The Hierarchies of Global Finance: An Anti-Disciplinary Research Agenda

ABSTRACT

This article critically assesses the economics discipline’s capacity to capture the structural features and political economy implications of contemporary financial processes in the global South, with a particular focus on South Africa. Delving into the complexities of financial processes in South Africa, the article proposes an alternative, anti-disciplinary framework for understanding drivers and impacts of financial processes. We show how such an approach cannot simply be about adding social or political perspectives to mainstream economics, but rather about interrogating how we think about economic systems themselves, drawing on a variety of theoretical and disciplinary insights. This is about taking an open and holistic approach that centers history, power, structures, and social relations. With an issue such as finance, critical political economy approaches from a variety of disciplines allow us to see that finance cannot be separated from the wider economy or from the social relations it forms part of today and historically. This becomes particularly clear when considering how racial, gender and class relations both impact and are impacted by financial processes in South Africa. We conclude with recommendations for studies of changing financial processes globally and in the global South.

KEYWORDS:

• Global finance
• hierarchy
• anti-disciplinarity
• global South
• South Africa
• imperialism

JEL CODES:

• F3
• O1 A120
• B5

Acknowledgements

This article has benefited greatly from feedback from many colleagues and friends. Since the beginning of the Price of Wealth project back in 2019, which was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, we have received sustained and constructive feedback from participants of the project. We are indebted to Rick McGahey, Teresa Ghilarducci, and Gustav Pebbles for inviting us to be a part of this project and for engaging very constructively and generously with our ideas and various versions of the article from the beginning to the end. Danilyn Rutherford, Donna Auston and Kathryn Derfler from the Wenner-Gren foundation provided academic, logistical and moral support throughout. We are also grateful to our friend Paul Gilbert with whom we had early discussions about the nature and potential of the field of anthropology as a way of enriching economic analysis, but also the drawbacks of anthropology itself and the need to move beyond disciplines. All the workshop participants provided incredibly useful feedback on the article, with a special thanks to Carly Schuster and Isabelle Guérin for giving particularly detailed comments. Last but not least, thanks to the editor and anonymous reviewers of the Review of Political Economy, who provided excellent feedback and helped us polish the article for publication. All errors remain our own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This report argued that World Bank research methodology on finance and development between 1998 and 2005 was excessively focused on cross-country comparisons and cross-country regressions. Furthermore, the report deems such regressions to be useful to illustrate general patterns but points out that they cannot be reliably used for policy conclusions. What’s more, the report considers the link between finance and growth to be ‘too black-boxy’ to provide any practical guidelines for policymakers (Banerjee et al. 2006, p. 111).

2 African men represent about 70 per cent of the semi-skilled and unskilled workers in the mining industry, while white men still hold 60 per cent of top management positions (Department of Labour, 2016, 112).

3 The debate was also spurred by liberal claims that the system of job reservations during apartheid was inimical to economic growth. In opposition to this claim, the radical scholarship produced at the time showed how racial segregation had been and continued to be central to capitalist growth in South Africa (Saunders 1988).

4 An example of mainstream analysis of identities that attempts to go beyond the individual to consider group inequalities is stratification economics (for a review, see Chelwa, Hamilton, and Stewart 2022).While this is an improvement on methodological individualism, the analysis tends to still center on group ‘rationalities’ rather than individual rationalities, thus to some extent remains committed to a rational choice framework.

5 For an important reminder of the South African origins of the term racial capitalism, and its strong political potency, see Peter James Hudson and Jemima Pierre’s editorial in the Black Agenda Report, 16 December 2020, https://www.blackagendareport.com/racial-capitalism-black-liberation-and-south-africa.

6 While social relations is a central term within the anthropological tradition there are many different approaches to how to define the term. For our purposes here we focus on social relations as a complex set of social relationships within a broader societal structure of raced, gendered and classed hierarchies. See for example Baviskar and Ray (2020).