Jing Wang (JW): Several years ago, I stumbled on your interview with Karin Knorr Cetina (Preda and Knorr Cetina, Reference Preda and Knorr Cetina2021), which maps out the genealogy of social studies of finance since the 1990s. That was a really helpful piece to get a snapshot of the field. Obviously, the field is much more sophisticated now, reflecting various technological and economic changes in the global context. I hope that, through this conversation, we might provide an update to our readers about the field.

First of all, as of today, you have numerous publications, including papers and books. You are a sociologist by training but your papers cover finance topics. How do you identify your interdisciplinary approach? How do you see this evolving across your different projects?

Alex Preda (AP): I think I see myself clearly as a sociologist. I am working on finance topics; sometimes, colleagues from other disciplines ask me in private conversations, are you an economist? No, I am not. I am a sociologist, but at the same time I felt that I should learn from other disciplines. When I was conducting the research on retail traders for my book Noise between 2006 and 2016 (Preda, Reference Preda2017), for instance, behavioral finance was blossoming. There was a very dominant stream of behavioral finance research being published at that time.

I saw that some of the topics are quite close to what I am doing. So I wanted to familiarize myself more with that, and I do not regret it because now I have a much better grasp of the thinking of a different discipline, which works on very similar topics to mine. I learned a lot from talking to scholars, reading behavioral finance papers, and getting familiar with the analytical techniques. In the project I am doing now, I mentioned blockchain. For instance, when I started the project, I audited a class in computer science. I really did because I felt I needed it, and then I started reading computer science papers on blockchain and so on and so forth. I think that’s very helpful.

These interdisciplinary connections allow me to engage with other disciplines and learn how they think about problems similar to or even identical to my research problems. The other aspect is that it certainly helps me think better about my own sociological approach, my own sociological takes. Indeed, I realize it’s a bit of a balancing act, because at some point I was reading more papers from other disciplines than from sociology. So you need to strike a balance, in my case at least. I think it is a classic problem of ‘going native’, as anthropologists would say. Ethnomethodology has led some of its practitioners to go native, and I have to say I have been influenced by ethnomethodology.

I am a sociologist. I do not claim to do other things, but I am also very curious about how other disciplines handle problems that are very similar to sociological ones, even when they do not frame them as sociological problems. So my thinking has evolved a lot. Compared with 20 years ago, absolutely a lot. I have a clearer view of the conceptual work I should deploy in future projects, among others. My research projects are more concept-driven nowadays compared with earlier ones.

JW: To follow up on this question of interdisciplinarity, when you need to step into a new knowledge domain, for example, blockchain, how do you decide which sources are authentic and also manageable? For instance, when you need to take a blockchain or computer science class, how do you find this kind of class and ensure that it is neither too deep nor too shallow for your research projects? How do you gauge its relevance?

AP: I tend to go exclusively for academic sources. When I signed up for the computer science class, it was an introductory class (not advanced). It was Computer Science 101 offered by the Department of Computer Science at Harvard. I signed up for it, and online courses were available. Everybody was working from home during Covid. So it makes no difference. Everybody was attending classes online. I audited this class online. Usually, when I do this, I go exclusively for academic sources. I do not look at popular science materials.

JW: So you really attach importance to institutional credentials.

AP: Yes, absolutely. Then I started reading academic papers on blockchain published by academics, partly computer scientists, partly microeconomists – theoretical economists to be precise. At that time, I was at King’s College, so I got in touch a lot with colleagues from the Department of Computer Science. I found them very open-minded and very open to talking to sociologists. I liked that a lot.

JW: Could you name a few concepts that run through all your research projects? Is there any idea that you think has been most influential to your research in the last decade?

AP: I think one big concept that underpins a lot of things I have done is the concept of legitimacy coming from Weber’s Economy and Society. I explored legitimacy extensively in the book Framing Finance and in a number of papers. ‘Status’ and ‘legitimacy’ run through a lot of the work I have done. So these are very big concepts. The other concepts that have influenced me are not very present in my work until now, and I would like to focus more on them. Status is definitely the number one; the concept of boundary would be the third.

JW: In your understanding, who are the scholars representing these three concepts?

AP: When you look at ‘status’ and ‘legitimacy’, of course the primary source is Max Weber. That is the anchor in the classical sociological tradition. When it comes to the concept of status, there is a lot of scholarly work done on social status across different domains of social life. What I did here was to focus more on the notion of status of finance (Podolny, Reference Poldony2008). I think it happened at that time primarily because finance and financial markets became so dominant in developed economies in the 1990s. Max Weber offers a more institutional, macro, and meso perspective. But then the more micro perspective is Erving Goffman. He provides the interactional perspective on these two ideas. That is why in the pieces I have done more recently, I have gone back to Goffman and reexamined these two concepts from an interactional perspective.

JW: Reading your work, I thought that performativity is also a pivotal idea.

AP: It is. I became aware of the performativity school when it was prominent in the 1990s with Michel Callon’s The Laws of the Markets (1998). That was a very prominent idea, and it was prominent in the sense that many scholars were interested in how these material infrastructures and material technologies change the field of finance, how they create new modes of financial action. For instance, if you look at the initial work done on performativity a quarter century ago, it very much emphasized the material aspects. Derivative prices had material forms. They were printed on rolled sheets of paper, and traders used them on the trading floor to make bids and offers.

The idea focused heavily on the material aspect, and then it shifted a little, not sideways exactly, but to a higher level of abstraction. It morphed into the idea that abstract economic theories can change and intervene in social realities. And that idea got pushed back for a number of reasons. I can sign up to the first idea, the original idea of performativity, namely that infrastructures change the modes of financial action. I can get on board with that. The other idea that emerged a little later, that abstract theories of any kind change directly social realities, I am not sure about that. Maybe it needs to be spelled out and worked out in more detail. The idea that you have a model, theory, or a set of equations on a sheet of paper that will change whatever reality is around us is not as simple as that. So, there are many intermediary steps and many transformations involved here.

JW: From a theoretical perspective, how do you see the difference and relations between ‘distinction’ and ‘status’?

AP: If you adopt the following perspective, status can be considered in terms of ranking, whereas distinction is more tied to concrete work and practices through which you place a boundary in a given situation. You classify something as being different. While marking something as being different, you mark the identity of that group or person as being lower in the hierarchy. So, it’s not only that it’s someone or something different; there is more to it.

JW: So both try to do classification, but status in a more structural way that also shows hierarchies. But distinction might permeate a field such that groups with different status are actually distributed and scattered everywhere.

AP: Yes. I would say that when you have a distinction, you mark something, it can be an object, process or an activity, as different. But then in the next step where you say that’s different, so I am not doing that, it’s not very helpful. But when you say I am not doing this thing because I situate what I am doing as being better or of higher quality, then it becomes meaningful.

JW: How do you like the idea of actor-network theory? Because they also include objects in their consideration and they do not want to make hierarchical maps. Rather, they want to make flat ones.

AP: Yes, like a flat model. I am not really sure about this flat character. I know that it had a lot of traction initially and still has a lot of traction, but there was also a lot of pushback against this idea of a network of actors and actants. I think that in light of ongoing developments primarily around AI, but not only that, this idea needs revisiting. There is definitely contemporary mileage in this idea and its revisiting, but it also needs to be revised and specified in the sense that you don’t have only to revisit it as it was formulated in the mid 1980s. You also need to adjust, deepen, and update it. For a while, I do believe that it was difficult for many scholars and sociologists, traditional sociologists, to accept that you have some entity that is on a par with you as a human being.

One of the initial pieces of research from the 80s was done on Pasteur’s laboratory. That is the work of Bruno Latour. Then there is the work of Michel Callon on the scallops in a bay in Brittany (Callon, Reference Callon and Law1986). Researchers were trying to cultivate them, and the scallops resisted cultivation, and so on and so forth; they reacted. But the way it was presented was that actors and actants are on the same level, and that was a very innovative idea, but some sociologists thought, how can that be? Scallops have reactions; they can resist, but they don’t talk back to you, they don’t push back at you, they don’t come out of the water. They are silent, the highest level of indifference, or at most, they die; they don’t allow themselves to be cultivated. So that was the initial view. Whereas now, contemporary developments force us to not only revisit Actor-Network Theory, but also develop it, upgrade it, update it, and think more carefully about this network idea and the status of actors and actants. I think this theory has to be largely re-examined and specified (Borch, Reference Borch2026). So that is my reasoning.

This perspective was not available before. The other development that happened in parallel is that you have this idea of actor-network theory, flat networks with human actors and various non-human actants. But in parallel you had a lot of development in social network analysis. Social network analysis doesn’t care too much about actants, but they produced a lot of research showing that all these human-human networks are actually not flat, not homogeneous. There are a lot of power structures in them and a lot of hubs in networks, specifically inequality. Inequality is generated endogenously, not coming from the outside, not exogenous inequality and so on and so forth. I think actor-network theory hasn’t paid a lot of attention to what social network analysis was doing. Maybe it’s time to have a closer look.

JW: In terms of methods, most of your research requires you to enter fields with high thresholds – fields that are highly professional, highly technical. You need to talk to or observe those people who are not ordinary people or part of the masses. Rather, they are experts in a very specialized field. Do you find it difficult to access them? If that’s the case, do you have any methodological suggestions?

AP: To be honest, it was very difficult when I started doing all this. I was still in graduate school doing PhD work, and most of these people in finance back then in the 90s were not inclined to talk to someone like me. So, access was difficult, and this is one of the drivers why I did historical research first (Preda, Reference Preda2001) because it was much easier to get access to financial documents from archives, to the entire history of finance. And back then few people were doing that; not a lot of people were interested in using historical sources. Meanwhile, I think the situation has changed, but how shall I put it? Number one, the finance field is very cosmopolitan. To give you an example, I am working on this venture capital project right now; it’s totally cosmopolitan. I talk to people here in Hong Kong, in London, and even in Tokyo; they come from all corners of the world. The lingua franca is English. I don’t see many barriers related to ethnicity, to be honest, reviewing the work I have done. I am sure gender barriers exist because it’s a male-dominated field.

JW: And they don’t even want to talk to women?

AP: They would talk to women, and there are some women in finance and in venture capital. They say with pride that they play like a man (Fisher, Reference Fisher2012 is recommended here). Don’t expect this kind of stereotype of femininity, someone who is very gentle and caring. It’s not the case. Many cases are different. They don’t fit any established frameworks, but I am sure gender impacts access to research subjects. It has improved greatly over the years. I think it also has to do with the fact that, in my case, I published in finance journals, and they pay a lot of attention to that. I have published across disciplines, and that has definitely helped. I also think the fact that I have acquired what could be called interactional expertise helps. I can talk finance in their language.

Professional language has played an important role – it’s a professional field, considered to be an elite field. It’s indeed difficult to access. It depends on what level of access you want. Definitely it’s much easier to get interviews than to do participant observation, that is the most difficult thing I have encountered. It’s really difficult.

JW: To acquire financial language, did you take any ‘101 classes?’

AP: Yes, and I also read a lot. There was a time, maybe 10 years ago, when I was reading more finance papers than sociology papers to get a handle on the field. Finance papers are largely quantitative papers. People in finance have been reading these papers over 20 years or more, they can read this set of equations at a glance. Developing this kind of skill helps a lot because you can converse with them. It sounds simple and it is very simple in the end, just being capable of reading the set of equations and understanding what they mean. It’s not complicated once you put in the effort. This is also helpful. What else? Ultimately, building professional networks is key.

JW: Exactly. Are there any meetings or events that you would join to facilitate networking?

AP: I did that a lot, and I am continuing doing it. I think it’s very helpful. For the venture capital project I am doing now, I attend a lot of workshops, conferences, public events, lectures and things like that. There are some private events, you have to be invited. It’s kind of quasi-private and that’s more oriented towards socializing. And these are very good. But to be honest, interviews are easier to arrange. The most difficult thing is getting access to participant observation and getting admitted into observing close up what professionals are doing in front of a computer screen, for instance. I managed it only once within institutional environments. It was relatively easy with retail traders, but in the work on global market indices, it was difficult. It took me a year to get access just to get into the field. You need to be very persistent; perseverance is the name of the game. Never give up.

JW: Talking about quantitative papers, I have another question. Recently, we noticed that in social science in general, increasingly more research projects are shaped by quantitative or computational methods. In some cases, that even became a requirement for research to get funded. While you’re working on the social studies of finance, I noticed that most of your research is based on qualitative methods. How do you see the trend and what is your approach?

AP: Personally, again I’m speaking only for myself and I’m a qualitative researcher, but at the same time I don’t really see any hard divides between qualitative and quantitative methods. Especially within computational social science, we see a trend emerging now, computational ethnography, which is quite interesting and needs to be developed further. I do not believe that ethnographers necessarily have to transform themselves into computational researchers. Ethnography is a big part of my work. What I need to do and I’m trying to do that all the time is get a handle on computational social science, acquire the relevant knowledge and expertise. When someone in computational social science talks about certain concepts, we need to be able to talk to that person in their language, not necessarily that we have to do what they are doing, but to understand the logic behind their work. I think it’s important to develop this capability.

JW: So, you are able to be in conversation with them, although you don’t do their work.

AP: Exactly. I don’t do it, and I don’t claim in any way that I am preparing to cross over. But I talk to them in their language. I think they respect ethnography more when they see that we can communicate with them on their terms.

JW: When it comes to interdisciplinary dialogues on finance, I guess one of the most typical scenarios for academics is grant applications. Any thoughts or suggestions on this matter?

AP: I’m aware that grants have become very important, no doubt. It wasn’t like this maybe 20 years ago, but now it is. It’s a skill in itself because it’s different from writing a paper. Most academics know how to write a paper, but writing a grant application is different. You need to train for that. The strategy was to start with smaller grants, then bigger ones, and you acquire the skill of how to write grant applications. Meanwhile, what I’ve seen more in the UK than here is that universities are saying no, if you apply for smaller grants, the sum is too small, we don’t accept that because every grant has administrative costs on the side of the university. They are spending too much money on managing your grant relative to the sum you’re bringing in. So there has been this push, maybe not in all corners of the world, but this push to apply for bigger grants. The size of the overall pie is the same; the government funding hasn’t grown. That’s a real challenge here. The other strategy I’ve seen is collaborative grants, that’s kind of tricky because you need to have a very clear division of labor when you’re writing a grant. You’re committing to achieving some goals within a set period of time with set resources. In a collaborative grant, you’d have to be very clear who does what. You have a lot of pre-negotiating work, and you need to reach a binding commitment on the division of labor. I’m not really sure that collaborative grants are easier because you’re running the risk of your collaborator leaving for another job at the other end of the world, or what if they don’t deliver on time and so on and so forth. So it’s very tricky. I don’t know what advice to give personally, but I’m aware of these issues. I’m not very enthusiastic about collaborative grants because, ultimately, you are responsible; the responsibility is not shared. The principal investigator is always the one responsible for everything.

I think the best strategy is to obtain sample grant applications to get familiar with the writing style and the structure of a grant application. Budgeting is crucial. So many things differ from writing a journal paper. The only advice I can give here is to start early, start applying for grants early in your career. Maybe you will have a couple of failures but you’ll learn from them. Even if you fail a few grant applications, you learn from your failures and in the end you’ll get better.

JW: Another challenge relating to grant applications is, who is your imagined reader? With interdisciplinary research, it is very hard to imagine who the three people are on the grant review committee.

AP: That’s the most challenging part. It’s even more complicated because sometimes it’s five reviewers not three. There is a whole review board that is very heterogeneous, not only scholars from your discipline but from other disciplines as well. Then two or three people from that board will read your application and write their own reviews. It’s a two-stage process. In the end, the decision is made. So it’s a different kind of writing. The level of accessibility is key. I have learned to write in the simplest possible, clearest possible terms without losing the depth, no jargon, but at the same time keep the level of depth, keep the issue at stake clear, don’t trivialize the problem you want to investigate, keep it relevant. Write as simply as possible so that nobody on that panel can complain that they can’t understand it even if they are not from sociology.

JW: Since you have been in the field for a long time and you are processing and producing knowledge about money, how do you see and navigate the research-practice nexus? For example, in the conference or workshop we both were part of,Footnote ¹ several speakers actually participated in cryptocurrency markets, and some of them gained investment returns. Have you seen any academics struggle with this sort of situation, like, why would I bother writing this paper? Why not just act on the insights from these interviews and make a lot of money rather than turning them into some sociological theory?

AP: I see a lot of that among finance scholars. If you observe them close up, you know that the boundaries between academic research and practical action in financial markets are not clear at all in many ways. I do believe that there is a conflict of interest. This question has been asked to me before. Are you using your insights to make money? I can tell you my recent story. Last July, I got an offer from a recruitment firm in California. They wanted to talk to me about being hired as an expert for training some AI for financial advice literacy. We scheduled a talk because it was summer, the timing was flexible, late June or early July. They were recruiting experts from various finance relevant domains to develop this AI tool. This position is offered by a financial services firm, very established. But I was thinking, this is a respectable opportunity, but I worked for over 20 years, a quarter of a century, in developing this knowledge, and you want to buy it from me?! So I see here a conflict of interest. What if I don’t want to sell it? What if I want to use it in writing papers, writing books, giving talks, not selling it? Because once you try and sell it, it becomes a commodity with monetary value, instead of an object of intellectual dialogue or a resource to bring to the public. It’s not perfect, I know that very well. But to come back to the initial question, I’ve seen that a lot in mainstream finance academia; the boundaries between practical action and intellectual inquiry are not clear at all.

JW: I really like the contrast between commodity and intellectual dialogue for the public! For those scholars who want to stick to their intellectual pursuit, how would you advise them?

AP: It’s a value choice, one or the other. Intellectual pursuit or not. If not, nobody’s stopping you from entering the markets full time.

JW: You have to recognize who you are.

AP: Exactly. The ultimate question for me is also that: is there a conflict of interest here?

JW: My next question is on the social dynamics and social implication of technologies. With fintech and, more recently, AI, transforming financial services, what social dynamics should scholars and policy makers pay closer attention to? By social dynamics, I mean forces from the human side, in terms of how technology might reshape finance.

AP: I tend to think the following. A lot of changes are going to happen in financial services, partly due to AI. But again, AI on its own is not going to intervene deep in the social fabric, not in the short and medium term, but it is going to be very significant when combined with blockchain. I see blockchain in finance as more significant and more important than AI in terms of social connections. There is a lot to talk about here. I do believe it is very important, but I believe it makes sense to talk about social connections once we get a better grasp on how the technology works: the infrastructure. We don’t have a good handle yet on the social groups, interests, and dynamics arising alongside the infrastructures that emerge now. I’m talking about infrastructures, not only server farms, there is a lot of that, but also blockchain development, software code and so on and so forth. We don’t have yet a clear picture on the ground of the social processes and the social drivers of this infrastructure. It’s fueled by money, obviously, because you need huge sums in order to build all that. But saying it’s fueled by money or venture capital is by far not enough. You can read about that in any business journal (such as Wall Street Journal, Pitchbook, and a16z on Substack). So we need to go beyond that and look more into the social dynamics of what’s going on in the blockchain circle you were talking about. That’s a very good metaphor. You have this deep inner circle and then you have the shallow outer circle.

The circle that’s superficial and shiny is where you see all these crypto things like Dogecoin, the ones that attract a lot of attention, like a show, a spectacle (Preda, Reference Preda2023). People are doing it for the show, it’s very entertaining. They produce all these little images and visualizations, the graphics. But people tend to stay in the shallow part. It’s like you have the deep sea and the shallow sea, we’ve been snorkeling around a lot in the shallow sea, but much less going into the deep sea to see what’s different there.

JW: This reminds me of an old Chinese saying: ‘Those who wade in shallow waters see shrimps; those who go deeper observe fish and turtles; but those who venture into the furthest depths behold dragons’.Footnote ²

AP: I’ll use that as my introduction, I will definitely acknowledge you in my paper. I’m serious. Actually, since relocating to Hong Kong, I have learned a number of Chinese sayings that are very useful.

JW: What advice would you give to researchers who try to identify the theoretical significance of empirically-rich work? This probably sounds like a broad question. Maybe I can use my paper on China’s crypto industry (that I just presented at the HKU Symposium) as an example: the divergence between the chain circle versus the coin circle is a novel case. In terms of the theoretical framework, just from this workshop, I already received diverse comments suggesting more than five dimensions, all different than my original framework.

AP: But now you have to decide because you have the power, it’s your paper, you’re the author. You can accept or reject the suggestions. Personally, I would be grateful for every comment, but that doesn’t mean that I would accept every comment. Some of them might contradict each other and then it becomes a problem. I think it’s very important to note that I didn’t use to be a theorist. I have done very little theoretical work, almost none, I have done empirical work. But I can acknowledge the importance of theory. Theory is important to raise a question rather than stick with what other people are saying. As long as you can argue that the question is relevant, you just push through with that question. What I’ve been doing personally more recently is go back and read a lot of classical sociology. I read Weber again, I read Hobbes again, Leviathan. I am trying to identify some questions that are already present in the classics of sociology and then revisit them because they might have been unsolved. So, that’s another possibility. My advice for someone who is an empirical scholar is that it’s absolutely great to do empirical work, that’s who I am, but it’s important to have theory driven empirical work. Your empirical work is driven by curiosity, obviously, but also you want to reach a level of analytical understanding. Analytical means to me that you need to be driven by a question with theoretical relevance for how you conceive the world of finance.

JW: The ‘world of finance’: does it mean stakeholders in the world of finance or users, the masses that will be influenced by the world of finance?

AP: In the world of finance, usually you have this professional domain that you’ve written about, but they are not coextensive with this kind of popular finance where everyone, ordinary citizens, are involved in financial activities for various reasons. In reality, a set of theoretical questions arise about this, what’s been called financialization of life or everyday life. But on the other hand, you have the institutional domain where you have professionals working and professional groups developing a number of activities among themselves. So, it’s more like a closed circle. Here you have a series of questions that haven’t been examined very closely until now. Number one, the bridge between the two worlds. Do you have a bridge between the two worlds and what sort of bridges do you have, and how do they work? This is boundary work. How do you do this boundary work between the two domains, institutional and everyday? Also, to what extent do you maintain openings in this boundary? As far as I know, this boundary between the two worlds has been very little investigated. If I am wrong, point me to relevant work. In the work on financialization from 10 years ago, scholars started enumerating the aspects of financialization: financialization of the enterprise, macroeconomy, and then, lastly, the financialization of everyday life. It’s the last item in the list, and it feels totally disconnected from the other aspects. I’d be very interested, for instance, in this boundary, how do these two worlds interconnect, and what effects does this connection have, what sort of boundary work is involved.

JW: Let’s talk more about the role of media and technology in such a boundary zone. We are now living in a rapidly developing economy undergoing both financialization and informalization. The financial market is open to consumer investors. At the same time, the internet is available almost everywhere and individuals can enter the financial arena via all kinds of apps on their computers or via mobile phone.

AP: But it’s a very controlled gateway. If you take trading apps such as Robinhood, as an example. They are considered a popular gateway to finance, but it’s a very controlled gateway. If you look at what happens, you’re buying or selling something on the app. But who is on the other side? If you go to the wet market, you always see someone on the other side selling you goods, and then you negotiate and you can chat a little and so on and so forth. But here it’s not like this at all. Who’s on the other side when you’re trading?

JW: But still, the wet market case also means that if you want to investigate, there might be a global supply chain behind. Right? That’s like the case of Matsutake mushrooms shelved in supermarkets in Japan which actually come from Oregon (Tsing, Reference Tsing2015).

AP: The wet market lady who sells you salad or tomatoes or whatever gets the tomatoes from a wholesaler, and they come from New Zealand or Australia and are sold here in the wet market. That lady is only an intermediary.

JW: The last question on my list was, where do you see your research heading in the coming years, especially in light of ongoing changes in financial markets and digital infrastructure? It depends on how much you want to share with the journal audience; what are your ongoing or new research projects?

AP: What I am doing now is I’ve been working on this blockchain project for 5 years now, and then I started the venture capital part. I expanded the project because initially the blockchain project didn’t have a venture capital part. But as I told you, when I was doing it I saw it as necessary to expand into venture capital. Over the last 3 years or so, I’ve been working on this venture capital part of the blockchain project. Now I’m trying to find some time to write a book about the entire thing. That’s the biggest item on my mind and on my agenda right now, the book. I also have smaller ongoing projects.

JW: What kind of theoretical framework underpins this book project?

AP: Well, to be honest with you, I think I’m focusing here on a couple of related notions. One is the notion of capital, but I mean purely economic capital here, not necessarily social, cultural, symbolic capital, or other aspects of capital. Because if you’re familiar with the debate among economists, it’s unclear what capital actually is. This has been debated, and the main focus has been limited on economic capital. For economists, that’s still a problem. That’s why you see someone like Piketty (Reference Piketty and Goldhammer2014), with his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, attempting, among the first things, to define what capital is in the twenty-first century. I think that’s still an unaddressed issue and that’s what I am trying to do with the book. Besides the capital focus, other significant notions would be labour and expertise. Data labour is in need of some additional examination – it has been mostly discussed as outsourced manual labour for labeling datasets, processing pseudo-automated transactions, or ranking data safety. I think there’s more to explore here.

JW: After all this, I actually wanted to trace back to the very beginning, your high school, college, or graduate school. How do you identify your scholarly trajectory if we have to find a starting point?

AP: That’s a tough question. I think in my undergraduate study, I got solid training in logic and philosophy but a very bad training in economic thought and economics simply because I am Romanian and I grew up under socialism. The training in economics was not even primitive; it was below primitive. I had to catch up a lot later in graduate school and after, but I don’t regret it. I think the most impactful time was my graduate school.

In the beginning, I had a longstanding interest in economic aspects because to be honest with you, against the background of my biography, I wanted to understand what’s wrong with socialism economically, why it doesn’t seem to work at all, why it’s such an economic catastrophe, which it was at least in my case and in my surroundings. That was the primary driver and, for that, you need to understand how the other side, capitalism, works.

At the same time when I was in graduate school, it was the 1990s, finance was becoming very prominent in western economies. Starting around 1993, finance became very prominent in western economies. And then it was also by accident. At some point when I was in graduate school and about to finish my PhD but not quite, I had a chat with my supervisor, Karin Knorr Cetina, and I asked her, what shall I do next? Because I didn’t have a clear idea. Then she said, let’s do finance. I still remember that conversation clearly. After my undergraduate studies, I wanted to go back to school and do a second degree in economics, but it was too complicated, not feasible at that time. It was way too difficult.

JW: Anything else you want to share with readers of the Finance and Society journal?

AP: I don’t know. Concerning advice, I am always kind of reluctant because I think what if I’m wrong, what if this advice works for me but not for other people. But the only thing I want to say here is perseverance is very important, not to give up. It may sound like a cliché, but it’s a question of faith, not religious faith, but faith in oneself, lack of self-doubt, not just simple psychology.

I had moments that felt really less faithful. I’m not immune. I felt like I will give up, I’m not doing this, I can’t do it, I’m not good enough. But then you say well let’s wait until tomorrow and let the feeling slip away. Tomorrow is another day, you know that film, Gone with the Wind, the main character’s declaration. Tomorrow we’ll start anew.