Activities and Outputs

In August 2025, a book was published called The Social Foundations of Finance, which was a collection of essays written in honour of my former Warwick colleague, Tim Sinclair. Very sadly, Tim died suddenly in 2022, leaving a vast hole most obviously in his immediate family life, but also very clearly in our department and in international political economy scholarship on the dynamics of global finance. This book has been edited by two further Warwick colleagues, Chris Clarke and Ben Clift, in an attempt to show how Tim's work has sparked multiple research agendas through which finance is repositioned as an intensely human practice. My essay tries to flesh out the implications of Tim's approach for understanding the fallibility of the human systems through which financial pricing takes place and the financial economy more generally is reproduced. It attempts to cast new light on dynamics of financial crises by emphasising how the models that are used to guide day-to-day practice within financial firms are themselves riddled with the ontological and the epistemic effects of human fallibility. Late in his life Tim and I would discuss the implications of what a research agenda cast in this image might look like, but sadly we did not get a chance to pursue it together. My essay is entitled, 'Of Markets and Models: The Extended Realm of the Mundane in the Social Foundations of Finance Approach'.