Linking Micro and Macro in a Global Financial Market: An Alignment of the New Economic Sociology and the Hierarchy Theory of Money

The New Economic Sociology has made great advances in challenging the traditional understanding of markets as abstract mechanisms for the exchange of products among anonymous buyers and sellers. It has shown how markets are constituted by actors, networks, institutions, sociocultural dynamics, and sociotechnical processes. Much of this work has focused, however, on the microstructures of markets or how specific markets are structured, produced, and reproduced. How these micro-dynamics align with broader structures in concrete and specific ways has been harder to trace. To address this issue this paper proposes aligning the insights of the new economic sociology with the hierarchy theory of money to show how the broader connections and interdependencies of the global financial system can be impacted by the micro-dynamics of specific markets. A case study of the 20^th century global gold market is used to illustrate how these theories work together and the theoretical insights produced by their coupling.