About me

I currently work at Morningstar, servicing the company's institutional clients. Before that, I have been active as a junior researcher at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, working on a research project that investigates the transformation of occupational careers in the financial industry since 1980 in Germany, France, and the UK.

Previously, I have written a PhD in Sociology at the University of Reims about the selection of financial asset managers by institutional investors. In my PhD, I focus on the analysis of the quality of portfolio managers who provide uncertain returns. Among other things, I show that the categories that investment professionals use to describe the work of funds analysts do not match adequately with their practice. Whereas investment professionals are used to distinguishing between a "quantitative analysis" and a "qualitative analysis" of portfolio managers, it is more adequate to say that fund analysts proceed to a joint analysis of the economic uncertainty associated to the investment in a specific portfolio and of the social conditions that produce such a form of uncertainty. There is an homology between categories used to describe the analytic practice of investment professionals and the social division of labour in the financial industry. I argue that the gap between categories and practice is an outcome of the same processes that govern the division of labour. This is why my new research project focuses more closely on financial careers and their transformations among the last thirty years.

As an undergraduate, I studied mainly Sociology and Economics, but also Philosophy and History, at the École normale supérieure (Cachan). I hold a bachelor degree in Sociology and Economics from the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre and a master degree in Sociology jointly awarded by the École normale supérieure (Paris) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris). I also studied one year at the Humboldt University (Berlin). As a graduate student, I was a member of the CEREP (URCA) and of the CMH (ENS-EHESS-CNRS) and I visited one year as a DAAD Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (Cologne).

I have translated "Die Börse" by famous economist and sociologist Max Weber, from German into French. In this book about the function and organization of stock exchanges and other financial markets, Weber shows among other things that most financial transactions cannot be intrinsically morally graded, while the exchanges play a role of utmost importance in the allocation of power and of chances of self-realization, in modern economies. Hence financial regulation should not rest on moral principles. Rather, any regulation should be based on a thorough analysis of the way in which financial markets operate, of their place in the socio-economic system, and of the interests that they serve. The analysis should also take into account the social conditions of living of market participants, and their relationships with each others. I take it as an encouragement to study the structures of social groups in the financial industry.

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