School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am an economic sociologist working at the intersection of political economy, science and technology studies, and social theory. Inspired by the sociology of scientific knowledge, my research addresses contemporary transformations in financial governance and interrogates the implications of scientized knowledge and expertise for public accountability and democracy. I have an emerging research interest in the financial dimensions of public health governance, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After receiving a PhD in Political Theory, published as History and Event (2015) by Edinburgh University Press, I was awarded a research grant from the Leverhulme Trust (2014-17) to investigate the regulation of financial trading algorithms. Drawing on these bodies of research and earlier work, I have published 14 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Economy and Society, The British Journal of Sociology, Theory & Event, The European Legacy, Journal of Political Ideologies, and International Review of Economics Education, among others. In 2015 I co-founded Finance and Society, which is today a leading journal in the interdisciplinary field of finance studies published by Cambridge University Press. In 2023 I became a Director of Finance and Society Network Limited, which oversees the journal as well as the Network's annual conferences. With Matthias Thiemann, I guest edited a special issue of Economy and Society in 2022 titled 'Recentering central banks', which breaks new ground by exploring how the governance techniques of central banks condition the limits of state sovereignty. I am co-director of the Centre for Science, Knowledge and Policy (SKAPE) from 2022-25 and co-principal investigator on the project Scoping Impact: Mapping, Evaluating and Learning from Contemporary Trends in Research Impact Definition (2023) commissioned by the ESRC to advise on its future defintion and conceptualisation of research impact. I am the course organiser for Sociology of Freedom, Sociology's Academic Advisor, and the School of Social and Political Science's Director of Undergraduate Programmes (2022-5). I have supervised 3 PhD students through to their awards and currently supervise 3 PhD students working on topics as varied as platformisation, macroeconomic expertise networks, and truth construction in judicial processes.

I am currently writing a second book, provisionally titled The Impossible Performance of Financial Stability. My book is organised around the thesis that financial stability governance, on the model established after the 2008 financial crisis, cannot realise the stable financial system it aims to secure. Despite adopting an institutional machinery modelled on the performative power of monetary policymaking, this approach to financial stability governance is undermined by constitutive exclusions such as an inability to recognise how the actions of states and central banks have played a key role in the financialization of the economy. As a result of this failure of reflexivity, regulatory authorities struggle to anticipate and mitigate the financial instabilities provoked by their own interventions.

Positions

• Lecturer in Economic Sociology, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh (2017 - 2023)
• Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh (2014 - 2017)
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh (2013 -2014)
• Doctoral Researcher with Reid Studentship, Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London (2009 - 2013)

Selected Publications

(see full list on Google Scholar)

Book

• Coombs, N. (2015) History and Event: From Marxism to Contemporary French Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

Edited collection

• Coombs, N. and Thiemann, M. (Eds.) (2022) Special issue: Recentering central banks. Economy and Society, 51(4): 535-702.

Articles, reports, chapters and review essays

• Coombs, N., MacDonough, H. (in preparation) Beyond the linear model: Introducing 'process impact' to social science research evaluation. 
• Coombs, N., MacDonough, H. and Rodrigues, E. (2024) Scoping Impact: An International Study of Contemporary Definitions and Conceptualisations of Impact by Funders of Social Science Research. Report for the Economic and Social Research Council. Edinburgh: Centre for Science, Knowledge and Policy. (p. 37)
• Coombs, N. (2024) Central bank power without central bank autonomy? Finance and Society, 10(1): 65-68. [Response by Leon Wansleben]
• Coombs, N. (in press) Infrastructural power in financial governance: Its meaning, applications, and varieties. In: Brandl, B., Campbell, M. and Westermeier, C. (eds.) Cambridge Global Companion to Financial Infrastructures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
• Coombs, N. (2023) The democratic dangers of central bank planning. Accounting, Economics and Law: A Convivium: 1-19. [Response by Eric Monnet]
• Samman, A., Boy, N., Coombs, N., Hager, S., Hayes, A., Rosamond, E., Wansleben, L. and Westermeier C. (2022) After the boom: Finance and society studies in the 2020s and beyond. Finance and Society, 8(2): 93-109.
• Coombs, N and Thiemann, M. (2022) Recentering central banks: Theorizing state-economy boundaries as central bank effects, Economy and Society, 51(4): 535-558.
• Coombs, N. (2022) Narrating imagined crises: How central bank storytelling exerts infrastructural power, Economy and Society, 51(4): 679-702.
• Coombs, N. and van der Heide, A. (2020) Financialization as mathematization: The calculative and regulatory consequences of risk management. In: Mader, P., Mertens, D. and van der Zwan, N. (eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization, 358-68. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Coombs, N. (2020) Financial regulation. In: Borch, C. and Wosnitzer, R. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies, 137-153. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Coombs, N. (2020) What do stress tests test? Experimentation, demonstration and the sociotechnical performance of regulatory science, The British Journal of Sociology, 71(3): 520-536.
• Coombs, N. and Frawley, A. (2019) The value in 'value': An exercise for pluralising economics instruction, International Review of Economics Education, 30: 1-11.
• Coombs, N. (2017) Macroprudential versus monetary blueprints for financial reform, Journal of Cultural Economy, 10(2): 207-216.
• Coombs, N. (2016) What is an algorithm? Financial regulation in the era of high-frequency trading, Economy and Society, 45(2): 278-302. [featured in The Regulatory Review]
• Coombs, N. (2016) Underlabouring for science: Althusser, Brassier, Bhaskar. In: Malik, S and Avanessian, A. (eds.) Genealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity since Structuralism, 271-99. London: Bloomsbury.
• Coombs, N. (2016) Did Lenin refound Marxist dialectics in 1914?, The European Legacy, 21(1): 1-18.
• Cameron, A., Coombs, N. and Samman, A. (2015) For a post-disciplinary study of finance and society, Finance and Society, 1(1): 1-5.
• Coombs, N. (2014) Speculative justice: Quentin Meilassoux and politics, Theory & Event, 17(4).
• Coombs, N. (2011) The political theology of red Toryism, Journal of Political Ideologies, 16(1): 79-96.
• Coombs, N. (2010) Nomological disputation: Alain Badiou and Graham Harman on objects, Speculations: A journal of speculative realism, 1(1): 135-144.

PhDs supervised to award

• Zehner, N. (2023) Envisaging dataist modernity: The construction of Edinburgh's innovation apparatus (supervised with Nicholas Prior)
• Julius K. (2022) Realising catastrophe: The financial ontology of the Anthropocene (supervised with Donald MacKenzie)
• Cassar, D. (2022) Inscribing markets, shaping policy: A sociological investigation into the yield curve (supervised with Donald MacKenzie)

Current PhD students

• Wen, S. (4th year) Governmentality, platformisation and governance in urban China : A case study of “taxi village” in Shenzhen (supervised with Donald MacKenzie)
• Gaillardou, F. (2nd year) Varieties of “left turn”: the relationship between the government and the Economics profession in Argentina and Brazil, 2003-2016 (Supervised with Tod Van Gunten)
• Choi, Y. (1st year) How can truth-claims become truth in criminal courts? (Supervised with Stephen Kemp)