Bio: (1944-) Austrian-American anthropologist and sociologist. Karin Knorr-Cetina holds a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna and lectures at the University of Bielefeld, the University of Konstanz, and the University of Chicago. Knorr-Cetina studies economics, science and technology, globalization, and qualitative methods. She began her research by studying the work of scientists in the laboratory, and that experience, together with the theoretical influence of symbolic interactionism, social constructivism, and phenomenology, led her to create her theoretical perspective, which she called "postsocial theory".

Within the laboratory, or as she calls "epistemic culture", post-social relations arise between the post-social self and the "object of knowledge", so the self and the object become mutually connected. Later, she extended post-social relations to the relations of people with consumer goods or technology. She believes that post-social relations, therefore, face-to-face relations, are replaced by the relationship of people with objects. Recently, Knorr-Cetina has focused on studying the information architecture of global financial markets, as well as the global social and cultural microstructures that these markets create. She believes that the micro-sociological approach is the best basis for understanding macro-social structures and institutions, so in her study of globalization, she starts from a micro-sociological ethnographic perspective.

Main works

The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (1981);

Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (1999);  

The Sociology of Financial Markets (2005);

Maverick Markets: The Virtual Societies of Global Financial Markets (2011);

Handbook of the Sociology of Finance (2011).