Observing financial practices. An antidote to the limitations of interviews?

Given the widespread use of this resource, the methodological virtues of interviews with experts in the field are sufficiently well known and recalled. This article proposes instead to interrogate this dominant practice, in the light of another unjustly neglected inductive method: observation. Drawing on my own ethnographic experience (a three-month internship in a trading room, followed by numerous site visits to monitor the practices of asset managers), it argues that some of the too rarely discussed limitations of interviews with financial actors can be overcome through observation. This is not, of course, to discredit research based on interviews, but to open a methodological dialogue in order to build even more robust critical knowledge about finance.