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1. Social Theory and Ontology

I am sitting in my home office, sequestered by COVID-19, and open my browser to see the latest installment of Matt Levine’s Money Stuff, a financial newsletter published by Bloomberg.com, and see the title, “WeWon’t” followed by the byline : “Well, WeWork has finally sued SoftBank, but it is a little anticlimactic”. We Company, an American commercial real estate company, providing shared workspaces and services for startup enterprises operating under the names WeWork, WeGrow, and WeLive, is the brainchild of Adam Neumann. The past two years have not been kind to We Company : the initial public offering (IPO) — a process of taking a private company public — has been a fiasco. Within one month of filing the IPO on August 14, 2019, We Company found its valuation drop by thirty-seven billion, removed Adam Neumann as CEO, and, on November 21, 2019, laid off over two thousand employees. SoftBank, a Japanese multinational conglomerate founded and run by Masayoshi Son, owns Vision Fund, the world’s largest technology-oriented venture capital fund. SoftBank is now the principal shareholder and, back in December 2019, agreed to buy three billion dollars of We Company stock from current investors by April 1, 2020. They have not completed the sale, prompting We Company to file a breach of contract complaint.

The We Company story makes for high drama, complete with larger-than-life alpha-male personalities, engaging in semiotic quiddities, such as Neumann managing to trademark the word “We”, and being able to determine the composition of the board of directors even after leaving the Company. Does the story reflect more than drama? Yes. This case puts in bas relief the difficulties semioticians face with the relationship between agents, social structures, and reality.

Such social dramas speak directly to the widespread disagreement within social theory of immediate interest to semiotic research in economics and finance. Namely, how are we to deal with the paradox of agency and structure? We must take it for granted that agents determine social structures at precisely the same time that we must take it for granted that social structures determine agents. As Dave Elder-Vass describes this predicament, even dyed-in-the-wool “individualists” like Max Weber theorize the impact of social forces, and committed “structuralists” like Emile Durkheim insist on the capacity of the individual agent to resist social forces (2010 : 3). The inherent ambiguity of agency and structure has led to a particular move within social theory : admit the constitutional roles of both agency and structure. This both-and move is characteristic of “structurationists” like Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, both of whom see structure residing within each human agent.

The present essay intends to defend a particular ontology known as Critical Realism : a form of “post-structurationist” theory associated with the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar (1997). For critical realist sociologists, such as Margaret Archer (1995), Nicos Mouzelis (1999), and Dave Elder-Vass (2010), structuration commits to the conflation of structure-within-agency that does not ultimately pass analytic muster. Critical realist social theorists opt instead for a position of treating both structure and agency as analytically discrete, for structures exist outside of individuals in some crucial respects. As I argue shortly, this approach fits within the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, and for the present thematic purposes, with the institutional economics of Thorstein Veblen.

2. Critical Realism

The organizing principle of critical realism is that reality exists independently of human consciousness. Our knowledge of reality is reliable but fallible, meaning that there is no reason to expect an isomorphic relationship between reality and truth : reality is ontological (i.e., being); truth is epistemological (i.e., knowledge). More formally, critical realism operates according to the dictum, “if something has causal power, it is real”. Reality is a function of many material and non-material parts and relations.

Critical realism rests on two positions : ontological stratification and emergent powers materialism.

Reality is stratified, consisting of multiple, interconnected layers, each of which operates according to its processes or mechanisms. The relations between the categories of material beings, living beings, and rational beings are one-way : all animals consist of chemical substances, but not all chemical substances comprise parts of animals; both chemical and biological laws govern animals, but the animal can act in ways different from the chemicals of which it is composed. The biological facets of an animal issue from the primary strata of the physical and chemical but cannot be reduced to them (see 2.1).

The critical realist perspective on human cognition is of an emergent structure of three dynamic processes : relations between brain and body, body and world, world and brain. In this respect, critical realism is non-reductionistic. Bhaskar identities three ontological aspects : the real, the actual, and the subjective.[1]

The real comprises anything in the universe that exists regardless of whether we do or can know it. Most capaciously, this ontological stratum delimits the boundaries of possibility. In 1925, Winston Churchill, serving in his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursued a policy of returning the Pound Sterling to its prewar value. At the time, Sterling was valued at £4.66 but gold was trading at £4.88, a ten percent difference. It was within the boundaries of possibility for Britain to return to gold parity, but it required a deflationary policy of contraction too painful for the populace to endure and was quickly abandoned.

While a return to the gold standard was for John Maynard Keynes the height of macroeconomic folly, he was not opposed to fixing exchange rates, and in both his Treatise on Money (1930) and later with E.F. Schumacher (1943) proposed the introduction of a supranational unit of account, the Bancor. If adopted, it would have served as an international clearing system for the balance of payments between countries. Gold could be exchanged for bancors, but bancors could not be exchanged for gold. Individuals could not hold bancors, only sovereign nations of the International Clearing Union. The Keynes proposal lost out in the final negotiations at Bretton Woods in 1944. Once again, the bancor comprises the real as a real possibility, and, as such, has an ontological status with some causal powers, namely as inspiration for future financial arrangements.

The actual comprises any event that happens in our world, whether physical or social. The Bancor never became actual; instead, the United States dollar took over as the dominant international reserve currency. In actuality, the dollar became the single currency hegemon over currency exchanges and balance of payments, with more than sixty percent of global transactions denominated in dollars. The reality of a supranational unit of account became the actuality of a small class of reserve currencies, including the Euro, the Pound sterling, the Dutch guilder, the Japanese yen, the Chinese yuan, Swiss franc, and Canadian dollar. In 1969, the International Monetary Fund created a unit of account known as “special drawing rights” (XDRs) that have some of the properties of the Bancor, but which apply only to a select “basket” of currencies.

The subjective consists of what we experience, either directly or indirectly. Bhaskar’s designation of this strata as subjective is unfortunate and problematic, as noted by Tobin Nellhaus (1998). The very notion of subjectivity is laden with modernist assumptions that cannot claim universality in time and space, given that the very idea of subjectivity is particular to 17th century Europe. I agree with Nellhaus (1998 : 10) that a more appropriate designation of this stratum is semiotic, and holding jurisdiction over all knowledge seeking practices.[2] Gold standards and bancors are semiotic phenomena par excellence (see Oakley 2022; section 3 below), which also happen to play out in the domains of the real and actual. The economic enterprise itself is a semiotic theory of real and actual markets and their consequences. The very possibility of an international monetary system cannot arise without the social structures and human agents giving rise to them. If the International Monetary Fund (IMF) did not operate within the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) — which, in turn, gets its authority from 164 members, each of whom represents a participating country — then there would be little agreement upon currency code or numerical code necessary to make XDRs operational. Importantly, the domain of the actual is relevant when considering complex social systems that come into existence via agents but possess structures and functions not easily cognizable by the very agents actualizing them.

2.1 Social Ontology

From the above remarks, it is possible to limn out a social ontology as processes indigenous to one or more of these domains, with downward and upward pressures brought to bear on the actual from the real and semiotic, or medial pressures from the actual on our access to the real with the aid of the semiotic.

As a first explicit approximation of this ontology, let us line up this general ontological terminology with social theory. In this dispensation, the general domain of the real (possibility) corresponds with structures. These would include forces of production or other forms of structural conditioning. The general domain of the actual corresponds to agents. These include existent habits, interaction groups, institutions, and organizations, all the socio-cultural interactions and their effects. The general domain of the semiotic corresponds to culture as manifest in all manner of signs and signals that count as meaningful apprehensions of reality. It is also important to note that culture is not, as implied by structurationists, inside each agent.

As will be advanced in section 3, the ontological strata of society — structures, agents, culture — are intertwined with experience in the form of three phenomenological modes of technology, society, and meaning. What follows is paraphrastic of Tobin Nellhaus’s integration of Bhaskar’s critical realist and Peirce’s theory of signs (1998 : 19).[3]

According to this social ontology, the phenomenology of technology comprehends all tools and artifacts preserved in locutionary acts, habits, documents for enacting institutions, organizations, and operating within the forces of production. Much of this material is not “in the head”. The phenomenology of society manifests real events in the form of functions, such as illocutionary forces, psychological states, capacities, and opportunities, intentions, social positions and relations, and their attendant powers for domination or exploitation. The phenomenology of meaning is made manifest in arguments, reasons, theories, ideologies, stories, plays, and other “works”, in the practices of agents with identities, identifications, modes of presentation, and communicative and performative strategies that operate within constraints of conceptualization and emotion, such as image schemas, and basic-level categories.

Together these phenomenological modes produce a prismatic effect of the semiotic work of money and finance. Money and finance is at once a “thing” (technology) made manifest in currencies capable of being handled, taken, exchanged, altered, or destroyed; at another it is manifest as “debt” in the form of promises and related performative acts; at still another it is “capital”, the manifestation of power (meaning) in the form of a “vendible commodity” (see Nitzen & Bichler 2009 : 10).

3. Peircean Semiotics and Critical Realism

Not much has been written on signs and semiotics among the critical realists. The clearest statement comes from Bhaskar in Dialectic (1993 : 222). Bhaskar offers a tripartite scheme of signifier, signified, and referent, expressing dissatisfaction with the Saussurean tradition in semiology that either elides the signified (nominalists) or reference (postmodernists). The “semiotic triangle” works as follows : the signifier “transmits locutionary force” and is “detachable” from the referent; the signified is thereby “bound in layers of differentially sedimented semantic stratification”, which “enables conceptual distanciation” beyond the here-and-now. The signified link to the referent establishes the transitive dimension of reality — facets of reality brought within the orbit semiotic organisms. Nevertheless, intransitive phenomena exist outside the orbit of semiotic agents or at least exist outside the immediate consciousness of agents. For Bhasker, each semiotic triangle emerges from other such similar triangles ad infinitum.

Bhaskar never associates his semiotics with that of C.S. Peirce; nonetheless, the similarities between the semiotic models are hard to miss. Bhaskar’s signifier and signified align with Peirce’s sign (representamen) and interpretant; Bhaskar’s referent aligns with Peirce’s object. The schematic alignment is most significant in that Bhaskar’s distinction between transitive and intransitive reference intersects with Pierce’s distinction of immediate and dynamic objects. For Peirce, the immediate object is the object presented by the sign, as it occurs in perception or mental imagery. In contrast, the dynamic object is the real object of reference in the world (CP 5.484), leading him to posit the distinction between the “inner” and “outer” world, which maps reasonably closely onto Bhaskar’s transitive and intransitive referents. For Bhaskar as for Peirce, science itself is an epistemologically relative social practice operating within the transitive dimension.

How might Peirce’s notion of the interpretant supplement a critical realist semiotic? First, because an interpretant can function as an object for ensuing semiotic action (semiosis), interpretants form the mechanism for the ceaseless emergence of semiotic triangles. The lifeworld is a world of semiosis. Second, an interpretant need not be a concept but rather an effect or trace of three-dimensions of semiotic work : emotional (immediate), energetic, and logical (final) semiosis. A significate effect can be immediate as a fundamental feeling of recognition or apprehension capable of channeling a response. A significate effect can then become energetic to the extent that it enables a resultant action based on the channeled response. For example, suppose I am walking and see a piece of engraved paper laying on the ground, as similar to the one depicted in figure 1.

Figure 1

-> See the list of figures

I then notice that the bust in the center is of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States. The immediate interpretant of an engraved piece of paper is that signifies $20. I look around to see if anyone is nearby to claim it. Seeing no one, I feel a mixture of joy and guilt : joy at my good fortune; guilt at the thought of my joy as contingent on misfortune of another. This dialectic of joy and guilt comprises the energetic or emotional interpretant. Additional energetic interpretants are possible as well, such as the unease I feel at having a perpetrator of ethnic cleansing and genocide represent the “good faith and credit” of my country. But these reservations are not enough to elicit outright rejection of this denomination of the currency, for the logical or final interpretant is that (if genuine) it bears a credit in a sovereign unit of account I need to pay taxes or discharge other debts, public or private. I suppose I could try to exchange one of these bills for two $10 bearing the likeness of Alexander Hamilton, who is, at the time of this writing, a heroic founding father. The significate effect of this final interpretant is to strengthen, weaken, or modify a habit. This act of exchange for purposes of virtue signaling still depends on recognizing the offending piece of paper as legal tender : the exchange does not take it out of circulation; it merely transfers possession to another entity within the system. I and my fellow currency users are still locked in the same monetary system, and as users of that system, we have limited means of modifying it. Had Barack Obama’s plan to replace the image with Harriet Tubman (figure 2), an abolitionist who helped bring slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad, been actualized, US currency would enjoy not only my compliance but my acceptance, with the alignment of the energetic and logical interpretants in this semiotic network.

Figure 2

-> See the list of figures

If Peirce’s semiotics comports with critical realism, what are we to make of the argument that Peirce himself is considered a “semiotic idealist” (Savan 1983)?

The semiotic idealist maintains that all that exists comprises “of the nature of the sign” (Parker 1994 : 65). Peirce asserts that all mental activities entail semiosis. What is called semiotic idealism may be consistent with critical realism to the extent that Peirce’s ontology allows for extra-semiotic reality, namely something similar to Bhaskar’s intransitive dimension : there are relations of secondness that do not solely depend on the existence of minds. As Parker aptly phrases it, Peirce would accept the proposition that “while everything there is may potentially be a sign, not everything that has being is only a sign” (1994 : 66). In this respect, Peirce’s semiotics is consistent with the limited social constructionism of critical realism, making Bhaskar and Peirce a strong tag-team for building a social cognitive semiotics of money and finance based on constant unfolding of semiotic triangulations. That said, the broad application of Peirce’s semiotic only gets us so far, for Peirce rarely addressed the particular ontology of social structures.[4] For that, we should turn to Peirce’s one-time student, Thorstein Veblen.

4. Veblen and Pecuniary Interests

The American economist Thorstein Veblen (1859-1929) is most famous for articulating the doctrine of conspicuous consumption in his The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). His later work, The Theory of the Business Enterprise (1904), and The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), goes farther to solidify his legacy as one of the founding members of the Institutional Economics School : institutions — coordinated systems of habits of thought — shape economic behavior according to evolutionary processes.[5]

Veblen opens Chapter Eight of Leisure Class with several statements that seem to presage many critical realist views on structure and agency.[6] To begin, Veblen regards social structures as evolving entities that emerge, develop, change, and perish according to a process akin to natural selection. Second, the forces behind the “natural selection of institutions” (while ultimately dependent upon “living tissue”) “can best be stated in terms of an environment, party human, partly non-human, and a human subject with a more or less definitive physical and intellectual constitution” (87). Third, that today’s social structures shape the institutions of tomorrow through a selective, coercive process, “by acting upon men’s [sic] habitual view of things, and so altering or fortifying a point of view or a mental attitude handed down from the past” (88).

Institutions, thereby, “are the products of the past process of selective adaptation and adapted to past circumstances and therefore are never in full accord with the requirements of the present” (88).

Veblen’s social theory seems to accommodate well to a stratified social ontology of structure, agency, and culture, with institutions as the actualization of these three domains. Institutions are habits of thought that guide human beings only to the extent that they are “received from an earlier time” that “have been elaborated in and received from the past” (89). These structures shape the terms of engagement and application of any new situation, and thus they adapt themselves “to an altered situation, only through a change in the habits of thought of the several classes of the community, or in the last analysis, through a change in the habits of thought of the individuals that make up the community” (89).

Consider again the Jacksonian $20 bill. As Veblen might have it, many facets of the engraving satisfy both productive and ceremonial instincts, both of which cannot be reduced to atomic behaviors. The productive need for legal tender comports with the habits of thought that have been influenced by the evolution of a sovereign monetary institution, for which users of the currency need access to the unit of account in order to discharge public (e.g., taxes) and private (e.g., home mortgage) debts, and to secure commodities for living.

At the time of this writing, the plan to replace the Jacksonian bill with a Tubman bill, initiated by Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew under Obama, has been delayed for six years by Secretary Steven Mnuchin under Trump. As the paragon populist and Trump’s favorite president, Andrew Jackson has come to signify white settlers as the rightful heirs of the nation. Thus, keeping Jackson’s image in pecuniary circulation is thought to reaffirm white privilege, and the very idea of replacing him with a former slave and abolitionist is anathema.

Let us take a step back momentarily and see how Veblen’s institutional economics fits with critical realism’s broad social ontology. Veblen’s worldview sees human beings as animals conditioned by the innate propensities to alter our material environments to suit our interests. In a more contemporary patois, we are “niche constructors” par excellence. As such, this instinct of “workmanship” and “industry” — a byproduct of idle curiosity, novelty, and intergenerational diffusion — means that “the habitual elements of human life change unremittingly and cumulatively, resulting in the continued proliferation and growth of institutions” (1914 : 18). Against the background of industry lies a series of institutional structures that are said to define the four evolutionary eras (or “stages”) in human habits of thoughts, namely the peaceable era, the predatory eras, the handicraft era, and the machine era (1914 : et passim). Modern industrial societies, especially capitalist ones, are effectively assemblages of peaceable, predatory, handicraft, and machine habits of thought. However, Veblen suggests that many of our modern modes of social behavior, mainly as catalyzed in leisure-class pursuits, are part and parcel of the predatory era. Modern economies evidence a dichotomy of institutional products : waste in pursuit of the canons of taste, or industry in pursuit of instruments for human betterment. The former orients to the past and support “tribal legends” and the conservation of inequities, while the latter orients to the future and to technological imperatives facing the species, which ideally are to be judged by their consequences.

For Veblen, money or the pecuniary interests, can and does evidence an overweening influence of the predatory and wasteful endeavor in the form of what he calls “business capital”, such that money becomes one of the foremost means by which the leisure class demonstrates conspicuous leisure and invidious “self-respect”. It is crucial to note Veblen’s penchant for using the Latinate pecuniary as both modifier and common noun throughout his works. The Oxford English Dictionary catalogs usage since the 16th century as the avaricious propensity of individuals or non-corporal punishment. Taken as a piece, “pecuniary” covers the institutional dimensions of money as a means of social positioning, either as creditor or debtor, and that much of economic life is the act of navigating these positions within the institutional confines of instrumental and wasteful enterprises. His views on money are most evident in the Theory of the Business Enterprise (1958 [1904]), where the “effective industrial capital” facets of money diminish in favor of “capitalized presumptive earning capacity”, “the outcome of many surmises with respect to the value of prospective earnings and the like” (77). In a sense, business capital highlights the credit nature of money as a vehicle for social positioning.

Now, this broad sense of money as social positioning fits well within a critical realist ontology (see Lawson 2016), wherein the entity “money” consists of two authority relations, namely the issuer of the currency (a sovereign) and a user of the currency (the subject), at least this is so for all state money. Entities come into existence by the issuer and accepted by the user then produce the emergent properties of debt and credit imputed onto a tokenized unit of account, thereby reproducing the social categories of debtor and creditor. Besides, we should note that banks are another institution developed for the express purpose of issuing credit, which subsequently increases the “purchasing power” of subjects by making them indebted.[7] Lastly, the mechanism most often used for rendering a currency as something of value is taxation : subject A needs this and only this token denominated in this and only this unit of account to satisfy her obligation to the sovereign(s), and because subject B is under the same or sufficiently similar obligation, he will accept subject A’s payment to him in that same currency.

As Veblenesque logic would have it, the pecuniary institution enjoys a group pedigree precisely because it comes to stand for the dominant means of positioning one as a subject within a larger community, with the means or lack thereof of satisfying one’s instrumental needs and having resources left over to meet the prevailing canons of taste.

5. Social Cognitive Semiotics as Metatheory (General Ontology + Methodology)

We are now able to articulate the broad outlines of a social cognitive metatheory, combining a general ontology with methodology.

A social ontology of semiotics specifies the following real entities : interaction groups that produce “normative circuits”; normative institutions; associations; and organizations (see Elder-Vass 2010 : 115-167). Examples of interaction groups include any coordinated activity, such as standing in line or walking in a neighborhood while maintaining social distancing. Normative institutions include large-scale normative circuits, such as the patterns of spoken languages with their communicative principles and maxims, as well as markets and money. Associations include friendships and other minimally legally-binding relationships. Finally, there are organizations, normative institutions with specified divisions of labor and authority relations, many of which can exert causal effects on large-scale normative institutions, such as capital markets, as we shall see momentarily.

All these entities emerge from the interaction of their parts, consisting of a distributed network of human beings (bodies), social roles, and artifacts. What is more, these parts conspire to form mechanisms with causal powers. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland, consists of members (62 central banks), a Board of Directors (18 members, including a Chair and Vice-Chair), and Managers, headed by the General Manager who reports directly to the Board of Directors. The primary mission of the BIS is to promote financial stability by acting as a counterparty for central banks and other international organizations and their transactions among one another.

The dominant mechanism of social power comes in the form of authority relations that are themselves emergent properties of these activities. As a repository of financial analysis and statistics, the BIS exerts broad and deep influence on central bank policy. It is from these parts (roles within the organization) and mechanisms (dissemination of information) that the authority relation of primary influencer of bank policy emerges.

It is just a small step to see these parts, mechanisms, and authority relations as interminable semiosis : circuits comprising representamen, object, and interpretant. A recent statistical report on debt securities can signify the current financial position of securities denominated in a particular currency held by investors outside the country of origin. Such a statistic can elicit energetic or emotional reactions among national investors, bankers, and politicians, which in turn, can lead to logical or final interpretants that change or modify habits, such as a policy to implement or relax capital controls.

6. Application : We Company and its Discontents

How can we make sense of the We Company fiasco mentioned in the opening? Taking a private company public is a significant change in social status, opening the Company up to new sources of investment as well as new levels of scrutiny, and the case of We Company is a spectacular example of what happens when the extra scrutiny produces untoward upward causal effects on the organization. The analysis begins with an accounting of the different parts that comprise an Initial Public Offering.

First and foremost, there is the private Company (PiC) and its existing investors — in this case, We Company and SoftBank, each of which is a distinct organization with its own structure and governance rules. Second are usually a set of competing investment banks (IB), such as Goldman Sacks or J.P Morgan, vying for the opportunity to handle the IPO. The third is the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) as the regulative organization that handles all matters involving the securities markets.

Within these organizations and the broader financial institutions reside in several roles and their values. There are the CEO and members of the governing board of directors of We Company, many of whom also represent their largest investor, SoftBank. Then, numerous investors, both private and institutional, make up the prospective customer base that sets the initial share price at offering. The underwriters, attorneys, and accountants work with the investment bank, J.P Morgan Chase, to file the paperwork and create a “book of interest” (of which more momentarily). Other salient roles include the SEC regulators and marketing and public relations firms.

What are the mechanisms for establishing opening market prices for a company’s debut on a public stock exchange?

Here we have three information-bearing artifacts necessary for the public offering. First is the Underwriting Agreement between the company and the investment bank, a legal contract that sets the terms of the partnership. Second is the S-1 Registration Statement and Prospectus that must be filed with the SEC at the start of the process. These are the documents used throughout the process known as “building the book of interest”. In a nutshell, bankers from JP Morgan disseminate this document to prospective investors, meeting with them, and building advance orders to signal interest in buying, in this case, common stock in the We Company.[8] After an initial period of book building, the bank and Company identify a likely opening price. That price either meets or does not meet the private Company’s CEO, board, and majority shareholder’s expectations. If it does, the participants coordinate with the relevant stock exchange, in this case, NASDAQ, for an opening date. On that date, the CEO of the Company ceremoniously rings the opening bell, signaling the beginning of the public market. Usually, if it looks like the opening price is going to be met or exceeded, the bankers conduct another round of book building, securing advanced orders for an additional round of stock issues to try to bid up the price even more. Then the company becomes a publicly held entity, subject to new regulation types in exchange for greater access to capital.

Unfortunately for We Company, the process never got past the first book building, as it became evident that their prospectus did not persuade investors. For one, their financial disclosures did not follow the standard formula for calculating earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITA) and other generally accepted accounting practices (GAAP) issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). Standards set by FASB are recognized by the SEC as the authoritative standard for all public companies in the United States. Here we have a set of “nested” organizations that comprise the mechanisms and authoritative relations by which investors evaluate company finances. Instead of hewing to these reporting processes, We Company and its underwriters used a bespoke method called “Contributed Margin” as a measure of profitability (Lietz & Bracken 2019 : 6). However, most analysts suspected that the projected profitability was dependent on several questionable assumptions about future cost controls. So, the projected valuation in the book of interest woefully undershot the expected valuation and, hence, the stock price. We Company and JP Morgan suspended the IPO; We Company remains a private company with much less access to capital that has effectively squashed its growth plans, the very basis for its valuation — it is not what We Company earns now (since it operates at a loss) but what it promises to earn in the future that drove the IPO. The real possibility of We Company becoming a forty-four billion-dollar company has dropped to seven billion dollars in the eyes of potential investors. The actual We Company won’t go public anytime soon.

The S-1 document emerges as the authority relation for potential investors : it presents the Company’s business plan and strategy, its financial prospects, and its capitalization, each of which comprises a chain of immediate, energetic, and logical interpretants for an investor. If an investor is persuaded that the business model and growth strategy is sound but not persuaded that the financial descriptions and corporate governance reflect that strategy, then the investor is likely to purchase stock at a lower price, if at all. If an investor is not persuaded by either the business model and strategy, or the financial description, and, moreover, finds the corporate structure dysfunctional, she will pass. If, by chance, it is an investor of significant repute (e.g., Warren Buffett), and if other potential investors find out, others will be dissuaded from purchasing it. In the case of We Company, investors seemed to think of it as an unattractive “You”.

7. Conclusion

The present essay is an attempt to advance discussion and research into the sociality of human affairs as manifest in complex structures of money and finance among late capitalist economies. As with less complex social structures, matters if finance include autonomous agents capable of effecting upward causal change even as those same agents are born into social structures that affect downward causal constraints. Agents have an impact on structures just as those structures offer stabilizing constraints that render an agent’s actions intelligible according to prevailing normative institutions. The processes of semiosis — of discerning meaning from signs — happens against these institutional backgrounds, as suggested by Bhaskar, presaged by Peirce, and made sociologically comprehendible by Veblen.

A critical realist ontology offers a metatheory for the conduct of social cognitive semiotics. Concerning theory, it specifies three ontological domains of the real, the actual, and the semiotic that are always acting and interacting with one another, obviating the need for either deflationary individualist or inflationary structuralist commitments. Entities that emerge from social structures, nevertheless become real and actual in their own right. Once created, they possess emergent properties that the very beings who created them cannot wish away or easily alter. It will not be easy for the US dollar to be suddenly displaced as the primary reserve currency, given the fact that a plurality of global assets are denominated in dollars : Chinese investors may not like the US and its policies, but that does not mean they are willing to retreat to the Yuan voluntarily, given that the banking system and judiciary do not enjoy the same authority relations to the securing of private property rights as western institutions.

Concerning method, it specifies a procedure by which semioticians first identify the constituent parts of a social systems without prejudging what types of entities are proper parts. For instance, brains and bodies may be necessary but not sufficient as agents, for on analysis the material environment, including tools and information-bearing artifacts are often, if not nearly always, proper parts of such as system. Subsequently, the semiotician examines the relationships between these parts, some of which are to be identified as mechanisms for exerting authority relations possessing causal powers within the social structure in question — even as the process itself likewise changes the mechanisms and authority relations, sometimes radically so, in the case of institutional breakdown or revolution.

Part, mechanism, and authority relations are the stuff of coordinated activities within normative institutions that frame our association and organizations with causal powers. I suspect that it is the last element, authority relations, that will prove to be the most consequential and challenging feature of a critical realist ontology of social systems, as such relations comprise the emergent properties of normative institutions that are the most taken for granted and the least amenable to objective analysis. Human beings act most assuredly and fluently when such relations operate below the introspection threshold. The subnconscious attachment to institutional structures is the crux of Veblen’s socio-economic project : what are the murky social instincts that drive economic activity? How do they determine the structure and function of a broader political economy? More fundamentally, any social and economic structure harkens back to semiosis and the interminable dance of representamen, object, and interpretant. Semiosis, in turn, is the quintessence of organismic engagement with the world. In turn, complex organisms increase engagement with the world in a manner that alters the very world itself, for good or ill. Human social structures and their avatars come onto the scene; they affect the real and the actual through cultural formations amplifying the very terms of what is possible.