Taking Michel Callon to the Istanbul Stock Exchange : frames, overflows and storytelling

Tarim, Emre (2013) Taking Michel Callon to the Istanbul Stock Exchange : frames, overflows and storytelling. In: Coping with Excess : How Organizations, Communities and Individuals Manage Overflows. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., pp. 81-98. ISBN 9781782548577

Abstract

In this chapter, I describe the role of storytelling as a framing device for helping to manage information flows in financial markets. In doing so, I draw on Michel Callon’s conceptual discussion of the importance of framing to the success of market-based exchange relationships. Callon has argued that frames imposed on phenomena and their relationships can disentangle things and render them calculable. To summarize his arguments, I begin with Callon’s discussion on framing in financial markets (1998b, 1999), in order to highlight the neglected role of storytelling in the framing of market phenomena and overflow management in financial markets. I then take this theoretical conversation with Callon to Istanbul, where I have conducted fieldwork research on the ways in which investors and brokerage firms have made sense of financial markets. I thereby demonstrate how storytelling has served to manage flows of information by generating and maintaining shared frames and interpretive templates (Czarniawska, 2008), and how these frames were subjected to occasional overflows.