What is the relationship between the financial system and politics? In a democratic system, what kind of control should elected governments have over the financial markets? What policies should be ...implemented to regulate them? What is the role played by different elites - financial, technocratic, and political - in the operation and regulation of the financial system? And what role should citizens, investors, and savers play? These are some of the questions addressed in this challenging analysis of the particular features of the contemporary capitalist economy in Britain, the USA, and Western Europe. The authors argue that the causes of the financial crisis lay in the bricolage and innovation in financial markets, resulting in long chains and circuits of transactions and instruments that enabled bankers to earn fees, but which did not sufficiently take into account system risk, uncertainty, and unintended consequences. In the wake of the crisis, the authors argue that social scientists, governments, and citizens need to re-engage with the political dimensions of financial markets. This book offers a controversial and accessible exploration of the disorders of our financial capitalism and its justifications. With an innovative emphasis on the economically 'undisclosed' and the political 'mystifying', it combines technical understanding of finance, cultural analysis, and al political account of interests and institutions. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199589081/toc.html
This paper takes a closer look at those parts of the European Commission’s Capital Market Union (CMU) that bear upon the attempt to set up a new market for securitizations, called ‘simple, ...transparent and standardized securitizations’, in brief STS-securitization. The ‘puzzle’ at its heart is the discrepancy between narratives and content. While the narrative is about the construction of a US-style market-based financial system to overcome the problems of Europe’s bank-based system and help medium-sized enterprises, the first legal initiative aims to create a European market for securitizations, which are a source of funding for large (mortgage) banks and as such are squarely at odds with the headline goals of the Capital Market Union. The paper discusses in detail key passages from the proposal to tease out the discrepancy between story and fact and ventures an explanation based on the identification of the interest coalitions behind the package.
The securitization crisis that started in mid-2007 has demonstrated that we are indeed living in a "global financial village" and are all subject to the vagaries of financialization. Nevertheless, ...the fallout from the credit crisis has not been homogeneous across space. That some localities were hit harder than others suggests that there are distinct geographies of financialization. Combining insights from the "varieties of capitalism" literature with those from the literature on "financialization studies," the article offers a first take on what may explain these different geographies on the basis of an informal comparison of the trajectories of financialization and their political repercussions in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. The article ends with some reflections on how economic geography could be enriched by combining comparative studies on institutionalism and financialization, while its distinct research focus-detailed spatial analysis endowed with a well-developed sensitivity for geographic variegation-may help overcome the methodological nationalism of much comparative institutionalism.
This paper presents the case of the post-crisis discursive defence of shadow banking in the Netherlands to argue, first, that there is a need to dust off older elite theories and adapt them to ...post-democratic conditions where there are no widely shared ‘political formulas’ to secure mass support for elite projects. Second, that temporality should be taken more seriously; it is when stories fail that elite storytelling can be observed in practice. As new ‘political formulas’ are minted and become established, elites can again hope to withdraw from the political scene and leave policy-making to the self-evidence of output legitimacy and/or the perpetuum mobile of There-Is-No-Alternative (TINA). This suggests that elite theory should replace an epochal reading of post-democracy with a more conjunctural one.
This paper contributes to extending the empirical and conceptual scope of Social Reproduction Theory by bringing it into dialogue with debates on financialization. We call for the need to document ...and theorize the “lived” dimension of the financialization and marketization of Infrastructures of Social Reproduction, and of the healthcare sector in particular. Our argument draws empirically on the analysis of patient and staff safety and vulnerability issues related to the bankruptcy of the Slotervaart hospital in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.Social reproduction theory and debates have a long, rich, and complex history 1 , but received increased attention after the 1990s and again after the 2008 financial crisis. The significant changes that global economic restructuring and crisis brought to both the organization of social reproduction and the international division of reproductive labour (Federici, 2019) demanded new types of analysis and theorization (Fraser, 2016; Rodríguez-Rocha 2021; Hall, 2020). Infrastructures of Social Reproduction (henceforth ISR) debates were popularized after the 1990s when the fraying of the welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990) and the marketization and financialization of care practices led to diminishing provision of social reproduction services (Bakker, 2007); but also to increasing informality in the provision of services to those who cannot access the market proper (Mitchell et al., 2003). Katz (2008), for example, scrutinized the intricate connections between basic services provision and New Orleans’ rebuilding efforts post-Katrina, demonstrating how undermining one social reproduction (henceforth SR) activity directly impacted others – the lack of childcare pushed nurses away from the city, which in turn hindered the full reopening of hospitals and other care facilities. However, these important debates on SR and ISR have thus far engaged very little with financialization literature despite the fact that ISRs can potentially enact or destroy forms of biological citizenship (Netz et al., 2019), strengthening or weakening community and social ties and deeply affecting economic and productive practices.Financialization literature for its part had equally limited engagement with social reproduction debates. Van der Zwan (2014) identifies three core streams in this literature: financialization as a new regime of accumulation; financialization as the rise of shareholder value; and financialization of everyday life. Within this last stream, Kaika and Ruggiero (2016) researched the shift from industrial to financial capitalism as a “lived” process and documented how the everyday lives of factory workers became fully intertwined with the restructuring of the economy. More recently there have been more systematic attempts to theorize a better understanding of how the infiltration of finance-led practices, metrics, and logics can transform citizens into financial actors (Langley, 2008; García-Lamarca and Kaika, 2016; Doling and Ronald, 2010).
The tempestuous rise of finance in contemporary capitalism has incited a frantic search for new conceptual tools to make empirical and theoretical sense of it. Financialization and the theoretical ...connotations it carries, is one such new conceptual tool. Although a growing number of scholars are using the concept, its dispersal over the disciplines and relevant research communities — as a brief analysis of the ISI database and other databases suggests —, is still rather limited. On the basis of a constructive reading of the older debate over ‘conceptual stretching’ in the political sciences, the author presents three conditions for conceptual success, to wit: stay focused on the empirical content, look for the conceptual value added, keep causal mechanisms in mind. Combined with the hard but mundane work of organizing workshops, special issues, setting up professional charters, that might just do the trick.
Abstract
The article scrutinizes the Dutch healthcare market system to provide empirical grounding to the debates around the extent to which rationally constructed markets can develop as originally ...planned. Focusing on one specific pricing device, we document how the perceived economic ‘rationalities’ embedded in its design are challenged by the unforeseen and unanticipated ‘irrationalities’ of daily practices. We trace how healthcare professionals developed informal ways to adapt to the rules and expectations embedded in that device, resulting in forms of ‘counter performativity’ that threaten the quality and accessibility of Dutch healthcare. The main theoretical contribution of the article is to bridge the gap between ‘Actor Network Theory-based economic sociology’ and its emphasis on (counter-) performativity and the agency of devices with the older European continental inflections building on Weber, Durkheim and Bourdieu, by drawing attention to the distinct epistemologies of different professions, using insights from James Scott and the sociology of the professions.
The commuting burdens of disadvantaged groups have recently become a renewed topic of concern with social inequities and just city. It is widely believed that social restrictions and individual’s ...self-etermined actions become more important determinants of low-income workers’ commuting costs than spatial constraints. However, it is doubtable to recognise the belief as a ‘universal’ truth since the evidences for this are still fragmented and particularly are dominated by cases from the Western-developed countries. This paper reports on an initial investigation into low-income workers’ commuting burden and its determinants in a rapidly developing city, looking at the case of Beijing. Spatial constraints caused by uncontrolled urban sprawl, an insufficiency of affordable housing and lower levels of public transport services are still major factors leading to additional commuting time for low-income workers, in particular, for those who travel by public transit. Individuals’ preferences for housing have effects on low-income workers’ commuting times. For the car users, the effects are greater than that spatial constraints have. However, a preference for greater proximity to the workplace rather than a better quality living environment in a community has a significant influence on low-income workers’ commuting times. It suggests the basic need for housing and jobs explains the greater commuting burden on low-income workers. Thus, today’s commuting burden in China for low-income workers could be generally understood by social–spatial structure rather than social–cultural forces. But it seems that the impacts of individual’s self-determined actions on commuting burden will increase in the context of individualisation of the society in China.
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