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What Is an Exchange? The Crumbling of One Foundation of Modern CapitalismMini-conference, Society 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: financingstates and enterprises; controlling means of production; reaping the profits ofintermediation; and, eventually, speculating. Exchanges have long functioned aslocal monopolies, which generally constituted hybrid extensions of the publicauthority and of business interests, in order to organize the circulation ofcapital in a given territory. The organizational features of exchanges variedacross time and location, but they all aimed at making instruments tradableand operations reliable, and, in fine, they defined a space for self-regulatoryorganization and informal coordination among financiers, who were part of thenational 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 ofalternative trading venues, overhauled this institutional foundation of Westerncapitalism. From the 1980s, stock and derivatives exchanges gradually becamelimited companies. Then, at the start of the 21stcentury, many of them wentpublic and even listed themselves on the markets they operate. They startedto enter into mergers with other exchanges thus weakening their connection tonational sovereignty and blurring their relations to local economy. At the sametime, less-regulated trading venues, often backed by internationally-operatingfinancial institutions, were allowed to directly compete with exchanges. The banksthemselves put in place in-house systems to internalize the orders of theirclientele or offer their best clients privileged access to restricted pools ofliquidity. Such a trend towards private transactions on privatisedtrading venues culminated in the mid-Noughties, when the US Regulation NMS andthe European Markets in Financial Instruments Directive were both promulgated.Consequently, stock exchanges officially morphed from hybrid-institutionsorganizing public competition between financial intermediaries into privatecompanies competing with one another and with their main users to provideintermediation services. This overhaul of stock exchanges forces to tackle thefollowing questions, which all echo this broader paradox: the financializationof modern capitalism has profoundly weakened one of its crucial institutions.  *   What are the common features of stock exchanges, beyond variations in time andlocations? In what ways is an exchange different from a financial market, a tradingvenue?  *   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 aboutthe contemporary transformations of modern capitalism?The organizers are looking for contributions that will explore the economic historyof exchanges, the political economy of their emergence, past and recent changesand the study of their organizations. In short, contributions which would enlargeour understanding of these typical and yet crumbling institutions of modern capitalism.Submissions: https://sase.org/about-sase/conference-submission-and-award-guidelines_fr_25.htmlOrganizers: Marie-Laure Djelic, Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, Angelo Riva, and Matthias Thiemann