Prof Philip Roscoe

Prof Philip Roscoe

Professor

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 1973
Email
pjr10@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

I joined the University of St Andrews in 2009 as Lecturer in Management, was promoted to Reader in 2013, and Professor in 2023. I am currently Director of Research for Management, and have served as Director of Postgraduate Research and Director of Teaching.

Since arriving at St Andrews, I have been a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow (2016), and have published in leading sociology and management journals, notably Organization Studies, Human Relations, Accounting Organizations and Society, Economy and Society and Organization. I have monographs published by Oxford University Press, Bristol University Press and Penguin.

I am Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cultural Economy, having previously served as an associate editor.

I hold a PhD in management from the University of Lancaster (Institute for Entrepreneurship and Economic Development, 2007), an MPhil in medieval Arabic thought from the University of Oxford (1998) and a degree in theology from the University of Leeds (1995). From 2008-2009 I was assistant professor at Supdeco Montpellier in France, and before that a research assistant at the University of Lancaster, where I completed my PhD.  From 1998 to 2004 I worked as a financial journalist and small-business owner.

Teaching

  • MN4236 Sociology of Finance
  • MN5001 Contemporary Global Issues in Management

Research areas

I am a sociologist interested in the organization of markets. I have long been fascinated by how market-based innovations and ‘market thinking’ organize society. My early-career empirical work focused on the ethics and politics of such innovations. I studied the possibility of organ markets, the implementation of ‘fairness’ in transplant allocation, and how online dating enacts instrumentally rational, calculative romances. More recently, I have become interested in the importance of materiality in determining the shape of markets.

I have a maintained a career-long enthusiasm for the sociology of financial markets. My PhD explored the socio-material construction of the non-professional investor. A Leverhulme Trust fellowship allowed me to compile a ‘historical sociology’ of the genesis of two stock exchanges in London in the 1990s, the narrative at the heart of my recent How to Build A Stock Exchange (Bristol University Press, 2023). My undergraduate module ‘Sociology of Finance’ is one of just a handful on the topic in the UK.

Recent and ongoing work includes a collaborative project to produce an interdisciplinary survey of ‘market studies’ (forthcoming 2024, Cambridge University Press), a project on the legitimacy of materiality and its role in shaping new institutions, and work with early career colleagues on innovations in graduate recruitment, government bureaucracy, and the financialization of the art market. Most recently I have become interested in the UK’s freeports project – and am following the development of the Forth Green Freeport, not far from St Andrews.  

I advocate participatory, impactful work, an approach that I seek to follow in my own practice: the academic as public entrepreneur, working to articulate new modes of organizing as a source of social transformation.  I have therefore a long-running interest in public engagement. I was one of the first cohort of BBC Radio Three’s New Generation Thinkers, and in 2014 published ‘I Spend therefore I Am’ (Penguin/Viking). From 2019 to 2020 I wrote and produced an acclaimed podcast series ‘How to Build a Stock Exchange’, now developed into a book by the same title. You can find a scrapbook of media contributions and talks at www.philiproscoe.net.

I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students considering topics linked to the sociological study of markets, particularly finance and financialization.

PhD supervision

  • Daniel Davies

Selected publications

 

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