Acclaimed finance podcast concludes
Dr Philip Roscoe of the School of Management has published the concluding episode of his podcast 'How to build a stock exchange'. Over 18 episodes, the podcast has offered a social history of finance as we know it today, exploring the sociology and materiality of financial markets, and showing how contemporary exchanges have evolved from local concerns to global data infrastructures. The narrative features much of Dr Roscoe's own research on the markets of London throughout the twentieth century. It represents an attempt to find new voices for research and to disseminate more widely the intellectual concerns of a critically-inclined school of management.
Dr Roscoe's podcast tackles finance from the perspective of responsible enterprise. Along the way it has explored themes such as gender inequality in financial markets and the murky history of finance and slavery. The latter topic, written in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, explored Liverpool's burgeoning financial sector and the narrator's own connections to the city. It led to an article in The Conversation, 'How the shadow of slavery still hangs over global finance'. In July 2020, Dr Roscoe was invited to address an audience of US policymakers and regulators, alongside Commissioner Rostin Benham of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to discuss a possible exchange for recyclable materials; this proposal features in his final episode.
The podcast has been downloaded approximately 10,000 times and the transcriptions accessed a further 6,000. The Guardian's Aditya Chakrabortty described the podcast as 'brilliant and searching', while others said 'beautifully told, fascinating, and very important' (Dr Paul Segal, Kings College London), 'an absolutely wonderful way of disseminating research' (Dr Kristian Bondo Hansen, Copenhagen Business School), and 'overwhelmed at how good this podcast is' (Guppi Kaur Bola, activist and writer, Chair JCWI).
The podcast was recorded between February 2019 and October 2020, and is available on iTunes, Google, Spotify and other podcast services.