Where do investors come from?

The Hamburg University recently hosted a two day workshop about the sociology of financial markets, organized jointly by two sections of the German Society for Sociology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie), the section for economic sociology and the section for organizations sociology. There, I was lucky enough to present an ethnographic paper called "Financial Investment and Social Division of Labor. Conditions of Realization of a Financial Institution". In this paper, I show how the figure of the investor as a speculator managing a "balanced whole" comes about.