Razvan Dumitru Current Project Razvan Dumitru Curriculum Vitae Current Project My PhD project investigates how an institution thought and designed to embody the free market - namely the stock exchange - takes roots and it is regulated in a post-socialist environment, in Chisinau, the capital of the Republic of Moldova. Its establishment in the mid 1990s highlights the difficulties, opportunities and contradictions encountered by people taking the task of setting up a new institution that is organized on different principles than the socialist and soviet ones. A supposedly non-bureaucratic institution dedicated to encourage and represent the spirit of a new economic system oriented towards market economy, individual entrepreneurship and responsibility, an institution aimed to stimulate efficient investment and risk taking, the stock market is one of the key symbols of the capitalist economy embodying its virtues and perils. The stock market is an institution modelled to facilitate the extending and or trading of shares in joint-stock companies. They are populated by individuals who have the skills and knowledge to buy and sell financial assets as traders and brokers. These people act according to a set of formal and informal rules. The formal rules are devised and maintained by the board of the stock exchange, which is enforced by bureaucratic bodies located outside of the marketplace. However, the specific stock market I aim to look at, is located, populated and regulated, due to historical conditions, by individuals who have the cultural acquisitions of the socialist period on which other layers of experience and cultural acquisitions were accumulated and dismantled during the "transition" period. My research proposal outlines and justifies questions that detail the purpose of this study: How is the stock market designed and enacted in a post-socialist environment in relation with property, law, and moral sphere?

How are people's different and sometimes contradictory cultural acquisitions and skills enacted, used, displayed and changed in the stock market? How are people defining themselves and their social relations with friends, family and institutions and larger social milieu through their activity related with the stock market? My ethnographic investigation will focus on the skills, representations, attitudes and social connections of the people working in the stock exchange and the securities exchange commission, taking into account the importance of learning as part of life, which is embedded in broader political and historical conditions. Therefore, structural conditions of the social and economic milieu where the market takes place will taken into account and depicted. I will also investigate how people acting in the market at various levels and functions employ in their activity regulations and how are these regulations developed and employed under specific cultural understanding and performance of property, law and risk. I will follow two strands of inquiry regarding the emergence and transformations of the securities market in Moldova considering that in the post-socialist context the new institution and its personnel have to employ new sorts of capacities, skills, behaviours at various level of the stock market. Since these capacities are necessary born in the social world in which actors of the market were and are embedded, I will also investigate this broader world of theirs. This will enable me to dig out an "archaeological" account of the skills, attitudes and social connections that enable participants to take part in the stock market and the cultural and material tools through which different individuals, institutions or groups make use of the stock market. These tools are various expert knowledge - economic, statistic, and even socio-cultural analysis/ethnographic accounts implemented on different instruments (e.g. computer networks, mathematical formulae, software programs) as most of the analysts of the financial markets following famous Callon's suggestions pointed out. Moreover I will see how certain conceptions about Moldovan economy, its political and social features play a role in the decisions that the traders and investors take in the stock market. My aim is to dwell in these cultural layers being they economic, political, interpersonal, and professional as enacted on different levels: individual (experiential and educational), familial, social relational and institutional. I will also take into account institutional and informal relations between political sphere, the regulatory commission of the market and the stock market itself. I will describe how institutional boundaries are defined, enacted and breached by individuals embedded in social relations and how the spheres of the economic and political are defined and trespassed with the use of various cultural logics and conceptions about the capital market.