Přehled o publikaci

My dissertation project could be described as a cultural sociology of retail investing in the Czech (and Slovak) post-socialist context. The goal is to reconstruct ideal types of collective representations – shared patterns of meaning in interpretations of individual investors – that surround the recent surge in micro-investing here, while concurrently keeping heightened sensitivity towards their global confluence as well as historical, post-socialist particularity. The intention is to provide a deeper understanding of the rise in micro-investing here and how it is framed within the local context. My motivation is not only to map meanings in a particular empirical context, but to provide theoretical insights beyond the topic of investing. The main research question is: What collective representations surround the contemporary surge in micro-investing in the Czech Republic? Based on the preliminary results, this question is specified through three auxiliary research questions developed in conjunction with theory. 1) What imaginaries of the future influence the activities of micro-investors? 2) What figures can we employ to understand their self-perceptions and aspirations regarding investing? 3) How do micro-investors conceptualise the financial infrastructures they enter and the expertise they encounter? Briefly, I conceptualise investing decisions as impacted by imaginaries of the future, archetypical aspiration figures of ideal typical selves and spatial imaginaries of economic infrastructures and distributed expertise necessary to navigate them. The questions are addressed through a variety of qualitative ethnographic and interview data combined with computational text analysis. The methodology is split into three general research blocks, which are conducted in relation to each other and not necessarily in a chronological order. The first contains ethnographic participant-observations at various meet-ups, conferences and events aimed at retail investors. The goal is to provide preliminary themes to be developed in the second block and expanded with theory. This block helped me create the auxiliary questions. The second block (and main body of the research) conducts in-depth interviews with individual micro-investors to expand and confront interpretations based on the first block. The last block operationalises findings of the first two blocks to confront them with a corpus based on media articles, analysed with basic text mining methods and supervised machine learning. While my preliminary results show a multitude of potent themes, I would like to focus on a particular one at the conference, hence the title. In the interviews, I used the metaphor of driving on a highway to understand better how investors inhabit investing platforms and financial markets. My research partners have expanded the set of metaphors. Likening investing to driving on a highway seems a good fit to conceptualise the treatment of a risk, from driving at maximum speed without a driving license to merely sitting in a Flixbus, to paraphrase one of my research partners. However, paraphrasing another research partner, it also poses certain limitations, such as the fact that increased traffic leads to speedier achievement of an end goal. Alternatively, investing has been likened to swimming in a pool with sharks or interacting with a variety of vendors on an open town square. While the results are descriptive rather than conclusive, they shed a different light on how investors make sense of the markets. My presentation aims to discuss how to expand these results and what more they can illuminate. Nevertheless, if a more general research project is preferred, I can discuss the dissertation project in greater depth or split the metaphor-based contribution into a separate paper.