David Pinzur joined the London School of Economics and Political Science as an Assistant Professor in 2020, following his Ph.D. studies at the University of California, San Diego and postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne. His research interests span the sociology of (financial) markets, science and technology, culture, and environmental sociology. At the broadest level, his work is concerned with two related processes: first, how market exchange, calculation, and regulation are enabled through the construction of intertwined material and social devices; second, how the features of these sociomaterial infrastructures feed back into behavior on markets and beyond.
David is currently exploring these processes in two projects. The first looks at the construction of agricultural futures markets in the decades following the U.S. Civil War. Focusing on the cases of Chicago and New Orleans, this research traces how economic, cultural, organizational, and material differences in the extant agricultural trade led the markets to adopt dissimilar derivative infrastructures. It additionally demonstrates how these infrastructures underlaid and supported distinct styles of traing on the two markets. A second, contemporary project investigates the role of crude oil derivative markets in coordinating expectations of the future among parties as diverse as banks, hedge funds, state and private statistical agencies, policymakers, price reporting agencies, and oil companies. This research aims to uncover new elements of the relation between price and prediction, as well as to understand how oil’s construction as a financial product relates to its resilience as an energy source.
Journal publications
Pinzur, David (2021) Infrastructure, ontology and meaning: The endogenous development of economic ideas. Social Studies of Science.
Pinzur, David (2021) Infrastructural power: Discretion and the dynamics of infrastructure in action. Journal of Cultural Economy.
Pinzur, David (2016)
Making the grade: infrastructural semiotics and derivative market outcomes on the Chicago Board of Trade and New Orleans Cotton Exchange, 1856–1909. Economy and Society, 45 (3-4). pp. 431-453
Work in progress
"Infrastrcture and the sociology of markets"
"Price & prediction in the crude oil market"