What Does Taking the Floor Do? Commentary on Daniel Beunza’s Taking the Floor

Abstract

Daniel Beunza’s Taking the Floor: Models, Morals, and Management in a Wall Street Trading Room is a carefully and well written book. It is clearly argued, and the ethnographic description flows nicely. Nevertheless, this is a book that left this reader thinking how one should understand it. This text expands on that puzzle. It asks what does this book do? The answer unfolds in three sections, the first explores what this book does in terms of its argument, the second does it in terms of its writing, and the third inspects the particular dramatization this book stages.

Keywords

• ssf
• sociology of finance
• economic sociology