PAPEL DE LOS ASTROCITOS EN LA EPILEPTOGÉNESIS

Rank Sources of unaudited earnings estimates:

Sources of non-financial performance measures

1 Analysts’ consensus CPA assurance report

2 Self (one’s own estimate) Individual analyst

3 Press release in WSJ Press release in WSJ

4 Friend in industry Industry study

5 CEO comments Trade newsletter

6 Individual analyst CEO Comments

7 Company web site Local business reporter

8 Internet chat room Company web site

9 Unsolicited newsletter Internet chat room

Derived from Schwarzkopf, 2007

As Schwarzkopf (2007) observes, there was a strong consistency in the ranking of analyst consensus, indicating that intersubjective validation of earning estimates and market expectations among ostensibly independent experts (although this may be problematic given the evidence that analysts can themselves be guided by prevailing peer opinion; see later). In contrast, there was much less value placed on information provided by industry newsletters and chat-rooms where the credibility of the source was unknown. As Schwarzkopf points out, this would suggest popular concerns about the irrational influence of such sources is overstated (although this study does not concern non-institutional day-traders). Schwarzkopf’s study suggests that the form and medium through which companies disclose information may influence credibility, which also has implications for the practice of investor relations (see Hong & Ki, 2007; also see Golding, 2003; Davis, 2006b, 2007).

Other psychological studies have examined market reactions and price movements in response to news announcements in key financial media (particularly the Wall Street Journal and CNBC; see for example Beneish, 1991; Sant & Zaman, 1996; Lee, 1998; Hong & Stein, 1999; Huberman & Regev, 2001; Busse & Green, 2002). The evidence of price movements in response to public news invite important questions concerning whether this is attributable solely to the information itself or the expectation that other investors will respond to it (a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy). Although behavioural finance generally pays minimal attention to the symbolic, constitutive ontology of market information, there is potential to extend these studies from a communication studies perspective. These analyses help build a picture of the intersubjective codifications that underpin financial investment practices. However, it remains unclear which media are potentially most important in informing investment decisions, the extent to which their credibility affects usage, and what kinds of information investors are seeking. It is also unclear whether or how media/information usage across different market sectors varies, and whether there are differences in the value investors place on publicly-available information sources/channels versus private ones.

In contrast, cultural/ ethnographic approaches (e.g. Zelizer, 1994; Abolafia, 1998; Ray & Sayer, 1999; Singh, 2001; Du Gay & Pryke, 2002) emphasise communicative processes in regard to issues such as identity and inter-subjective meaning in economic activity, although the attention paid to interpretative agency can sometimes de-emphasise consideration of broader political- economic arrangements (e.g. Zelizer’s [1994] analysis of cultural variation in the ‘earmarking’ of monetary forms prioritises agency and cultural context over macro-structural processes such as credit systems and accumulation circuits). Meanwhile, several micro-ethnographic studies of media/ information usage in finance institutions (e.g. Knorr-Cetina & Bruegger, 2002a, 2002b; Beunza & Stark, 2002, 2004) have analysed how information systems in financial institutions influence relations among investors and how they make sense of their decisions/ actions. These are significant because they relate the institutional organisation of media systems and information displays to the intersubjective codifications governing investment decisions.

Cultural economy is therefore an important sub-field but there is a tendency, particularly in the micro-ethnographic studies, to overlook the implications of their analyses for macro-level political

economic arrangements and accumulation regimes (although some culturally-inflected approaches emphasising symbolic goods do- see later). Although Thrift (1999) points to the rise of ‘soft capitalism’ and the emphasis on new managerialist cultures as a productive force/ source of competitive advantage in their own right, he also observes that, ‘The cultural turn involves, then,

acts of homage to the importance of capitalism, which at the same time, act as a means of forgetting all about it and getting onto more interesting things’ (p.135). Thrift also points to a

valorisation of new business cultures which, coupled with new technologies and spatialities of economic agency, ‘form an emergent and increasingly powerful “cultural circuit of capital” which has

only existed since the 1960s’ (1999, p.144). Leyshon and Thrift (2007) also point out that socio-

cultural approaches to financialization have focused either on the implications of financial activity for the macro-relations between state capital and civil society, or on the micro-social dimensions of financial institutions and investment practice. Although both identify important processes, the

interlinkage between these two levels of analysis is often left unexplored. The significance of the

‘cultural turn’ is the extension of the analytic frameworks applicable to economic phenomena through emphasising the socio-cultural dimension in all forms of economic activity. The cultural turn also demands reconsideration of the ontology of the economic ‘base’, particularly in regard to the constitutive/ performative potential of economic knowledge which renders problematic any positivist distinction between ontological and epistemological claims in the sphere of financial exchange. Other approaches have linked cultural forms to shifts in the mode of production. These include Baudrillard’s (1975, 1981, 1993) work on sign-value and Lash & Urry’s (1994) analysis of symbolic goods in the contemporary economy. For Baudrillard, just as commodity production based upon use-value becomes superseded by exchange-value in industrial capitalism (i.e. Marx’s C-M-C and M-C-M’ circuits respectively), so sign value comes to supersede exchange value in the postmodern era. The reproduction of sign values through simulacra means signs are no longer structurally grounded in/ constrained by objective material representations. Social identity and values thus become increasingly-self-referential. Baudrillard (1993) suggests an emancipatory role for symbolic exchange beyond the confines of material capitalist accumulation. In a related analysis, Lash and Urry (1994) likewise identify a shift away from the industrial production of material goods to symbolic/ informational goods and the emergence of a sign-based knowledge economy. There is no doubt that the commodification of symbolic/ informational consumer goods and services has become a key feature of the contemporary economy in most industrialised capitalist economies. However, as Dodd (1994) and Miller (2002) have suggested, these phenomena do not necessarily point to any epochal shift in fundamental political-economic arrangements, let alone the redundancy of material production.

It is therefore important to differentiate between; a) the intensification of the production of symbolic economic values in terms of a creeping extension of the relations of economic exchange and capital accumulation into the sphere of cultural relations and identity formation, and; b) the intensification of the production of symbolic economic values in terms of the expansion of capital accumulation through financial market processes involving increasingly abstract forms of securities/ financial instruments which do not correspond directly to material economic conditions. The latter is evidenced partly by the disproportionate growth of financial market values as a proportion of GDP, but also by financial transactions denoting exchanges which, in practice, would not be materially possible. For example, some derivatives trading involves creating simulacra of transactions in the underlying securities/ commodities on scales that would not be feasible if undertaken using their ‘referent’ objects24. Lowenstein (2000) suggests that NFIs are “the equivalent of financial veg-o-

matics […] slicing and dicing financial assets into potent, newfangled securities.” (2000, p. 59),

while Lewis points to the use of NFI to conduct financial exchanges “that could never exist in the

real world” (1989, p. 163). Such phenomena raise important questions about the nature of financial

representation and value and the ontological status of trade in financial securities that entail no obvious material production as part of the value-creation process.

24

Dunbar (2000) notes that the infamous LTCM hedge-fund, whose trillion dollar derivatives portfolio collapsed in 1998, almost precipitating a systemic crisis, engaged in derivatives trades which included artificially replicating the effect of selling of UK ‘gilt’ bonds in volumes that exceeded the total volume of gilts on the market.

Thus many of the new theories concerning cultural circuits of economic activity have focused on new modalities of exchange that modify, but do not supersede or extend beyond the basic processes of commodity production and exchange (Marx’s M-C-M’ circuit). However, in other respects, the cultural economic arguments concerning the role of shared meanings in the production of value and self-referential sign-values are highly relevant to the massive growth of the financial markets and the evidence of unprecedented financial deepening over the last thirty years (not to mention the magnitude of the current global credit crisis). The insights concerning signification/ representation and economic value might be developed further in relation to Marx’s (1996) often-overlooked third circuit of accumulation (M-M’) involving the generation of fictitious financial values (which Marx himself found difficult to reconcile with the labour theory of value). However, linking cultural economic frameworks to a Marxist one requires a bridge or synthesis between political economy and cultural economy (see earlier discussion of Sayer, 2001; Jessop, 2004; Graham, 2006). This will be developed as the thesis progresses.

The various outlined above all offer potentially useful analyses of how contemporary markets operate and suggest important angles of enquiry for communication/ media scholars. The theoretical and empirical emphasis on communication, information and media can help to explain key processes in financial markets which are both central to their functioning and understated from the perspective of alternative theoretical frameworks. Babe (1995) points out that, although neoclassical economics acknowledges the key role of information in the efficient determination of market prices, it implicitly conceives of communication in technical-functional terms involving the mechanistic transmission of data. This theoretical ‘blindspot’ overlooks processes of mediation, representation, interpretation and meaning without which many market phenomena (such as the inter-subjective coordination of pricing and values) cannot be adequately explained. One might contend, however, that the critical political economy approach to media also has a ‘blindspot’ insofar as its emphasis on economic ‘base’ conditions and material production does not readily lend itself to analysis of semiotic issues of representation along the lines of postmodern cultural approaches to economic/ financial analysis. No critique of communication, mediation and informational processes in financial markets can proceed without recognition of the symbolic processes underpinning the generation of financial values. However, as will become clear, the symbolic ontology of monetary forms and financial values is not a contemporary aberration made possible by new media technologies, but a fundamental and constitutive dimension of markets. As indicated earlier, there have been numerous political economic studies of how media systems are increasingly driven by the need to maximise revenue, and also the role of those systems in shaping ideological and policy environments aligned to the interests of advertisers and corporate shareholders (e.g. McChesney et al., 1998; Golding & Murdock, 2000). Although these studies have critiqued the broad structural relations between media systems and capitalist accumulation regimes, critical analyses of how media systems operate within financial markets and empirical studies of communication processes in financial institutions have been rather less common. This probably reflects both the complexity of the subject matter and also the limited opportunities to access financial institutions for extensive empirical analysis. Nevertheless, the last decade has seen a steady growth in the communication studies literature on financial phenomena, but as with the approaches of other social sciences, several theoretical and theoretical themes can be identified in this work.

Part 2: Communication- specific studies of financial markets