1st Edition
Financial Cultures and Crisis Dynamics
The recent financial crisis exposed both a naïve faith in mathematical models to manage risk and a crude culture of greed that embraces risk. This book explores cultures of finance in sites such as corporate governance, hedge funds, central banks, the City of London and Wall Street, and small and medium enterprises. It uses different methods to explore these cultures and their interaction with different financial orders to improve our understanding of financial crisis dynamics.
The introduction identifies types of cultural turn in studies of finance. Part I outlines relevant research methods, including comparison of national cultures viewed as independent variables, cultural political economy, and critical discourse and narrative policy analysis. Part II examines different institutional cultures of finance and the cult of entrepreneurship. Part III offers historical, comparative, and contemporary analyses of financial regimes and their significance for crisis dynamics. Part IV explores organizational cultures, modes of calculation, and financial practices and how they shape economic performance and guide crisis management. Part V considers crisis construals and responses in the European Union and China.
This book’s great strength is its multi-faceted approach to cultures of finance. Contributors deploy the cultural turn creatively to enhance comparative and historical analysis of financial regimes, institutions, organizations, and practices as well as their roles in crisis generation, construal, and management. Developing different paradigms and methods and elaborating diverse case studies, the authors illustrate not only how and why ‘culture matters’ but also how its significance is shaped by different financial regimes and contexts.
Introduction Part I: Researching Cultures of Finance: theoretical foundations and methods 1. Sense- and meaning-making in the critique of political economy (Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop) 2. A Grid-Group Theory Approach to Cultures of Financial Markets (Eelke de Jong) 3. Economic imaginaries, corpus linguistics and the narrative turn: making sense of financial crisis (Amelie Kutter and Bob Jessop (with Michael Farelly)) Part II: Cultures of Finance 4. Contingency and the ‘Cultural’ and the ‘Social’ in Finance (Oliver Kessler) 5. Financialisation, statecraft and regulation of the entrepreneurial subject (Charlie Dannreuther) 6. Cultures of Finance, Booms and Busts (Raphäelle Chappell, Edward Nell, and Willi Semmler) Part III: Cultural Factors in Financial Crisis Generation 7. Finance and Financialization in Varieties of Capitalism (Christoph Scherrer (with Stefan Beck)) 8. Financial Crisis: Its Causes, Policy Responses and Future Challenges (Brigitte Young) 9. Competitive concerns and imaginaries in the making of European finance (Daniel Mügge) Part IV: Financial Calculation, Fictitious Capital, and Crisis Dynamics 10. Hedge funds and the Limits of Market Efficiency as a Regulatory Concept (Horacio Ortiz) 11. From finanza derivata to derivatives finance – how and why Italian municipalities got high on interest rate swaps (Andrea Lagna) Part V: Crisis Construals and Responses to Financial Crisis 12. How to exit unconventional monetary policies: a return to the Great Moderation model of central banking? (Daniela Gabor) 13. Will they ever Learn? Understanding Stability and Change in EU Leaders’ Policy beliefs during the Euro Crisis (Femke van Esch and Eelke de Jong) 14. Crisis construals and the Power of Construal (Deutungsmacht) in the EU crisis (Mathis Heinrich and Bob Jessop) 15. A Cultural Political Economy of Financial Imaginaries: ‘BRIC’ and the Case of China Crisis (Ngai-Ling Sum) Conclusions: The Cultural Turn in the Critique of Finance, Financialization, and Financial Crises
Biography
Bob Jessop is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Lancaster University, UK.
Brigitte Young is Professor for International Political Economy at the Institute of Political Science, University of Münster, Germany.
Christoph Scherrer is Professor for Political Science and Director at the International Centre for Development and Decent Work, University of Kassel, Germany.
