On Using Theory-Derived Metaphor as a Prompt in Qualitative Interviews: Highways and Financial Infrastructures
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The presentation focuses on a methodological device I use in qualitative interviews for my dissertation, specifically on a particular question. The idea behind the question is to capture how individual retail investors practically navigate financial markets. Since markets and the experience of investing within markets can be somewhat abstract, I put across a metaphor to make the experience of navigating markets more tangible. I approximate navigating financial markets to driving on a highway. Both are infrastructures, that enable and constrain certain processes or goal-oriented movements. And both infrastructures depend on the “driver’s” experience as well as the traffic. The original idea was to validate whether theory-based example of the highway as a metaphor for enabling and constraining properties of institutional entanglements that Peter Wagner (1994) writes about does seem like a valid approximation of how we can think about markets even for practicing investors unfamiliar with the sociological theory behind this concept of institutions. However, the results I am going to present show that the metaphor of a highway works also as a fruitful prompt that allowed my research partners to develop rich narratives not only around how they understand financial markets, but also how they navigate and position themselves within the markets. The goal of the presentation is to illustrate how mundane metaphors can be used to capture more abstract practices or interactions during qualitative interviewing. |
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