Untitled - socium.ge

Technology in financial networks 209networks and represent the market as a unified powerful entity apart from theindividuals that compose it. Still, traders redefine the trading arena. Profitmakingadvantage lies in creating protected spaces within the temporally andspatially defined marketplace. Pit traders fragment the market into encloseddealing spaces where ties of friendship and reciprocity deliver profit. As in thecase of the trading pit, the ethics of efficiency demand further rationalizationof the contradictions between the design and operation of the marketplace.New technologies offer materials to create the appearance of direct contactbetween trader and market.(2) Electronic technologies can, in theory, extend to any area. But, in practice,economic action is intertwined with specific, spatially defined networks.The information that traders need to make strategic decisions arises from theparticular setting of the trading floor or dealing room. Saskia Sassen (2001)argues that certain cities remain key for global finance because of the concentrationof high-level services, such as accounting and law. Global cities areimportant beyond connections between firms and the glamor of urban living.Cities and their financial institutions create cohorts of traders whose techniquesof exchange and information-gathering practices are bound to theirlocation.(3) Liquid markets require dense participation. In the nexus market form,traders gather in a single space and circumscribed time to make exchanges.The pit arranges liquidity by concentrating trading. The global scale of electronicnetworks creates a problem for organizing a liquid market. Becausetraders are located in widely dispersed time zones, market coordinationthrough time management is a key element of global financial networks.Traders in different hubs must be engaged in the market at the same time,otherwise there is too little action to create easy exchange at high volumes. Inthe global financial marketplace, traders in certain locations, like Chicago,London, and Frankfurt, create nodes of liquidity for particular financial instruments.Traders in these locations work in the markets each day, generatingpossibilities to deal at a fair price for any number of contracts.Although in theory liquid markets can spread over the surface of the globe,in practice global cities provide concentrations of traders that support liquidity.The time zones of these cities determine the peak times of financial activity.In the absence of spatial concentration, the temporal dimensions ofmarkets assume a heightened importance. In electronic networks, temporalcoordination is crucial for maintaining liquid markets.(4) The redesign of exchange technologies and the changes in time andspace create the possibility for new kinds of traders to emerge. A technologicalform that favors actors with abstract analytical skills is replacing thenexus system based on relationships among locals and between locals andbrokers. These are not, however, the skills of the “symbolic analyst” or