Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra is an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, a founding faculty member of the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute, co-founder of the Computational Social Science program at UCSD, and Associate Director of the Latin American Studies Program at UC San Diego. His research concerns markets and their location in contemporary societies with an emphasis on finance, knowledge, and organizations. In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), for example, he examines the organizational and political tensions at play in developing some of the key infrastructures of British and American stock markets that automated trading in the late twentieth century. By looking at how experts in telecommunications created novel niches within stock exchanges, Automating Finance shows how these technical workers slowly transformed both the devices and cultures of their organizations, enabling the transition from trading floors to purely electronic exchanges. Automating Finance combines insights across fields, from the theoretical insights from science and technology studies and the analytical lenses of institutional theory, to anthropological discussions of relations and the economic metaphors of market design. Shifting emphasis to processes of marketization in higher education, his most recent book, The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences, studies labor markets in the British academia, demonstrating how market-like interventions of quality assessment introduced in the 1980s transformed the practices, career structures, and disciplines of anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists working in the United Kingdom. The book is based on a methodological innovation that synthesizes computational techniques with the ethnographic logic of the extended case study. Juan Pablo was trained in physics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Museu Nacional of the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, and the University of California San Diego. Juan Pablo’s work has been published in Economy & Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, European Societies, Cultural Sociology, Theory & Society, and the British Journal of Sociology.