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Abstract
This article confronts the question of what a revitalized financial sector might look like if this were to be reconfigured so as to reproduce first an artisanal-like persona for the financial analyst and craft-like organizational structure for financial businesses, and second if this were to be re-territorialized so that it acted like a partisan rather than, as at present, like a disembedded footloose structure of ‘global finance’. Initially the analysis is pitched at a rather abstract and theoretical level – pulling together artisans, nomads and partisans and tracing their intellectual lineages. But the chapter ends with three very concrete illustrations of actual financial relations in practice that meet some of the criteria for being both artisanal and partisanal.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank participants in that seminar for helpful comments, particularly Robert Boyer. Thanks are also due to Peter Gibbon of DIIS, who suggested the points made in the text about gambling, and to Karel Williams and Mike Pryke of CRESC for several other helpful suggestions on an earlier version. Finally I acknowledge the critical comments of the two referees whose suggestions undoubtedly enabled a clarification of the argument and strengthened its overall coherence. Of course, I remain responsible for any remaining errors.
Notes
1. Disquiet with securities trading strategies is not that new, however. It goes back to at least the early eighteenth century when Daniel Defoe was a stern critic (Defoe Citation1701). In the more modern period Fischer Black extoled the virtues of automated trading for the operationalization of the efficient market hypothesis in the 1970s (Black Citation1971 – see illustration 2 above). And Domowitz (Citation1993) provided an early survey and assessment of the use of computer technologies in financial trading environments.
2. See http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b77f05ec-a8ec-11e0-ab62-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2M2IWLbEg> (accessed 23 February 2013). Of course there is huge controversy over the effects of HFT and nothing is settled. For a report that is more ambiguous than the Financial Times's by-line might indicate see ‘Studies say no link between HFT and volatility’ <http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/38452490-da07-11e0-b199-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1j4CUW4r9> (accessed 23 February 2013). Longer-term assessments (Hendershott et al. Citation2011; Jain Citation2005) are more reassuring, but these are mainly based upon pre-crisis data and come from within the financial orthodoxy. And European regulators remain edgy. The new European Securities and Markets Authority has asked for clarification of trading strategies in a wide-ranging review <http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1126c474-5ed6-11e0-a2d7-00144feab49a.html#axzz2M2IWLbEg> (accessed 23 February 2013). Meanwhile the main industry players have formed a lobby group (under the auspices of the Futures Industry Association) to try to head of regulatory initiatives.
3. In this presentation I run together the notion of the artisan and the craftsman. For a telling analysis of the value of the notion of craftsmanship in relation to modern sociality see Richard Sennett (Citation2009). His analysis is pitched at the societal level, extoling the virtues of craftsmanship as a necessary means for fostering social cooperation. Sennett does not differentiate between craft and artisan; indeed, he does not mention the artisan at all. The sense of artisanship as an organizational category suited in part to a re-invigorated financial system it also discussed below.
4. In part Lenin's antagonism towards the artisan was because craft was associated with a particular form of organization: the Guild. In this article I am not defending this aspect of organizational artisanship, though Guild Socialism was an interesting formulation of the 1920s and 1930s and has acted as one of the precursors for the idea of ‘associationalism’, towards which the analysis here is in part sympathetic, and which could act as a modern organizational framework for thinking about the wider role of artisanship (see Hirst Citation1994; Smith & Teasdale Citation2012).
5. Particularly from the point of view of an academic: much academic activity (teaching, researching and writing) is a form of craft production I would suggest.
6. Sensibilism refers to a body of discursive arrangements and approaches.
7. The necessary element of the imaginary to understanding the nature of sociality is stressed by Castoriadis (Citation1987). In the context of the financial system see Beckert (Citation2011).
8. Will provides the link between an inner mental state and an outward action or conduct. A passion is an enthusiasm. Both of these may be exercised thoughtfully or more momentarily on a whim.
9. As should be clear, this is not exactly the same as the notion of ‘animal spirits’ which remains a strong feature of Keynesian and post-Keynesian analysis of the financial system (Dow and Dow Citation2011; Marchionatti Citation1999).
10. These comments are the result of engagement with the following critical literature dealing with affect: Papoulias and Callard (Citation2010), Leys (Citation2011a, Citation2011b), Connolly (Citation2011), Altieri (Citation2012), Frank and Wilson (Citation2012), Leys (Citation2012) and Rose (Citation2012).
11. This might help illuminate Alan Greenspan's confession over the crisis that: ‘Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief’ (Quoted in Alan Clark and Jill Treanor, ‘Greenspan – I was wrong about the economy. Sort of ’, The Guardian, 24 October 2008). Greenspan later retracted his self-doubt in an ABC TV News interview of April 2010, in which he reaffirmed his faith in Ayn Rand's philosophy of the free market as the embodiment of reason (available at: <http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/interview-alangreenspan-10281612>).
12. This is the site of considerable debate of course, broadly organized around the possible way that the social and the technological can be combined, as in the work of Michel Callon for instance (Callon Citation1998). Indeed, continuing in this tradition, Latour and Lépinay (Citation2009) – taking their cue from Gabriel Tarde's ‘economic anthropology’ – insist that economic calculation is only made possible by the passions so that passionate interests are the handmaiden of economic calculation; there is no separation of the rational from the passionate (or what I have been calling above the ‘irrational’). Clearly this relates to the earlier discussion about the differences/similarities between rationality and emotions. In part this may be a terminological difference, but it also expresses a conceptual one, the contours of which were outlined above. The position in this article is not Tardeian since I am for keeping these two domains conceptually and operationally distinct.
13. ‘Appropriation’ for Schmitt is always something that takes place in respect to the land and territory – seizing it and dividing it. Thus the sea and the sky presented problems for him, which he never fully resolved.
14. Nor strictly speaking a guerrilla, who is potentially everywhere but disguised – hence nowhere.
15. ‘The powerful third party delivers not only weapons and munitions, money, material assistance, and medicines of every description, he offers also the sort of political recognition of which the irregularly fighting partisan is in need, in order to avoid falling like the thief and the pirate into the un-political, which means here the criminal sphere. In the longer view of things the irregular must legitimize itself through the regular, and for this only two possibilities stand open: recognition by an existing regular, or establishment of a new regularity by its own force. This is a tough alternative’ (Schmitt Citation2007, p. 53).
16. Of course, things are always more complicated with D&G. Really, as stressed by Moore (Citation2012), such an artisanal figure distributes space (between the nomad and the sovereign) rather than occupying a fixed position in another space. But then the holey space is exactly that; a sort of non-space.
17. Beunza and Stark's analysis is considerably more subtle than indicated here. They introduce the notion of reflexive modelling to deal with the social entanglements of traders, trading practices and the technical modelling that produce algorithms and their adaptations. Nevertheless, the suggestion here is that this underplays the role of pure automatic HFT in the financial environments discussed above, which represent the leading edge of a new round of systemic riskiness associated with current developments.
18. This relates to the idea of the ‘enterprise entity’ and ‘enterprise analysis’. The characteristics of these are discussed at length in Thompson (Citation2012). Originally posed by Berle and Means in the 1930s, the notion of a company viewed as a definite entity (if not a unity) existing in its own right has fallen into relative decline as a more proprietary conception of the firm emerged. In part this has to do with changes in fashion in the case of organizational theory as discussed above, but also in terms of corporate law which views the firm as a multilayered structure with many subsidiaries and holding arrangements. In addition this is reinforced by the rise of a ‘shareholder rights’ discourse in the business world: financial disbursements to shareholders (‘shareholder value’ extraction) is given an absolute primacy over the maintenance of an ordered internal structure designed for continued organizational and operational reproduction. This is paralleled in many other areas of social analysis, e.g. in terms of the state, where this is also increasingly seen as a disarticulated and fragmented entity made up of many disparate apparatuses of governance and rule, not anymore a single centralised entity (as in post-colonial state formulations in particular – see, for instance, Hansen & Stepputat Citation2002), and further in terms of the nation state, which is also being increasingly considered as having been hollowed out by the forces of globalization. All these conceptions are having the effect of undermining any possibility of the effectiveness of social organizations with capacities to act as such to secure their effective reproduction.
19. Hughes and Lorie show how a remarkably tenacious small team of employees and consultants established the system against considerable technical, organization, social and political obstacles. Safaricom is a Vodafone subsidiary. The principles behind M-Pesa were extended to Eco-Pesa in 2010 (Ruddick Citation2011). This is a B2B framework for payments in impoverished informal settlements (slums) to aid waste collection and disposal and other local ecologically sound community developments.
20. Gradually the Bank has moved into other areas of local business support and more recently into the energy sector, which is becoming a major activity in the State as ‘fracking’ takes hold to release gas deposits.
21. Businesses can also redeem the BP for Sterling but at a 3% discount.
22. The UK has a perhaps surprisingly rich range of corporate forms that could encourage a wider social enterprise agenda: traditional Industrial and Provident Societies; Company Limited by Guarantee; Company Limited by Shares and Community Interest Company, as in the case of the BP. As yet these company forms do not challenge the ubiquity of the traditional limited liability company, either in terms of extent or size, but they provide a mechanism by which social objectives could be pursued and charitable objectives advanced, particularly in the context of the ‘Big Society’ idea currently being popularized by the Coalition Government in the UK (Smith & Teasdale Citation2012).