Whether it is Callon’s investigations of financiers’ use of modelling technology or MacKenzie’s analysis of the production of financial instruments, these scholars are interested in what we might call the sociology of financial meaning-making. MacKenzie, for instance, has been at the forefront of identifying financial instruments as “performative”: according to MacKenzie, formulae like the famous Black–Scholes mechanism for derivative pricing do not simply reveal underlying market realities. Because they influence and shape subsequent financial decisions and the financial milieu more broadly, these formulae actively shape and build market realities. They are, in MacKenzie’s words, “an engine, not a camera”: they do not simply measure market realities; they help bring them into being.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 84