Back-office intricacy: the description of financial objects in an investment bank

Fabian Muniesa, Dominique Chabert, Marceline Ducrocq-Grondin and Susan V. Scott

Industrial and Corporate Change, 2011, vol. 20, issue 4, 1189-1213

Abstract: The complexity of contemporary finance translates into what we call the problem of "description": the problem of constructing robust, flexible, portable, and mutually compatible depictions of complex, multisided, and often ambiguous financial objects (products, trades, marketplaces). This problem is characteristically exacerbated in back-office operations within the financial services industry. We provide a case study in the form of a qualitative examination of back- and middle-office operations in an international investment bank. We analyze the manifold manifestations of the problem of description within this bank. Copyright 2011 The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/icc/dtr020 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Back-office intricacy: the description of financial objects in an investment bank (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:indcch:v:20:y:2011:i:4:p:1189-1213

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Industrial and Corporate Change is currently edited by Josef Chytry

More articles in Industrial and Corporate Change from Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().