Abstract Discussing recent literature on online financial practices, this article argues that ‘finance becoming tech’ assumes the form of particular financial situations in the everyday, to be understood in terms of Erving Goffman’s concept of interaction order . While the interactionist strand in the social study of finance foregrounds the role of techno-social situations in the constitution of finance, this article suggests applying Goffman’s notion of the ‘interaction order’ to that debate and demonstrates the latter’s capability to reconstruct the techno-social mechanisms through which finance emerges in the everyday. Unlike the notion of ‘situation’, that of ‘interaction order’ addresses the constitution of situational boundaries through interactional procedures as they refer only partially and selectively to circumstances of their social contexts. Against this background, online financial practices are analytically contoured as techno-social situations that enable the emergence of finance as a matter of the everyday. It is argued that the enabling condition for this commingling of everyday and financial processes is a specific delimitation of the digital-financial interaction order from parts of its political economic context – in particular, the uncertainty that structurally characterizes the financial economy.
Andreas Langenohl (Thu,) studied this question.