Hermann Kocyba

My present research is focused on cognitive and normative accounts of “doing market” within German banks. The aim consists in reconstructing the ways in which specific groups of actors look on financial markets and their transformative effects on the traditional banking system. The analysis of actor-theories of the mechanisms of financial markets leads to a picture of heterogeneity, the activities within banks being guided by very different frames on the level of rationality assumptions as well as on the level of normative orientations. Banks are not integrated on the level of common interpretations or of shared knowledge practices, they can be described as competitive arrangements of conflicting rationalities, which allow only partial and asymmetric forms of integration.