Structure and meaning in financial markets: the strength of weak semiotic ties

This article proposes a conceptual framework for analysing financial markets as semiotic systems. My goal is to overcome the tendency to explain the functioning of financial markets through the misleading opposition between their socio-technical characteristics and persistent ideal-types of socially em-bedded market structures. Instead, I propose a relational conception of mar-kets as networks of meaning and argue that their properties need to be ex-plained in terms of the meaning-structure of market calculation rather than its social or technological media. I draw on insights from semiotics and research on distributed cognition and sense-making to formulate an ideal-type of how financial valuation and pricing process meaning. Theorizing meaning in rela-tional and pragmatic terms allows me to describe the semiotic conditions of financial market efficiency and (in-)stability.