Review: Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London by Sam Eastepp
Zaloom, Caitlin. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 224pp.
ISBN: 978-0226978147
Recent ethnographies of technology have written against the familiar rhetoric that globalization produces “flow” – the flow of water, the flow of energy, the flow of data, and the flow of capital. Caitlin Zaloom’s 2006 ethnography, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, contributes to this discussion while capturing a surprisingly human story amidst a world overwhelmed by screens and software. Having been promptly hired as a “runner” by a Chicago trading firm in 1998, the unique access Zaloom gained to her field site brings enrichment to her arguments and enlivens her evidence.
Zaloom’s ethnography achieves two goals. The first is an argument against the notion that financial markets flow freely like fluids. Zaloom argues that markets move through the embodied beliefs and actions of financial traders. Taken alongside similar arguments about globalization, Zaloom contributes to this debate by articulating the friction of financial markets, even in the so-called “developed world” of the U.S. and the U.K. This argument is an important contribution to anthropologists of capitalism, who are the first audience of Out of the Pits.
The second goal of Zaloom’s work is to depict an old trade profession in a state of technological transition. The human experiences of financial traders moving from architectural floor pits to internet-based screen trading does not get lost in the software and computers, an easy trap for studies of technology to fall into. Out of the Pits offers answers to methodological questions for ethnographers of technology and STS scholars, who constitute Zaloom’s additional academic audience.
The first part of Out of the Pits focuses on Zaloom’s archival and ethnographic evidence. She uses the introduction and chapters one through three to set up the chess board for the second section, which focuses on her arguments in chapters four through seven. In the introduction, Zaloom explains how she came to access her field site, and the kind of travelling she did between archives, London, and Chicago. She also outlines some financial terms she will use for her arguments in later paragraphs.
In chapter one, Zaloom presents her archival research on the early formation of Chicago’s futures trading industry at the end of the 19th century. This chapter serves to illustrate how transformations in trading technologies, in the form of new architectural features in trading buildings, provide a precedent for how she interprets the computer-based changes happening in the 1990s and 2000s. The second chapter focuses on her time on the Chicago trading floor. Here, Zaloom illustrates the meaning and significance attached to traditional pit trading. She draws her readers’ attention to the embodiment and performativity of the trading pit technology through choregraphed hand gestures. She also uses this chapter to show how the global futures market created by early Chicago traders led to the downfall of traditional pit trading. In chapter three, Zaloom moves to her firm’s London trading location, which involved screen-and-software trading rather than pit trading. Here she contrasts the older, working-class “Essex” traders with the group of software traders she became a part of, full of multicultural and college-educated trainees. This chapter largely provides evidence of how the screen-based trading works for arguments in later chapters.
The final four chapters consist of different insights and arguments interspersed with additional evidence. In chapter four, Zaloom discusses the role risk plays in the management of trading and traders. She explains the different risk faced by brokers and “locals,” showing how the two kinds of traders work to produce the highly-desired “liquidity” of the market. Trading contracts in future goods and commodities are understood to alleviate risk, which the traders personally take on. In this way, they view themselves as absorbing the bulk of the risk involved in capitalism, but that this offers opportunities for extraordinary profits. In chapter five, Zaloom details how the traders cultivate a sense of themselves as “competitive actors” and “economic men.” This is achieved through masculinist language of physical and sexual conquest, control, and humiliation.
These forms of expression help traders transform themselves into competitors. Zaloom reveals how the pits become spaces outside the social norms of “civil decorum” that enable traders to act out their competitiveness for the sake of profit. In chapter six, Zaloom argues that traders discipline themselves to “divine” the market, determining the “correct price” of commodities and goods. The market takes on a cosmological quality, and traders learn to ignore extraneous information outside trading, such as personal life and news about currency or interest rates. This enabled them to get “in touch” with the market to earn profit.
In her conclusion, Zaloom proposes “practical experiments” to explain both the traders she has worked with and as a travelling concept for future ethnography. She explains that traders test new innovations through practice, envisioning an ideal building and then constructing it for trade. Out of the Pits also urges its readers to engage in similar practical experiments. Zaloom advocates for carrying out ethnographic research in ways that are practical and practice-oriented, but also experimental and boundary-pushing, such as the co-productive relationship she formed with her interlocutors. Unlike other ethnographies of technology, Out of the Pits highlights how the beliefs and practices of groups and individuals rest at the center of technological change.
This structure, while straightforward, offers several of the strengths in Out of the Pits. The balance Zaloom strikes between her archival research, her fieldwork in Chicago, and her fieldwork in London feel appropriate for her argument. Archival material from Chicago helps create a temporal depth for the present-day trading of Chicago. Her chapter in London, which might initially be read as out-of-place, comes into focus when she makes her arguments on discipline and ambiguous numbers in chapters six and seven. Learning to trade on screens in chapter three proved to be an essential component of these arguments when contrasted with pit trading in chapters five and six.
By narrating stories through both fieldwork and archival material, Zaloom demonstrates how technology, architecture, and infrastructure shape the movement and circulation of global financial capital. The strength of Zaloom’s arguments draws greatly on her ethnographic detail and the authentic way she can depict her relationships. She was able to accomplish this by being invited into the company she worked with as an employee, but also through the careful alignment of evidence from Chicago, London, and archives to craft a multi-dimensional argument. Zaloom shows her reader that the wealth, money, and value of global financial capitalism do not flow unobstructed, but markets are crafted and constructed through the interaction of individuals.
Zaloom’s ethnography is about the disruption of internet-based technology. However, because of the access she gained, and the subsequent data collected, her gaze largely comes to focus on the old floor traders. In some ways, she tells a story of loss, death, and mourning. At times, she draws the reader towards sympathy with the traders, towing the line between convincingly representing her interlocutors and calling for the return of the trading floor. Although she does not make any such claim, her effective representation is a stellar example of what ethnographic writing should do.
Sam Eastepp