Practices and meanings of non-professional stock-trading in Taiwan: a case of relational work

Non-professional investors, especially outside the Anglo-Saxon context, represent an important and under-researched topic for sociological studies of finance. The paper presents a qualitative study of non-professional investors in Taiwan, where levels of participation in the stock market are very high. It shows that investors are embedded in complex networks of social relations, cultural norms and economic projects. We use Zelizer’s notions of ‘relational work’ and ‘earmarking’ to explore how economic relations construct and reinforce social relations: investing is productive of, as well as derived from, social structures. Stock market participation secures access to social groupings and reproduces hierarchical relations in families and social networks. Our study seeks to highlight the relational content of financial markets, and calls for further investigation of the relational work performed by the material-calculative architectures of high finance.