Preda

Alex Preda provides an ethnographic exploration of how financial expertise is performed and produced in the media, analyzing its features and how audiences react to it. He examines how analysts, ancho

Alex Preda is an ethnographer, but unlike many of his tribe, his fieldwork was done, not with the dispossessed, but with white-collar entrepreneurs. The result is an ethnography of noise in electroni

We often think of finance as a glamorous world, a place where investment bankers amass huge profits in gleaming downtown skyscrapers. There’s another side to finance, though—the millions of amateurs w

As financial markets have assumed increasing prominence in societies, economic sociology's insights into their operations have provided some of the most cogent explanations of how they affect our worl

As the banking crisis and its effects on the world economy have made plain, the stock market is of colossal importance to our livelihoods. In Framing Finance, Alex Preda looks at the history of the m

As the banking crisis and its effects on the world economy have made plain, the stock market is of colossal importance to our livelihoods. In Framing Finance, Alex Preda looks at the history of the ma

This 2005 book examines the formation of scientific knowledge about the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and shows the broader cultural assumptions which grounded this knowledge. Alex Preda highlights the metaphors, narratives, and classifications which framed scientific hypotheses about the nature of the infectious agent and its transmission ways and compares these arguments with those used in the scientific knowledge about SARS. Through detailed rhetorical analysis of biomedical publications, the author shows how knowledge about epidemics is shaped by cultural narratives and categories of social thought. Preda situates his analysis in the broader frame of the world risk society, where scientific knowledge is called upon to support and shape public policies about prevention and health maintenance, among others. But can these policies avoid the influence of cultural narratives and of social classifications? The book shows how culture matters for prevention and health policies, as well as wit