Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-w5vf4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-28T22:59:16.146Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

After the boom: Finance and society studies in the 2020s and beyond

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Amin Samman ,
Nina Boy ,
Nathan Coombs ,
Sandy Hager ,
Adam Hayes ,
Emily Rosamond ,
Leon Wansleben  and
Carola Westermeier
Amin Samman*
Affiliation:
City, University of London UK
Nina Boy
Affiliation:
Heidelberg University Germany
Nathan Coombs
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh UK
Sandy Hager
Affiliation:
City, University of London UK
Adam Hayes
Affiliation:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem Israel
Emily Rosamond
Affiliation:
Goldsmiths, University of London UK
Leon Wansleben
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute Cologne Germany
Carola Westermeier
Affiliation:
Goethe University Frankfurt Germany
*
Corresponding author: Amin Samman, Department ofInternational Politics, City, University of London, Northampton Square, London,EC1V 0HB, UK. Email: amin.samman.1@city.ac.uk.
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The crisis of 2008 was a watershed event for the study of finance and society. There was the boom in financial markets that came to a head with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and there was the boom in financial scholarship that followed in its wake. But what comes after this second boom? After more than a decade of rapid expansion under the shadow of 2008, what comes next for the new finance studies? What are the emerging debates that matter most? Where lies the need for further theorisation and for new empirical work? In this editorial, these questions are pursued under three broad headings, each corresponding to an overarching imperative: first, the need to keep a vigilant watch on the core institutions and logics of finance; second, the need to continue expanding and deepening the field; and third, the need to persist with difficult lines of questioning.

Keywords

Social studies of financecritical finance studiespolitical economyeconomic humanitiesfinancialisation

Information

Type
Editorial
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , 2022 , pp. 93 - 109
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2022 The Author(s)

References

Adkins, L., Cooper, M. and Konings, M. (2020) The Asset Economy. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Angeletti, T. and Lemoine, B. (2021) The laws of finance for a sociology of finance and law entanglement. European Journal of Sociology, 62(2): 183–212.Google Scholar
Babic, M., Dixon, A. and Liu, I. (2022) The Political Economy of Geoeconomics: Europe in a Changing World. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Baines, J. and Hager, S.B. (2021) The great debt divergence and its implications for the Covid-19 crisis: Mapping corporate leverage as power. New Political Economy, 26(5): 885–901.Google Scholar
Baucom, I. (2005) Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bay, T. and Schinckus, C. (2012) Critical finance studies: An interdisciplinary manifesto. Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 24(1): 1–6.Google Scholar
Benquet, M. and Bourgeron, T. (2022) Alt-Finance: How the City of London Bought Democracy. London: Pluto.Google Scholar
Bernards, N. and Campbell-Verduyn, M. (2019) Understanding technological change in global finance through infrastructures. Review of International Political Economy, 26(5): 773–89.Google Scholar
Birch, K. and Muniesa, F. (eds.) (2020) Assetization: Turning Things Into Assets In Technoscientific Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Birch, K., Ward, C. and Tretter, E. (2022) Introduction: New frontiers of techno-economic rentiership. Competition & Change, 26(3-4): 407–14.Google Scholar
Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Borch, C. and Wosnitzer, R. (eds.) (2020) The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bowman, A. et al. (2013) Central bank-led capitalism? Seattle University Law Review, 36: 455–87.Google Scholar
Boy, N. (2015) Sovereign safety. Security Dialogue, 46(6): 530–47.Google Scholar
Boy, N. and Gabor, D. (2019) Collateral times. Economy and Society, 48(3): 295–314.Google Scholar
Boy, N., Morris, J. and Santos, M. (2017) Introduction: Taking stock of security and finance. Finance and Society, 3(2): 102–105.Google Scholar
Brandl, B. and Dieterich, L. (2021) The exclusive nature of global payments infrastructures: The significance of major banks and the role of tech-driven companies. Review of International Political Economy, https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2021.2016470.Google Scholar
Braun, B. (2022) Exit, control, and politics: The structural power of finance under asset manager capitalism. Politics & Society, 50(4): 630–54.Google Scholar
Braun, B. and Koddenbrock, K. (eds.) (2022) Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Buller, A. (2022) The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Campbell-Verduyn, M. and Giumelli, F. (2022) Enrolling into exclusion: African blockchain and decolonial ambitions in an evolving finance/security infrastructure. Journal of Cultural Economy, 15(4): 524–43.Google Scholar
Carruthers, B.G. (1996) City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chakravartty, P. and Ferreira da Silva, D. (2012) Accumulation, dispossession, and debt: The racial logic of global capitalism. American Quarterly, 64(3): 361–85.Google Scholar
Christophers, B. (2014) Geographies of finance I: Historical geographies of the crisis-ridden present. Progress in Human Geography, 38(2): 285–93.Google Scholar
Christophers, B. (2020) Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays For It? London: Verso.Google Scholar
Cieslak, A. and Vissing-Jorgensen, A. (2018) The economics of the Fed put. NBER Working Paper Series, No. 26894.Google Scholar
Coombs, N. and Thiemann, M. (2022) Recentering central banks: Theorizing state-economy boundaries as central bank effects. Economy and Society, 51(4): 535–58.Google Scholar
Crosthwaite, P., Knight, P. and Marsh, N. (2019) The economic humanities and the history of financial advice. American Literary History, 31(4): 661–86.Google Scholar
de Goede, M. (2010) Financial security. In: Burgess, J.P. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies. London: Routledge, 112–21.Google Scholar
de Goede, M. (2012) The SWIFT affair and the global politics of European security. Journal of Common Market Studies, 50(2): 214–30.Google Scholar
de Goede, M. (2021) Finance/security infrastructures. Review of International Political Economy, 28(2): 351–68.Google Scholar
de Goede, M. and Westermeier, C. (2022) Infrastructural geopolitics. International Studies Quarterly, 66(3): sqac033.Google Scholar
Desan, C. (2014) Making Money: Coin, Currency and the Coming of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dutta, S., Kremers, R., Pape, F. and Petry, J. (2020) Critical macro-finance: An introduction. Finance and Society, 6(1): 34–44.Google Scholar
Eichengreen, B. (2019) Financial history, historical analysis, and the new history of finance capital. Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, 1(1): 22–23.Google Scholar
Elliott, J. (2022) Punitive futurity and speculative time. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 23(1): 149–64.Google Scholar
Federici, S. (1975) Wages Against Housework. Bristol: Falling Wall Press.Google Scholar
Feher, M. (2009) Self-appreciation; or, the aspirations of human capital. Public Culture, 21(1): 21–41.Google Scholar
Feher, M. (2018) Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Ferguson, S. (2018) Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Fichtner, J. and Heemskerk, E.M. (2020) The new permanent universal owners: Index funds, patient capital, and the distinction between feeble and forceful stewardship. Economy and Society, 49(4): 493–515.Google Scholar
Fichtner, J., Heemskerk, E.M. and Garcia-Bernardo, J. (2017) Hidden power of the Big Three? Passive index funds, re-concentration of corporate ownership, and new financial risk. Business and Politics, 19(2): 298–326.Google Scholar
Forslund, D. and Bay, T. (2009) The eve of critical finance studies. ephemera, 9(4): 285–99.Google Scholar
Foster, J.B. (1999) Marx's theory of metabolic rift: Classical foundations for environmental sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 105(2): 366–405.Google Scholar
Gabor, D. (2016) The (impossible) repo trinity: The political economy of repo markets. Review of International Political Economy, 23(6): 967–1000.Google Scholar
Gabor, D. (2020) Critical macro-finance: A theoretical lens. Finance and Society, 6(1): 45–55.Google Scholar
Geiger, S. (2020) Silicon Valley, disruption, and the end of uncertainty. Journal of Cultural Economy, 13(2): 169–84.Google Scholar
Gruin, J. (2019) Financializing authoritarian capitalism: Chinese fintech and the institutional foundations of algorithmic governance. Finance and Society, 5(2): 84–104.Google Scholar
Gruin, J. and Knaack, P. (2019) Not just another shadow bank: Chinese authoritarian capitalism and the ‘developmental’ promise of digital financial innovation. New Political Economy, 3(2): 1–18.Google Scholar
Hager, S.B. (2016) Public Debt, Inequality and Power: The Making of a Modern Debt State. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hardin, C. (2021) Doing economics otherwise, from one crisis to the next. Journal of Cultural Economy, 14(1): 1–8.Google Scholar
Hayes, A. (2020) The behavioral economics of Pierre Bourdieu. Sociological Theory, 38(1): 16–35.Google Scholar
Hayes, A. and O'Brien, R. (2021) Earmarking risk: Relational investing and portfolio choice. Social Forces, 99(3): 1086–1112.Google Scholar
Hendrikse, R., Bassens, D. and van Meeteren, M. (2018) The Appleization of finance: Charting incumbent finance's embrace of FinTech. Finance and Society, 4(2): 159–80.Google Scholar
Hockett, R.C. and Omarova, S.T. (2015) Public actors in private markets: Toward a developmental finance state. Washington University Law Review, 93(1): 103–75.Google Scholar
Huang, Y. and Mayer, M. (2022) Digital currencies, monetary sovereignty, and U.S.-China power competition. Policy and Internet, 14(2): 324–47.Google Scholar
Hudson, M. (2021) Finance capitalism versus industrial capitalism: The rentier resurgence and takeover. Review of Radical Political Economics, 53(4): 557–73.Google Scholar
Ingham, G.K. (2004) The Nature of Money. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Jain, S. and Gabor, D. (2020) The rise of digital financialisation: The case of India. New Political Economy, 25(5): 813–28.Google Scholar
Jenkins, D. and Leroy, J. (eds.) (2021) Histories of Racial Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Jordà, O., Knoll, K., Kuvshinov, D., Schularick, M. and Taylor, A. (2019) The rate of return on everything, 1870-2015. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(3): 1225–98.Google Scholar
Jordà, O., Schularick, M. and Taylor, A. (2015) Leveraged bubbles. Journal of Monetary Economics, 76.Google Scholar
Jordà, O., Schularick, M. and Taylor, A. (2017) Macrofinancial history and the new business cycle facts. NBER Macroeconomics Annual, 31(1): 213–63.Google Scholar
Kish, Z. and Leroy, J. (2015) Bonded life: Technologies of racial finance from slave insurance to philanthrocapital. Cultural Studies, 29(5-6): 630–51.Google Scholar
Knight, P. (2021) Conspiracy, complicity, critique. Symploke, 29(1-2): 197–215.Google Scholar
Knorr Cetina, K. and Preda, A. (eds.) (2012) The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Komporozos-Athanasiou, A. (2022) Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Konings, M., Adkins, L., McKenzie, M. and Woodman, D. (2022) Dimensions of the asset economy. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 23(1): 1–14.Google Scholar
Lamb, W.F. et al. (2020) Discourses of climate delay. Global Sustainability, 3: e17.Google Scholar
Langley, P. (2020) Assets and assetization in financialized capitalism. Review of International Political Economy, 28(2): 382–93.Google Scholar
Langley, P. and Leyshon, A. (2012) Financial subjects: Culture and materiality. Journal of Cultural Economy, 5(4): 369–73.Google Scholar
Langley, P. and Leyshon, A. (2021) The platform political economy of fintech: Reintermediation, consolidation and capitalisation. New Political Economy, 26(3): 376–88.Google Scholar
Langley, P. and Rodima-Taylor, D. (2022) FinTech in Africa: An editorial introduction. Journal of Cultural Economy, 15(4): 387–400.Google Scholar
Lockwood, E. (2021) The antisemitic backlash to financial power: Conspiracy theory as a response to financial complexity and crisis. New Political Economy, 26(2): 261–70.Google Scholar
MacKenzie, D. (2005) Opening the black boxes of global finance. Review of International Political Economy, 12(4): 555–76.Google Scholar
Mader, P., Mertens, D. and van der Zwan, N. (eds.) (2020) The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
McClanahan, A. (2019) Serious crises: Rethinking the neoliberal subject. boundary 246(1): 103–32.Google Scholar
McGoey, L. (2021) Hiding the rentier elephant in plain sight: The epistemology of vanishing rent. Sociologica, 15(2): 75–93.Google Scholar
Meister, R. (2020) Justice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the Twenty-First Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, T. (1991) The limits of the state: Beyond statist approaches and their critics. American Political Science Review, 85(1): 77–96.Google Scholar
Mollan, S. (2021) Financialization, financial elites, and the changing genres of financial and banking history. Essays in Economic and Business History, 39: 188–205.Google Scholar
Mulder, N. (2022) The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Muniesa, F. (2022) Paranoid finance. Social Research, 89(3): 731–56.Google Scholar
Offer, A. (2017) The market turn: From social democracy to market liberalism. Economic History Review, 70(4): 1051–71.Google Scholar
Palan, R. and Phillips, R. (2022) Arbitrage power and the disappearing financialized firm. Finance and Society, 8(1): 22–41.Google Scholar
Paraná, E. (2019) Digitalized Finance: Financial capitalism and Informational Revolution. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google ScholarPubMed
Pistor, K. (2013) A legal theory of finance. Journal of Comparative Economics, 41(2): 315–30.Google Scholar
Poovey, M. (2008) Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Predmore, S. (2020) Feminist and gender studies approaches to financialization. In: Mader, P., Mertens, D. and van der Zwan, N. (eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization. London: Routledge, 102–12.Google Scholar
Quinn, S.L. (2017) The miracles of bookkeeping: How budget politics link fiscal policies and financial markets. American Journal of Sociology, 123(1): 48–85.Google Scholar
Rabinovich, J. (2019) The financialization of the non-financial corporation: A critique to the financial turn of accumulation hypothesis. Metroeconomica, 70(4): 738–75.Google Scholar
Riles, A. (2010) Collateral expertise: Legal knowledge in the global financial markets. Current Anthropology, 51(6): 795–818.Google Scholar
Robinson, C.J. (1983) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Rosamond, E. (2020) From reputation capital to reputation warfare: Online ratings, trolling, and the logic of volatility. Theory, Culture & Society, 37(2): 105–29.Google Scholar
Rosamond, E. (2021) Derivative character investments: Social impact bonds as path-changing devices. Journal of Cultural Economy, 14(4): 485–97.Google Scholar
Samman, A. (2022) Eternal return on capital: Nihilistic repetition in the asset economy. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 23(1): 165–81.Google Scholar
Samman, A., Coombs, N. and Cameron, A. (2015) For a post-disciplinary study of finance and society. Finance and Society, 1(1): 1–5.Google Scholar
Samman, A. and Gammon, E. (eds.) (2023) Clickbait Capitalism: Economies of Desire in the Twenty-First Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Samman, A. and Sgambati, S. (2022) Financial eschatology and the libidinal economy of leverage. Theory, Culture & Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211070805.Google Scholar
Schwan, M., Trampusch, C. and Fastenrath, F. (2021) Financialization of, not by the state: Exploring changes in the management of public debt and assets across Europe. Review of International Political Economy, 28(4): 820–42.Google Scholar
Schwartz, H.M. (2021) Mo'patents, Mo'problems: Corporate strategy, structure, and profitability in America's political economy. In: Hacker, J.S., Hertel-Fernandez, A., Pierson, P. and Thelen, K. (eds.) The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 247–69.Google Scholar
Schwartz, H.M. (2022) What's missing when we think about Global Political Economy? Global Political Economy, 1(1): 155–72.Google Scholar
Speth, J.G. (2021) They Knew: The Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Spiegel, S.J. (2021) Climate injustice, criminalisation of land protection and anti-colonial solidarity: Courtroom ethnography in an age of fossil fuel violence. Political Geography, 84: 102298.Google Scholar
Strange, S. (1991) An eclectic approach. In: Tooze, R. and Murphy, C.N. (eds.) The New International Political Economy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 33–50.Google Scholar
Streeck, W. (2014) Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Tooze, A. (2018) Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
United Nations (2021) IPCC report: ‘Code red’ for human driven global heating, warns UN chief. UN News, 9 August.Google Scholar
van Riet, A. (Forthcoming) European financial law and the state-finance nexus: Sovereign privileges or market discipline for safe public debt? Finance and Society.Google Scholar
Vettese, T. (2018) To freeze the Thames. New Left Review, 111(May-June): 63–86.Google Scholar
Vogl, J. (2022) Capital and Ressentiment: A Short Theory of the Present. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Wansleben, L. (2020) Formal institution building in financialized capitalism: The case of repo markets. Theory and Society, 49(2): 187–213.Google Scholar
Wansleben, L. (forthcoming) Opaque social contracts: Fiscal sociology in the age of financial security states. MPIfG Discussion Paper Series, Cologne.Google Scholar
Waters, A. (2020) Will neoliberal capitalism survive the coronavirus crash or is this the beginning of techno-feudalism? Journal of Australian Political Economy, 86: 406–31.Google Scholar
Westermeier, C. (2019) Political security and finance: A post-crisis and post-disciplinary perspective. Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 29: 105–22.Google Scholar
Westermeier, C. (2020) Money is data: The platformization of financial transactions. Information, Communication and Society, 23(14): 2047–63.Google Scholar
Woodmansee, M. and Osteen, M. (eds.) (1999) The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wullweber, J. (2021) Zentralbankkapitalismus [Central Bank Capitalism]. Berlin: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Yusoff, K. (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar