What is the social history of the unit of observation’s definition? How do social groups talk about this definition? How has it been contested?

It might be interesting to look into the history of reporting on the stockmarket, or businesses more general. There is some work done by scholars like T. Mitchell or Callon on how "the economy" has become essentialized through particular liberal ideologies and in the later case "devices" such as the stockmarket ticker. Looking at market sentiments from a linguistic perspective might be usefull to analyse this dataset.