(E)valuated by the market: The challenges of evaluating the individual performance of sell-side analysts in the quest for narrative authority

The concept of narrative authority has recently been mobilised to understand the work of financial analysts, focusing less on the technical content of their recommendations than on how they construct their legitimacy and discourse. Drawing on the sociology of evaluation, we look at systems used to evaluate the individual performance of sell-side analysts in order to understand their role in the construction of narrative authority. This study is based on 33 interviews with 13 financial market professionals. It examines in detail the representations of sell-side analysts’ performance the system conveys, as well as the analysts’ own perceptions of it. We show how they need to reach out to other financial professions in order to build their narrative authority, particularly internally. To make sense of the dynamics we unveil, we propose the idea of an accounting system—a performance evaluation system—which embodies and ‘performs’ the market, maintaining a circularity between narrative authority and stock market valuations and evaluations. The study shows just how difficult it is to construct a narrative authority and how fragile it is. We contribute to the literature on commodification and marketisation (Çalışkan & Callon, 2009) by showing how the evaluation of financial analysts’ performance positions them on the market as assets. Ultimately, our study shows how an accounting system plays a key role in understanding economic phenomena when these are constructed by performative narratives.