I am a sociologist interested in markets and organizing. 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.

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.

I was a member of the editorial group behind the field defining collected volume Market Studies: Mapping, Theorizing and Impacting Market Action, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024, and have recently completed What are Markets For? in Bristol University Press’ ‘What is it For?’ series. Other projects include work with early career colleagues on innovations in graduate recruitment, government bureaucracy, and the financialization of the art market.

I am increasingly concerned with the cultural economy of markets, and the role that fiction, expectations, and other imaginaries play in shaping market futures. In this vein, I am working with Dr Shona Russell on the construction of novel financial arrangements for ecosystem restoration, and on my own project on the cultural economy of the end of the world and how that matters for organising markets. From March to April 2025 I held a visiting fellowship at the Research School for Social Sciences, Australian National University, and will be visiting the Kate Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies, University of Heidelberg, for the autumn semester of 2025.

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 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, finance, and the cultural economy of both.

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), a visiting fellow at The Research School for Social Sciences, Australian National University (2025), and I will be affiliated researcher at CAPAS Heidelberg in the autumn of 2025. I have published in leading sociology and management journals and have monographs published by Oxford University Press, Bristol University Press and Penguin. My books have been translated into Chinese, German, Korean and Turkish.

I am Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cultural Economy, having previously served as an associate editor. JCE is one of the leading journals in its field, with a global, rapidly growing audience.

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.

Markets; materiality; innovation; sociology of finance

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