Four faces of power are summarized, based on the established literature in political science and the work of Foucault: they are power over decision, the power of agenda control, hegemonic power and ...capillary power. The four faces correspond also to four strategies used by City elites in the UK to protect markets from democratic control. Strategies have developed out of conjunctural crises. The most recent strategy, which involved a form of capillary power, was greatly damaged in the financial crisis of 2007–8. Since then the City has been obliged to retreat to a reliance on the exercise of power over decision, which involves open lobbying.
► Brings together literatures on financialization and global supply chains. ► Presents macro evidence on labour costs for successive Asian competitors. ► Compares trans-Pacific supply chains with ...earlier, national-based competition. ► Explores the relationship between Apple Inc. and Foxconn International Holdings (FIH).
This article argues that thirty years ago favourable cost conditions helped build productive power in Asia, whereas now US financial power drives and benefits from low labour costs in China, using the very different supply chain positions of Apple Inc. and Foxconn International Holdings (FIH) as examples. In the first section, the authors bring together the literatures on financialization and global supply chains to contextualise the pressures and outcomes discussed. A temporal dimension is added in section 2, using macro evidence on labour costs to compare new entrants into the industrial world order since the 1970s. The article then presents company illustrations in sections 3 and 4, deconstructing Apple's financial success and its trans-Pacific relations with its handset supplier FIH. The article concludes by observing that the rise of the post-national corporate player changes the alignment between large corporate interests and the US economy where Apple hoards its cash surplus and the success for the stockholders does not align with the broader needs of the US economy and society.
This article argues for a reconceptualization of financial innovation which, as culprit and victim of the current crisis, is now damned by those who once praised it. But what is financial innovation? ...The dominant answers from mainstream finance and social studies of finance share variations on a rationalistic view whereby financial innovation is about improving markets or at least extending the sphere of rational calculability. Because improvisation is more important than the dominant perspectives can admit, this article proposes a new concept of financial innovation whose three main elements - frame, conjuncture and bricolage - are indicated by the title of this article. The importance of this problem shift is that it highlights the inherent fragility of this type of intermediary-led financial innovation where things will often miscarry and highlights the need for a more radical rethinking about policy responses to the financial crisis that began in 2007.
This article introduces a journal special issue which examines how shareholder value and financialization have changed priorities and behaviours in present-day capitalism. This article opens the ...debate by reviewing three key issues: first, it considers the impact of shareholder value on national capitalisms in France, Germany and the USA; second, it analyses the effects of financialization on corporate strategy and sectoral performance; and, third, it reviews current conjectures about a finance-led macroeconomy and the possibility of a wealth-based growth regime.
This paper is about knowledge limits and the financial crisis. It begins by examining various existing accounts of crisis which disagree about the causes, but share the belief that the crisis ...represents a problem of socio-technical malfunction which requires some kind of technocratic fix: the three variants on this explanation are the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure. This paper proposes an alternative explanation which frames the crisis differently as an elite political debacle. Political and technocratic elites were hubristically detached from the process of financial innovation as it took the form of 'bricolage', which put finance beyond technical control or management. The paper raises fundamental questions about the politicized role of technocrats after the 1980s and emphasizes the need to bring private finance and its public regulators under democratic political control whose technical precondition is a dramatic simplification of finance.
This paper analyses the 'democratization of finance' or the promise that all households can make money and/or manage risk by buying appropriate financial services products. It does so by exploring ...the reasons for discrepancy between what is promised and what can be delivered. Our analysis starts from the economic promises and political pitches for the democratization of finance since the early 1990s and the corollary emphasis on promoting mass financial literacy. The article then identifies three key social preconditions which must be satisfied before the promise is delivered. Evidence and argument from the UK and US suggests that these conditions are not met because the context is confusing, individuals lack calculative competence and products are opaque. Under these conditions felicitous outcomes are uncertain for existing middle class savers and very unlikely for lower income groups. A concluding section relates this analysis to the cultural economy literature and to the politics of social security versus individual responsibility.
The financial crisis can be understood in many different terms. In this article, it is analyzed in terms of the unfolding of a series of elite narratives that shaped the agenda of regulation before ...the crisis, that were damaged by the crisis, and that were then reframed and recounted again in the wake of the crisis. The form of these stories differs in subtle ways by jurisdiction, and thus the fate of postcrisis regulatory practice likewise differs.
The imaginary of the city versus messy realities Stafford, Anne; Stapleton, Pamela; Wei, Hua ...
Financial accountability & management,
August 2020, 2020-08-00, 20200801, Volume:
36, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Accounting research on transport has been narrowly focused on cost recovery and the consequences of privatization and restructuring. Accounting researchers have not engaged with the now dominant ...orthodoxy about cities as agglomeration argued by urbanists like Glaeser or championed earlier critical understandings of the limits of urban planning argued by Jane Jacobs. Working within that critical tradition, this paper innovates by presenting an exploratory and interdisciplinary case study of public transport in the city of Greater Manchester, which draws on accounting and other evidence. Policy makers have represented the construction of Manchester's new tram system as a major success but we argue that the system represents an ill‐judged investment priority, which had unintended consequences for the whole public transport system. Part of the problem is classic top down failure to engage local specifics because the tram network has added a radial system to a city with untidy orbital movement patterns and diverse mobility requirements. This awkward gap between the imaginary of the policy makers and messy realities has financial consequences because the capital costs of tram increasingly squeeze the ability of the public transport authority to subsidize the bus services, which carry 10 times as many passengers as tram. The political question is whether and how this kind of argument and evidence can inform popular politics and shift what is taken for granted by experts and the political classes in Manchester.
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 serves as an introduction to a special issue which explores many new questions, intellectual and political, posed by the current global financial crisis. The aim is to get beyond the ...convention asking the well-rehearsed questions about what caused the crisis, or why the established theories could not predict it. For we can safely predict that many critical thinkers in political and cultural economy already know, or think they know, the answer to what caused the crisis. This is because they will construct the origins and causes of the within the problematic which they endorsed before the crisis began. Namely, that neoliberalism demarcates the period since 1970 as one of privatisation, liberalisation and support for free markets which essentially takes ideological propositions at their own word and, consequently, fail to distinguish between rhetoric and practice. This special issue explores some new ways of fundamentally reconsidering or challenging established ideas about neoliberalism and finance. For financialisation researchers, the intellectual struggle against organising concepts of neoliberalism and disembedded finance is unfinished business.
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