The Spectacle of Expertise - by Alex Preda (Paperback)

About the Book

Alex Preda provides an ethnographic exploration of how financial expertise is performed and produced in the media, analyzing its features and how audiences react to it. He examines how analysts, anchors, and producers collaborate in manufacturing financial talk that circulates around the world.

Book Synopsis

Financial experts have become ubiquitous on television, radio, and social media. They provide investment advice, interpret market movements, and explain the implications of political events, wielding a great deal of power and influence through their media presence. How do these experts acquire their authority, and what makes displays of financial expertise persuasive to their audiences?

Alex Preda provides an ethnographic exploration of how financial expertise is performed and produced in the media, analyzing its features and how audiences react to it. He examines how analysts, anchors, and producers collaborate in manufacturing financial talk that circulates around the world. Preda emphasizes the significance of talk--as opposed to the written word--in finance, as the fabric of many transactions and a means of capturing capital. Analysts and media figures understand financial talk as requiring a skill set distinct from conducting research or representing facts. Preda demonstrates that analysts and media professionals deploy expertise when they engage with audiences in ways that make it difficult to contest the claims conveyed in their talk.

The Spectacle of Expertise is based on close observations of TV and radio studios in Hong Kong, a global financial center and a crucial gateway to China, including interviews with audience members and financial analysts who appear as regular guests. It offers new and global perspectives on the relationship between financial expertise and the media, the making of public-expert talk, and how expertise is used to legitimize financialization.

Review Quotes

This work deserves an audience far beyond the substantive areas it addresses. It has much to contribute to an examination of talk, expertise, audience attentive action, the (embodied) presentation of self, and knowledge claiming.-- "Symbolic Interaction"

Written in clear prose, Preda's ethnography moves easily between theory and evidence.-- "Social Forces"

How are we ever going to make sense of our world after the 2008 crash without understanding what financial experts think they are doing? Reaching into all the latest research on, and analysis of expertise, Alex Preda tells us what is going on when financial experts present themselves in the media.--Harry Collins, coauthor of Why Democracies Need Science

Talk is fundamental to how human beings interact, and what we say about money and finance matters. Focusing on Hong Kong's TV and radio studios, and employing his trademark combination of ethnographic insight and sharp sociological analysis, Preda throws important new light on financial talk, its nuances, and its audiences.--Donald MacKenzie, author of Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets

This is easily the most original book in the sociology of finance that I have read in many years. Preda singles out financial expert talk by academics, analysts, and financial journalists, showing how it is interactionally produced and performed, and how it invades the public sphere and influences how finance is understood. This book should not be missed by sociologists of finance and financial economists. It is also a must read for science communication generally, expert studies and media studies--and for practitioners, seeking to look into a mirror of their practice.--Karin Knorr Cetina, author of Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge

About the Author

Alex Preda is professor of professions, markets, and technology at King's Business School, King's College London. He is the author of Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism (2009) and Noise: Living and Trading in Electronic Finance (2017), as well as a coeditor of the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance (2013).