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Call for paperMini-conference: What Is an Exchange? The Crumbling of One Foundation of Modern CapitalismSociety for Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) Annual Conference, July 10-12, 2014, Chicago.(https://sase.org/mini-conferences/themes_fr_182.html#MC8)Braudel considered the stock exchange to be a “shortcut for the merchants’ world”. There took place power struggles to organize the mobilization of capital: financing states and enterprises; controlling means of production; reaping the profits of intermediation; and, eventually, speculating. Exchanges have long functioned as local monopolies, which generally constituted hybrid extensions of the public authority and of business interests, in order to organize the circulation of capital in a given territory. The organizational features of exchanges varied across time and location, but they all aimed at making instruments tradable and operations reliable, and, in fine, they defined a space for self-regulatory organization and informal coordination among financiers, who were part of the national elites and in relations to other international financial centres. Exchanges were flagship institutions (like national anthem, armies, universities…) of nation-states’ sovereignty.Recently, the demutualization and listing of exchanges, combined with the rise of alternative trading venues, overhauled this institutional foundation of Western capitalism. From the 1980s, stock and derivatives exchanges gradually became limited companies. Then, at the start of the 21stcentury, many of them went public and even listed themselves on the markets they operate. They started to enter into mergers with other exchanges thus weakening their connection to national sovereignty and blurring their relations to local economy. At the same time, less-regulated trading venues, often backed by internationally-operating financial institutions, were allowed to directly compete with exchanges. The banks themselves put in place in-house systems to internalize the orders of their clientele or offer their best clients privileged access to restricted pools of liquidity. Such a trend towards private transactions on privatised trading venues culminated in the mid-Noughties, when the US Regulation NMS and the European Markets in Financial Instruments Directive were both promulgated. Consequently, stock exchanges officially morphed from hybrid-institutions organizing public competition between financial intermediaries into private companies competing with one another and with their main users to provide intermediation services.This overhaul of stock exchanges forces to tackle the following questions, which all echo this broader paradox: the financialization of modern capitalism has profoundly weakened one of its crucial institutions.What are the common features of stock exchanges, beyond variations in time and locations? In what ways is an exchange different from a financial market, a trading venue?Under which conditions may an exchange contribute to the financing of states, local governments, firms and small and medium-sized enterprises?How come the setting-up of exchanges is still promoted to solve policy issues (i.a. Obamacare Health Insurance Exchanges, exchanges for greenhouse gas allowances) whereas their model has been seriously impaired in the financial world?What does the institutional crumbling of stock exchanges tell us about the contemporary transformations of modern capitalism?The organizers are looking for contributions that will explore the economic history of exchanges, the political economy of their emergence, past and recent changes and the study of their organizations. In short, contributions which would enlarge our understanding of these typical and yet crumbling institutions of modern capitalism.Submissions: https://sase.org/about-sase/conference-submission-and-award-guidelines_fr_25.html&#160;Organizers: Marie-Laure Djelic, Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, Angelo Riva, and Matthias Thiemann