Dr. Aaron Pitluck

Research Interests & Areas

I am an economic sociologist who studies contemporary capitalism from a cultural and postcolonial perspective. Among other topics, my publications have explored professional investor behavior in equity and debt markets, and explored how moral and ethical norms, beliefs, and values are interwoven in markets.

My current research is a book project with the working title, Making Finance Meaningful. This is based on ethnographic research that I've conducted over the past decade in Islamic banks in Malaysia. The book is evolving but currently centered on three questions: What is the meaning of Islamic finance, and how are investment bankers and Shariah scholars co-producing it? What do we learn from their work about how to distinguish empowering from exploitative finance? And how do these work experiences inform us about secular projects to alter the trajectory of finance capitalism? My humble hope is that my readers will uncover new ways to think about, critique, and change contemporary capitalism.

Critiquing finance presupposes understanding. One cannot accurately critique—much less regulate, reform, or replace—something that one does not understand. This truism is particularly perplexing for moral critics of finance, as well as critical social scientists and autonomous regulatory bodies, because there are wide structural asymmetries of knowledge between these outside observers and financial experts. Given the pervasive and growing influence of finance in society, it is important for the public and public intellectuals to be capable of understanding, critiquing, and potentially controlling the finance industry. Over the past decade, I have conducted research in global Islamic investment banks in Malaysia to understand how investment bankers and religious scholars are attempting to bridge the gap between their worldviews and attempt to alter the trajectory of finance.

Previous research in Malaysia has examined how Islamic banking and finance has been guided and promoted by decades of leadership in government, universities, think tanks, and regulatory bodies such as the Central Bank. These accounts are an important explanation that my research draws on and contributes to. However, in contrast to these “top down” explanations, my methodology examines the prosaic and often contentious “bottom up” production of new forms of finance within Islamic investment banks. Complementing earlier research that I have conducted on professional investor behavior in Malaysia’s conventional financial markets, in 2012, 2013, and 2019, I conducted approximately fifty, focused, ethnographic, tape-recorded interviews with investment bankers and Islamic experts in ten investment banks. The interviews focus on my interviewees’ work constructing “sukuk,” a class of financial instrument developed over the past decade as a moral replacement for sovereign and corporate bonds. These banks form the super majority of the domestic sukuk market and half of the international sukuk market. Sukuk are viewed as a crucial element in building a global, transnational, alternative Islamic financial system. The novelty of this research’s “bottom up” methodology is in examining how these diverse parties communicate with one another to critique finance and contentiously coproduce Islamic finance before the innovations are institutionalized by state actors.

Click ‘Research’ above to see select publications in this and other areas.