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Sun Min
Director of Media Relations
Alyssa Vine
Associate Director of Media Relations
Peter Levin
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Peter Levin, Assistant Professor of Sociology, joined the Barnard faculty in January 2004.
Professor Peter Levin's main field of study is economic sociology, with a focus on work and gender identities. He has taught such courses as "Institutions and Organizational Analysis," "Masculinity: A Sociological Perspective," and "Sociology of U.S. Economic Life."
Professor Levin's recent research includes an ethnographic comparison of futures traders in two different institutional contexts: face-to-face or "open outcry" trading and screen-based electronic trading. He examines the institutional changes generated in futures markets by the shift from face-to-face interaction to trading via electronic screens. Central questions concern the ways in which information, identities (i.e., masculinity) and discretion are reconfigured when such fundamental technological changes take place.
He is also investigating the ways in which value is made in secondary markets, through an investigation of appraisers of fine arts. He studies the processes by which communities of expert appraisers and specialists transform cultural value into price.
Professor Levin's article "Information, Prices, and Sensemaking in Financial Futures Trading" received the Top Accepted Paper Award for 2005 from the Organization and Management Theory Division of the Academy of Management.
Selected Publications
Reconstructing Futures: Technology and Institutional Change in Financial Futures Trading (Book manuscript in progress).
"Contested Commodities, and Market Culture: How Economic Sociology Uses Culture," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Forthcoming September 2008).
"The Ontology of Price: Information in Open-Outcry and Electronic Futures Trading" (Under review at Administrative Science Quarterly).
"Errors, Discretion, and the Making of Markets" (In preparation for submission to American Journal of Sociology).
"The Social Organization of Art Prices: Appraisers, Auctions, and Authorized Price" (In preparation for submission to Sociological Theory).
"Information, Prices, and Sensemaking in Financial Futures Trading," Advances in Qualitative Organizational Research, K. D. Elsbach, ed. (Information Age Publishing, 2005).
"Read and Recommended," Economic Sociology: European Electronic Newsletter Vol. 6, No. 3 (2005).
"Gender, Work, and Time: Gender at Work and at Play in Futures Trading," Fighting for Time, ed. A. Kalleberg and C. Fuchs Epstein. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004).
"Ambiguity and Intermediaries in the Study of Markets," with M. Ventresca, London Times (2004).
"Information and Ambiguity in Markets," with M. Vetresca, Accounts: The Newsletter of the Economic Sociology Section (American Sociological Association, 2004).
"Pollution Futures: Commensuration, Commodification, and the Market for Air," with W. N. Espeland, Organizations, Policy, and the Natural Environment: Institutional and Strategic Perspectives A. Hoffman and M. Ventresca, eds. (Stanford University Press, 2002).
"The Caucasian Evasion: Victims, Exceptions, and Defenders of the Faith," with J. Miller and T.Z. Like, Images of Color/Images of Crime, 2nd ed., C. R. Mann and M. Zatz, eds. (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 2002).
"Gendering the Markets: Temporality, Work, and Gender on a National Futures Exchange," Work and Occupations Vol. 28, No. 1 (2001): 112-130.
212-854-2868
EDUCATION:
BA, Wesleyan University
MA, University of Southern California
PhD, Northwestern University
RELATED LINKS:
SPECIALIZATIONS:
Economic sociology
Organizations and work
Sex and gender
Qualitative methodology