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2017
Human Figurations. Long Term Perspectives on Human Condition, 6(2), 2017 | This paper focuses on the financial system as a global figuration in order to analyse its social logic of functioning and its connections with certain models of sociability and behaviour. As a global figuration, the financial system can be considered the result of the confluence of a triple vector of forces: a) the formation of competition spirals; b) the constitution of a complex web of interdependences and c) the constitution of a set of limits for the action of external constraints over the participants in the name of financial self-regulation. This triple vector is related to a model of sociability and behaviour based on a) the social production of indifference; b) the logic of the free-rider and c) the promotion of dis-identification patterns between the financial established and the financial outsiders. In sum, this paper proposes a framework of a figurational approach to the financial system, both in its macro-and micro-sociological dimensions.
This book is about the social and cultural study of finance, of the markets and institutions used for fmancial transactions, and the trading of assets and risks. The financial system controls and manages credit; in contemporary societies, the ultimate users of real capital rely heavily on others (investors) to provide the funds with which to acquire the resources they need. Investors make the transfers of money to those seeking credit in the hope of reaping profits at later points in time; the debts the receivers of the funds incur are claims investors can make on future income and on economic output and development. Characteristically, these claims (which take the form of company shares, governments bonds, etc.) and their derivatives are marketed and traded onfinancial markets••••with the help of financial intermediaries (e.g. banks, brokerage houses, insurance companies) who package the deals, assume some of the risks, and facilitate the trading of claims and risks among market participants. The existence of such markets allows participants to sell claims and risks they no longer want, and to pursue additional profits through clever trading. Financial markets, then, are a major, if not the most important component of the credit mechanism in risk-based economies. Economists regard them as constituting an efficient mechanism that :fuIfi11s vital functions 01: and for, the financial system: for instance, they pool and transfer wealth for capital use, decrease the costs of finance (through the elimination of banks as direct lenders), and spread and control risks risk being more widely distributed when credit is obtained in financial markets through the splitting of shares and through derivative products that can be used for hedging risky investments (e.g. Merton and Bodie 1995: 4f, 13-15). In contemporary Westem societies, financial activities are a defining characteristic not only of the corporate economy, but also of politics, the welfure and social security system, and general culture. For example, the corporate economy has long depended on credit to finance production and investments. A Robinson Crusoe with nothing to invest could not hope to produce much. He would first have to invest his own time and labor in order to build the rudiments of a productive capital structure (Shapiro 1985: 77). As Susan Strange argues (1994: 30), if we had had to wait for profits to be accumulated there would have been none of the economic growth of the past decades in industry and agriculture. The state has long needed credit and borrowed vast amounts of money. From the seventeenth century onward, states systematically financed costly military interventions by issuing debt (government First publ.
2016
Financialization – the leverage and promotion of anything to be turned into a tradable product – and its cultures are what Haiven addresses in his book Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Like many authors before him, he indicates that financialization is not only reduced to the transformation of currencies, goods, loans, etc. into tradable financial products such as swaps and futures, but that culture itself is under transformation and is being turned into an object of financial capitalism. The book’s opening sentence states the aim of the book very clearly: He wants to re-theorize financialization. In Haiven’s words financialization refers to ‘the increased power of the financial sector in the economy, in politics, in social life and in culture writ large’ (1).
According to Edward LiPuma, a dominant name in the anthropology of finance, we now live in a new and transformative phase of capitalism in which the proportion of wealth "held in financial as opposed to physical assets" is continually growing. This monetary capitalism is increasingly marked by financialization, speculation, risks, creation of derivative instruments, and circulation rather than production. To comprehend the economy of present and its politics, LiPuma argues, we need an adequate theorization of the social life of the new financial instruments such as the derivatives (p. 2).
Finance & Bien Commun, 2011
In recent years the behavior of individuals in the financial sector has been very questioned. In particular, it has questioned the behavior of the people from this sector that have acted improperly from an ethical point of view and motivated by personal interest against the institutions for which they work for and the common good. The author addresses some issues related to the dynamics of the financial sector and discusses how some behaviors of institutions and the financial sector itself, may affect behavior and lead to the occurrence of unethical behavior of people. At the end, when the findings and what to do, once again highlights the importance of the person and his values as an essential element to deal with temptations and unethical attitudes that the financial sector allows and even sometimes seems to encourage and invites the institutions to take care the problem.
2021
The financialization of the economy and society engenders different forms of resistance that fall under the category of debt repudiation, which we can conceive as a distinctive feature of advanced capitalism. From anti-debt movements in Mexico, Spain, Poland, Croatia and Chile to occupy movements in the United States, Israel and Canada, to mention a few examples, organizations have emerged to repudiate both debt and the centrality of financial markets. The financialization literature has yet to come to terms with these conflicts since it has mostly stressed the disciplining character of finance, rather than its resistance and repudiation. For two decades now, financialization studies have invested considerable effort in mapping the dense network of actors, devices, institutions, and processes that lead to the financialization of the
Work, Employment and Society, 2011
The crisis of 2007–9 has cast fresh light on the ascendancy of finance in recent years, a process that is often described as financialization. The concept of financialisation has emerged within Marxist political economy in an effort to relate booming finance to poorly performing production. Yet, there is no general agreement on what it means, as is shown in this article through a selective review of economic and sociological literature. The article puts forth an analysis of financialization that draws on classical Marxism while remaining mindful of the recent crisis. Financialization represents a systemic transformation of mature capitalist economies with three interrelated features. First, large corporations rely less on banks and have acquired financial capacities; second, banks have shifted their activities toward mediating in open financial markets and transacting with households; third, households have become increasingly involved in the operations of finance. The sources of ca...
Nierówności społeczne a wzrost gospodarczy, 2016
2014
This dissertation examines the evolution of financial sectors and provides an analysis of the linkages among finance, the real economy, and the social structures in which they are embedded in the context of the evolution of financial sectors. It analyzes the social and economic consequences of an increasingly complex, financialized economy.
Revista Internacional De Sociologia, 2020
Financialisation is a structural and incomplete process of change in contemporary economies. The growth of the financial system in last few decades has been accompanied by an increasingly complex relationship between socio-economic actors and financial markets. In this paper we analyse the causes and consequences of financialisation regarding: an erosion of the capital-labour relationship; the rise of labour income inequality; and the marketization of daily life and social rights. We review the main conceptualizations of financialisation on various research sites corresponding to the main economic actors, that is: non-financial corporations; the state and individuals; and their complex relationship with financial markets. Our primary objective is to evaluate the contributions and limitations of financialisation studies in these research sites and to identify the main methodological challenges in conceptualising financialisation.
Economic Sociology. European …, 2005
aim of the newsletter economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter provides information for scholars interested in economic sociology, with an emphasis on events and developments in Europe. The newsletter is driven by the idea of free access to information and open communication. contributions Please send contributions, suggestions and input to the editor. publishing information economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter is part of economic sociology_the european website, which is maintained by researchers and staff of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. The newsletter is published three times a year as a PDF and an HTML document. The PDF can be downloaded free of charge. Back issues are available on the website. subscription You can receive economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter via email. Please subscribe at http://econsoc.mpifg.de-> Newsletter-> Subscription editorial office Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies | Paulstr.
This article suggests that it is advantageous for social scientists to deliberately depart from functionalist theories seeking to explain the expansion of financial instruments and logics across social life. Rather, we identify three causes of financialization from three extant clusters of scholastic activity: an organic political economy that sees finance expanding as a product or by‐product of larger state‐ and imperial‐level political struggles, a relational sociology that sees the ways that finance expands by becoming another medium for expressing and constraining social relationships, and a cultural analysis that observes the increasing redefinition of discursive and material practices as financial. Across this larger discussion, we introduce and situate the contributions to this journal's special issue on financialization.
Corporate Governance & Finance eJournal, 2015
Modern finance has become a very complicated field, which raises many questions about its economic and social mission. Many bankers’ ignorance of complex knowledge and care for the future are hostile ingredients that transform the markets’ volatility, through spillover effects, into economic and financial crisis and social anomy. What fuels the wildfire does not necessarily mean black swan events, but often it is the result of (un)conscious and (un)intended decisions of certain economic policy makers. The current financial system is discredited. It is necessary to reform the financial institutions and practices, with the core principle that money should serve the economy and society and not vice versa. In a world of financial capitalism, a world driven by money and adjacent institutions appear to be defective and unjust to many of us. The conflicts’ arena must be manageable. The hopes rely on the institutions that represent financial capitalism, institutions erected by people, and w...
International Sociology, 2010
There has recently been an upsurge in social studies of finance, which maintain that economics performs, shapes and formats the economy and consider the formation and functioning of economic markets. They address market activities as global microstructures that are situated, reflexive accomplishments, focusing on the way in which the models, theories, procedures and techniques shape them. In all, financial sociology can attend to the interplay between actors' cognitive states and the enactment of financial models as situated, historical processes. This promises to develop a broader social scientific account of financial markets as situated, sequentially achieved global socio-material actions.
2016
This work pretends to introduce different concepts about the meaning of financialization in order to understand contemporary capitalism and its expressions. Among the views of politicalregulationniste, structuralist, logic-historical and contemporaneous, the work should embody all their key factors to understand the phenomenon of financialization. In the end, this work aims to point out the views of financialization to reinforce the debate over the contemporary capitalism and its dynamics. The financialization is comprehended here as the absolute form of capitalism expressing itself through channels around the globalized economy. Therefore, under this financial turmoil started in Subprime crisis, is it possible to continue the same old economy framework? Is the society facing a shift of an era? Key-words: Financialization; Capitalism; Finance Capital. Introduction There are no precedents in history where the capitalism was such complex, scale and capillary system. In nowadays the ex...
2018
Perhaps it is no more timely than now to discuss Ekaterina Svetlova's book on the impact of financial actors and their use of models on financial stability. We have just witnessed a power play between private investors and hedge fund managers which has resulted in temporarily blocking amateur investors on trading apps (BBC, 2021) and despite living with a major pandemic stock market values are rising, hinting at yet another financial bubble (Egan, 2021). These events have once again highlighted the importance of scrutinizing actions taken by financial institutions and explore whether models are villains, "dangerous and having the power to destroy markets", or scapegoats, "harmless camouflage which is frequently used to hide risks emerging somewhere else" (7). Originating from a desire to challenge claims made after the Global Financial Crisis that the blind following of models has led to its turmoil, Svetlova argues for a more subtle interpretation where "insufficient models are used as one of many resources in the multifaceted decision-making practices of financial markets" (3). In brief, the argument is that while financial models have grown in importance when making financial decisions, these are not used in isolation but users' emotions, judgements of the market and/or common institutional practices are part of the decision-making process. Consequently, rather than experiencing a uniform application of models, we observe a differentiated employment of models "contributing to the markets' stability rather than destroying them" (144). To make this argument, the book is divided into two parts. In the first part, Svetlova undertakes a comprehensive review of the literature (Chapter 2 and 3) while the second part (Chapter 4 and 5) combines extensive empirical data collected in Germany and Switzerland with secondary data. The theoretical chapters are remarkable in their ability to synthesise a large, interdisciplinary literature on decision-making processes of actors within financial institutions. Integrating insights from economics, finance and sociology, the author is able to show limitations to the assumptions of substantive rationality and emphasize the importance of judgements and emotions in making financial decisions. Perhaps most importantly to note here is the recognition of radical uncertainty and its distinction from risk which is often marginalized within the economics tradition. Svetlova acknowledges that investment decisions are inherently linked to "non-knowledge" which not only "cannot be conceptualized as missed information or not-yet-knowledge" but also "cannot fully be eliminated in financial markets" (144). This is argued to be a necessary condition for financial markets to exist because if future values would be known, there would be no potential gains from differential asset values. Svetlova then develops an important connection to one of the limitations of financial models: "self-referentiality" (16) whereby models do not sufficiently take into consideration how present expectations and actions of market actors change future outcomes and through this "produce their own blind spots" (19). This is an intriguing argument as it seems to indicate, while not explicitly stating it, that the employment of models reinforces the creation of nonknowledge.
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