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Lowe, Alan; Locke, Joanne and Lymer, Andy
(2012).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2011.12.004
Abstract
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States mandated a new digital reporting system for US companies in late 2008. The new generation of information provision has been dubbed by Chairman Cox, ‘interactivedata’ (SEC, 2006a). Despite the promise of its name, we find that in the development of the project retailinvestors are invoked as calculative actors rather than engaged in dialogue. Similarly, the potential for the underlying technology to be applied in ways to encourage new forms of accountability appears to be forfeited in the interests of enrolling company filers.
We theorise the activities of the SEC and in particular its chairman at the time, Christopher Cox, over a three year period, both prior to and following the ‘credit crisis’. We argue that individuals and institutions play a central role in advancing the socio-technical project that is constituted by interactivedata. We adopt insights from ANT ( [Callon, 1986], [Latour, 1987] and [Latour, 2005b]) and governmentality ( [Miller, 2008] and [Miller and Rose, 2008]) to show how regulators and the proponents of the technology have acted as spokespersons for the interactivedata technology and the retailinvestor. We examine the way in which calculativeaccountability has been privileged in the SEC's construction of the retailinvestor as concerned with atomised, quantitative data ( [Kamuf, 2007], [Roberts, 2009] and [Tsoukas, 1997]). We find that the possibilities for the democratising effects of digital information on the Internet has not been realised in the interactivedata project and that it contains risks for the very investors the SEC claims to seek to protect.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
