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Cited by 417

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 105 of the 105 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge

Open access
MacKenzie, Donald·2011·American Journal of Sociology

Abstract

This article analyzes the role in the credit crisis of the processes by which market participants produce knowledge about financial instruments. Employing documentary sources and 87 predominantly oral history interviews, the article presents a historical sociology of the clusters of evaluation practices surrounding ABSs (asset-backed securities, most importantly mortgage-backed securities) and CDOs (collateralized debt obligations). Despite the close structural similarity between ABSs and CDOs, these practices came to differ substantially and became the province (e.g., in the rating agencies) of organizationally separate groups. In consequence, when ABS CDOs (CDOs in which the underlying assets are ABSs) emerged, they were evaluated in two separate stages. This created a fatally attractive arbitrage opportunity, large-scale exploitation of which sidelined previously important gatekeepers (risk-sensitive investors in the lower tranches of mortgage-backed securities) and eventually magnified and concentrated the banking system’s calamitous mortgage-related losses.

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Metadata

Authors
MacKenzie, D.
Venue
American Journal of Sociology
Published
2011-05
Volume
116
Issue
6
Pages
1778-1841
ISSN
  • 0002-9602 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5390
OpenAlex
W2119836796
Cited by
417
References
105
FWCI
68.83
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/659639
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MacKenzie, D. (2011). The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge. American Journal of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1086/659639

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.