| This dissertation examines the changes in social relations that accompanied the institutionalization of credit reporting and rating agencies in the 19 th century United States and the development of markets for credit information. The project engages with scholarship concerning the social construction of "structural holes" and "brokerage" positions that embed "information intermediaries" and "status judges" within market networks. The study draws from an array of corporate documents; newspapers and law journals; attorney files and trial transcripts; and credit reports and ratings. I examine the considerable social labor the agencies undertook to shape various environments---organizational, market and legal---to be favorable to their activities and gain legitimacy as credit information experts in response to challenges from merchants being evaluated for credit, subscribers, competing agencies, the general mercantile community, agency managers, and law courts. The chapters are structured around analyzing the different problems associated with establishing routines for producing and distributing information of varying degrees of "hardness" (i.e., concreteness and compression)---oral reports, written reports, ratings---and exploring each agency's differing attitudes and policies toward these formats while assembling information repertoires. I argue that negotiating the social relations of trust and responsibility was the agencies' core concern as they tried to limit and shift the burden of their accountability and liability and protect their property rights for their information, tempered in particular ways by each agency's relative status within the industry. I show that the agencies' responses to these challenges, by and large, established and embedded practices that increased the ambiguity and uncertainty of the information's meaning and provenance, and shielded themselves from liability, which undercut the market transparency that credit information was supposed to produce. As such, the dissertation complicates the conventional story that posits that the evolution of credit information was driven by rational actors seeking increasingly more efficient and "convenient" information. Rather, I demonstrate that increasing the information's efficiency and "convenience" posed particular difficulties for agencies and their subscribers by shifting the burden and responsibility for credit decision-making, changing the grounds for an agency's legitimacy, and making information more costly to produce, difficult to price and vulnerable to pirating. |
