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AbstractThis article conceptualizes financial transactions as parts of financial infrastructures. Not only do transactions perform services for the economy, mainly in the area of calculation and pricing, but there is also merit in a conceptually infrastructural view on transactions which uncovers their ambivalence for the stability of the financial system. This is based on a conceptualization of infrastructures that distances itself from inherited modernist notions of the completeness, full operability, and functional integration of infrastructures, and instead highlights the constitutive incompleteness, error-proneness, and looming disintegration of infrastructures owing not to external threats but to their very modes of operation. The article analyzes two post-crisis reports that try to sort out this infrastructural ambivalence of transactions, and, in that attempt, mobilize different imaginaries. In the Brady Report following Black Monday of 1987, the imaginary of the efficient competitive market was cited to stabilize the boundary between functional and dysfunctional transactions. In the FCIC Report reflecting on the subprime mortgage crisis, a quasi-sociological diagnosis of mushrooming, and morally problematic transactional relationships were invoked to separate functional from dysfunctional intermediation by financial transactions.

Abstract
Town twinning is often seen as a linear driving force of European integration. This article argues that town twinning's historicity is more complex. The initial post-war period, according to today's practitioners' accounts, was characterized by a high degree of personal involvement which transformed into an exposure to relationship uncertainty. By way of contrast, twinning practices since the 1990s are reported as being driven by a more managerial logic. The shift from the imaginary of 'reconciliation' to that of 'integration' comes along with a change in twinning practices, the distribution of responsibilities and the share of personal involvement and exposure.

Erving Goffman's work is often read as a quasi-anthropology of social interactions, disclosing the fundamental micro-processes of sociality. This paper argues that his work ought rather to caution sociologists against axiomatics regarding the micro-ontology of social order, and attempts to rescue from Goffman's work references to the vanishing and transformation of social order. An example of the relevance of this attempt is research in the social studies of finance (SSF), whose interactionist strand reconstructs financial processes in their quality of social order and normative microcoordination. Yet precisely as these works, referring to Goffman and other analysts of social micro-processes, make financial markets legible for sociologists, a task arises for them: to represent not only the orderliness, but also the strains and transformations of the interaction order as envisaged by Goffman. Only this will enable SSF to analyze the translations of broader structural transformations in finance as they present themselves on the microlevel of financial interactions.

AbstractEmploying the example of Germany within a European context, this paper argues that government responses to the pandemic relied too much on the biopolitical governance of populations, and too little on the symbolic governance of public spheres. Based on an analysis of policy documents and their medial representation, it is found that the politics of pandemic security is focused on the regulation of population aggregates and movements (social distancing, lockdowns, border closings, etc.), resembling a quasi-Foucaultian notion of biopolitical governmentality. Confident that the crisis can be handled through a classical apparatus of security through self-conduct within an imaginary of stochastic aggregation of the social, these modes of governance paid virtually no attention to non-stochastic social aggregates, such as those which can be observed in public spheres. Yet these aggregates produced massive mobilizations against the politics of pandemic governance in liberal democracies, in the streets and on the internet. In conceptual terms, these mobilizations can be understood as an insistence on sovereign power, in Foucault's sense, yet 'from below': They reinvigorate the dramatic public, as opposed to the inconspicuous circulation, as the site for claiming attention, legitimacy, and potentially disruption—in other words, for claiming sovereign power. In the final analysis, a major security problematic can be seen in the failure of the politics of governmentality to be insensitive to the politics of sovereignty.

Abstract
Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology has been written with the intention to offer lessons from the historical trajectory of economic redistribution in societies the world over. Thereby, the book suggests learning from the political-economic history of 'social-democratic' policies and societal arrangements. While the data presented speak to the plausibility of looking at social democracy, as understood by Piketty, as an archive for learning about the effects of redistribution mechanisms, I argue that the book, or future interventions might profit from integrating alternative archives. On the one hand, its current line of argumentation tends to underestimate the significance of power relations in the international political economy that continued after formal decolonization, and thus form the flip side of social democracy's success in Europe and North America. On the other hand, the role of the polity might be imagined in a different and more empowering way, not just-as in Piketty-as an elite-liberal democratic governance institution; for instance, it would be interesting to explore the archive of the French solidaristes movement more deeply than Piketty does, as well as much more recent interventions in economic anthropology that deal with 'economic citizenship' in the Global South.

In ethnomethodology (EM), the concept of reflexivity refers to processes of the constitution of meaning through which actors collaboratively produce the interpretations they need in order to orient themselves in various situations. The paper discusses how EM's constitutive theoretic notion of reflexivity can be applied to non-human agency, referring to approaches in the social studies of finance (SSF) as they are informed by science and technology studies (STS), and in particular, how a reflexive notion of meaning and agency might be applied to financial agency that is largely object-driven, automated, algorithmic, and operates through quantifiers (that is, prices). Filling this gap, the paper outlines how meaning making in largely automated and algorithmic financial markets can be conceptualized in terms of EM's notion of reflexivity. It thereby refers to recent conceptualization of algorithmic action as a social logic centering on the execution of prescriptions, connects this conceptualization to EM's notion of accountability, and reconstructs algorithmic finance as a particular distribution of accountability and constitution of reflexivity, among human and non-human financial agencies.

Der Beitrag nimmt Erinnerung als eine spezifische Sinnmodalität in den Blick. Diese zeichnet sich in der Moderne dadurch aus, dass sie die Vergangenheit in nichttrivialer, d.h. Problematisierung evozierender Weise als abwesend markiert. Erinnerung unterscheidet sich daher von Tradition und linearer Kontinuierung, für die sich das Abwesenheitsproblem nicht stellt, ebenso wie von anderen Codierungen nichttrivialer Abwesenheit, etwa räumlicher Abwesenheit oder Zukünftigkeit. Erinnerungspraktiken in der Moderne generieren sozialen Sinn aus einer Problematisierung der Abwesenheit der Vergangenheit und sind daher grundsätzlich als Repräsentationen der Vergangenheit aufzufassen.