A second way in which finance theory has been incorporated into the infrastructures of financial markets is linguistic. The theory offers a way of talking about markets, especially about markets whose complexity might otherwise be baffling. Much of the attractiveness to practitioners of the Capital Asset Pricing Model's "beta" was that it seemed to offer a simple way of summarizing the relative riskiness of different stocks.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 1128