Martin David, 2002, « Dispositifs de défiance et fluidité des échanges sur les marchés financiers de gré à gré », Sociologie du travail, vol. 1, n°44, Paris, pp. 55-74.

In Parisian financial markets of derivatives, individuals with proxies negotiate thousands of transactions through mutual agreements. The conditions accounting for the relative fluidity and obvious rapidity in the relations between the two traders conducting such transactions, which may involve sums amounting to several million euros, need to be explained. The uncertainty often surrounding the derivatives at the center of the transaction is doubled by an interpersonal risk for the traders. How are such orally formulated contracts worked out and agreed to in a so formally incomplete way? What social and technical conditions make this possible? Emphasis is laid on arrangements that, outside the traders themselves, conjure the risk of unkept "reciprocal, problematic promises". Based on a system of technical machinery, various patterns in the professional organization of financial market trading shape these swaps and account for their fluidity but without undoing the uncertainty surrounding them. Risks and uncertainty are shaped by the arrangements for dealing with them; hence, any arrangement for building confidence is necessarily also one for testing suspicions.