The Economy as a Problem for the Sociology of Statistics: An Interview with Donald MacKenzie

On October 11th, I had the pleasure of interviewing the great Donald MacKenzie – Professor, Sociology University of Edinburgh and of course very well known for his research in STS and finance studies. In the future, the idea is to transcribe and edit the interview as text, but for now, and recovering an old tradition on this blog (in fact, this is the second interview with MacKenzie on this blog, in 2012 he was interviewed by Javier Hernández) I share the unedited video of the conversation via Zoom (in the middle of it, I changed the format by mistake and the image became smaller and I no longer appeared). The interview covers different research projects in MacKenzie’s career and tries to follow a thread that I believe crosses his work and constitutes an original and very productive research angle of his. The conversation begins with his Statistics in Britain, 1865-1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (1981), continues with Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (1990), to reach his finance studies (An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (2006), “The credit crisis as a problem in the sociology of knowledge” American Journal of Sociology (2011), Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets (2021), to conclude with his current studies on online advertising