The material and culture of financialisation

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a framework for understanding the material cultures of financialisation. It does so through a tight definition of financialisation itself (as the spread of interest bearing capital across economic and social reproduction) but also attaches financialisation to broader influences through commodification, commodity form and commodity calculation. These in turn are used to frame the material culture(s) of financialisation through deploying the 10Cs derived from the System of Provision approach: that the material cultures of financialisation are Constructed, Construed, Conforming, Commodified, Contextual, Contradictory, Closed, Contested, Collective and Chaotic. Some emphasis is placed upon the ‘distance’ of financialisation as such from most everyday practices and the systemic lack of knowledge of the financial system however it is represented and experienced.

KEYWORDS:

• Financialisation
• material culture
• system of provision

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ben Fine is Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, holding honorary positions at the Universities of Johannesburg (Senior Research Fellow attached to the South African Research Chair in Social Change) and Rhodes University (Visiting Professor, Institute of Social and Economic Research). His recent books include From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory, awarded the 2009 Gunnar Myrdal Prize, and From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics: The Shifting Boundaries Between Economics and Other Social Sciences, awarded the 2009 Deutscher Prize, both with Dimitris Milonakis, 2009, Routledge; Marx’s Capital, fifth edition, with Alfredo Saad-Filho, sixth edition, 2016, Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly, 2010; as contributing editor, with K. Bayliss and E. Van Waeyenberge, The Political Economy of Development: The World Bank, Neoliberalism and Development Research, 2011; and similarly with J. Saraswati and D. Tavasci, Beyond the Developmental State: Industrial Policy into the 21st Century, 2012, all with Pluto Press; and similarly with Kyung-Sup Chang and Linda Weiss, Developmental Politics in Transition: The Neoliberal Era and Beyond, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. He is Chair of the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy, IIPPE, and is a member of the Social Science Research Committee of the UK’s Food Standards Agency.

Notes

1. See Fine (2013) for a recent account of its origins and evolution and various contributions. See also Bayliss et al. (2013).

2. But see, for example, Isakson (2014).

3. This being drafted during the height of the horse meat scandal!

4. Although the SoP approach has also been applied to public provision, or public sector systems of provision, pssop.

5. See especially Christophers (2013).

6. See Langley (2008: 143) for whom:

instrumental rationality cannot be assumed to be an inherent feature of all modern monetary relations and all manner of financial networks. Rather, what we see are multiple monetary and financial networks in which the appearance of scientific rationality has to be secured and remade in specific forms, and remains contingent, contested, and open to (re)politicization.

From his perspective of financialisation as everyday (performative) life, there are resonances with the 10Cs approach as he ranges across financial inclusion and exclusion, inequality and networks, power, identity and dissent. Unsurprisingly, the implicit and, at times, explicit, presence of the 10Cs is pervasive across the literature.

7. See also Svetlova (2012).

8. On financial literacy, see Santos and Costa (2013), Santos (2017) and Gabor and Brooks (2017), and Fine (1998) for food.

9. See also Engelen et al. (2010) and Dixon and Ville-Pekka (2009) for pension provision as bricolage, and also Dorn (2012) and Thompson (2010). With his retrospective as Governor of the Bank of England replete with references to the importance of ‘radical uncertainty’, King (2016: 123) asks, ‘Why are we so reluctant to accept that the future is outside our control?’ His own analysis is founded on four universals of the human condition, those of disequilibrium, radical uncertainty, cooperation (prisoners’ dilemma) and trust – that might, as opposed to being specific to the second millennium’s financial system, equally be applied to war through to marital breakdown!

10. As Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England. See also Haldane (2009, 2010) and Cornford (2012).

11. This is implicit in his use of metaphors to paint his picture, not only dogs catching frisbees but also sudoku, SARS, and so on (Haldane 2012). See also Davies and McGoey (2012).

12. See Davies and McGoey (2012).

13. For financialisation and the Polanyian pendulum, or not, in the context of financialisation, see Watson (2009) and Konings (2009).

14. For the Bischoff and Wigley Reports, respectively.

15. But see Binderkrantz et al. (2015), who emphasise the increasing coincidence of power across government, media and bureaucracy.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the project Financialization, Economy, Society and Sustainable Development (FESSUD), which is funded by the European Union under Framework Programme 7 (contract number 266800).