ABSTRACT

This article analyses how a pair of nineteenth century commodity exchanges—in Chicago and New Orleans—shaped the sociotechnical infrastructures underlying two key types of market information—price quotations and crop statistics. Specifically, the paper investigates why these exchanges saw divergent outcomes, each successfully developing one information infrastructure but not the other. Prior scholarship has understood infrastructural development as the result of idiosyncratic, social structural alignments in actors’ resources and desires. This paper, by contrast, examines how such structural elements interacted with practical resources available to exchanges based on their roles within infrastructures. Findings demonstrate that the exchanges gained influence in proportion to their discretion over an infrastructure's everyday operations and the market routines these enabled. This ‘infrastructural power', or lack thereof, interacted with social structural resources in two distinct forms— ‘feedback’ in New Orleans and ‘sacrifice’ in Chicago—providing or denying each exchange the ability to shape infrastructures to its advantage. These findings suggest that analysts should pay closer attention to market dynamics as they relate to ‘infrastructure in action’.

摘要

本文分析了芝加哥和新奥尔良的两个 19 世纪商品交易所如何塑造了作为两种关键市场信息（价格报价和作物统计数据）背后的社会技术基础设施。具体而言，本文调查了为什么这些交流会产生不同的结果，每个交流都成功地开发了一个信息基础设施，但没有成功开发另一个。先前的学术研究已经将基础设施发展理解为行动者资源和愿望的特殊社会结构调整的结果。相比之下，本文研究了这些结构元素如何根据它们在基础设施中的作用与交易所可用的实际资源进行交互。调查结果表明，交易所获得的影响与他们对基础设施的判断力成正比。s 日常运营和市场例行这些启用。这种“基础设施力量”或缺乏这种力量以两种不同的形式与社会结构资源相互作用——新奥尔良的“反馈”和芝加哥的“牺牲”——提供或拒绝每个交易所塑造基础设施以使其有利的能力。这些调查结果表明，分析师应该密切关注市场动态，因为它们与“基础设施在行动”有关。