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.

Leading scholars from across the social sciences present empirical evidence that the obstacle of regulatory capture is more surmountable than previously thought.

Central banks have become the go-to institution of modern economies. In the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, they injected trillions of dollars of liquidity – through a process known as quantitative easing – first to prevent financial meltdown and later to stimulate the economy. The untold story behind these measures, and behind the changing roles of central banks generally, is that they have come at a considerable cost. Central banks argue we had no choice. This book offers a powerfully original examination of why this claim is false. Using examples from Europe and the US, the authors present and analyse three specific concerns about the way central banks in developed economies operate today. Firstly, they show how unconventional monetary policies have created significant unintended negative consequences in terms of inequalities in income and wealth. They go on to argue that central banks may have become independent of governments, but have instead become worryingly dependent on financial markets. They then proceed to analyse how central bankers, despite being the undisputed experts on monetary policy, can still err and suffer from multiple forms of bias. This book is a sobering and urgent wake-up call for policy-makers and anyone interested in how our monetary and financial system really works.

The consequences of the financial crisis may be uncertain, but are sure to reach deep into the body politic, civil society, welfare systems, and reform. This collection of essays by leading international sociologists and social scientists explores the likely outcomes and consequences

Crises have been studied in many disciplines and from diverse perspectives for at least 150 years. Yet recent decades have seen a marked increase in the crisis literature, reflecting growing awareness of crisis phenomena from the 1970s onwards. Responding to this mainstream literature, this edited collection makes six key innovations. First, it distinguishes between crises as event and crises as process, as well as crises as accidental events or as the result of system-generated processes. Second, it distinguishes crises that can be managed through established crisis-management routines from crises of crisis management. Third, it focuses on the symptomatology of crisis, i.e., the challenge of moving crisis symptoms to understanding underlying causes as a basis for decisive action. Fourth, it goes beyond the cliché that crises are both threat and opportunity by distinguishing valid accounts of the origins and present nature of a crisis, from more speculative accounts of what potentially exists. Fifth, it explores how crises can disorient conventional wisdom, thus provoking efforts to interpret and learn about crises and draw lessons after a crisis has ended. Finally, the sixth element is the move away from the conventional focus on executive authorities and disaster management agencies, instead turning attention towards how other social forces construe crises and attempt to learn from them. Offering important insights into the pedagogy of crisis throughout, this collection will offer excellent reading to both researchers and postgraduate students.

Throughout the Western world, governments and financial elites responded to the financial crisis of 2008 by trying to restore the conditions of business as usual, but the economic, social and human damage inflicted by the crisis has given rise to a reconsideration of the inevitability of unfettered capitalism as a fact of life. A number of economic practices and organizations emerged in Europe and the United States that embodied alternative values: the value of life over the value of money; the effectiveness of cooperation over cut-throat competition; the social responsibility of corporations and responsible regulation by governments over the short-term speculative strategies that brought the economy to the brink of catastrophe. This book examines the blossoming of innovative new experiments in organizing work and life that emerged in the wake of the financial crisis: cooperatives, barter networks, ethical banking, community currencies, shared time banks, solidarity networks, sharing of goods, non-monetary transactions, etc., experiments that paved the way for the emergence of a sharing economy in all domains of activity oriented toward the satisfaction of human needs. Other innovations included the creation of cryptographic virtual currencies, epitomized by bitcoin, which blended a libertarian, entrepreneurial spirit with information technology to provide an alternative to standard forms of currency. On the basis of a cross-cultural analysis of alternative economic practices, this book develops an important theoretical argument: that the economy, as a human practice, is shaped by culture, and that the diversity of cultures, as revealed in a time of crisis, implies the possibility of different economies depending on the values and power relations that define economic institutions. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, economics and the social sciences generally, and to anyone who wishes to understand how our societies and economies are changing today.

For the last decade, progressive scholars determined to understand the 2008 financial crisis have examined the growth of US subprime mortgage debt in the period leading up to the collapse and how government policy supported this accumulation. However, the long history of the subprime crisis, its connection to the patterns of financial risk designated by the postwar international monetary system, has been all too often overlooked. This book explores the long history of the subprime crisis through an original theoretic lens that sheds light on the institutional basis of global debt markets and the role of US Treasury debt in the international financial system.

Recent years have seen contestations of democracy all around the globe. Democracy is challenged as a political as well as a normative term, and as a form of governance. Against the background of neoliberal transformation, populist mobilization, and xenophobic exclusion, but also of radical and emancipatory democratic projects, this collection offers a variety of critical and challenging perspectives on the condition of democracy in the 21st century. The volumes provide theoretical and empirical enquiries into the meaning and practice of liberal democracy, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the consequences for citizenship and everyday lives. With a pronounced focus on national and transnational politics and processes, as well as postcolonial and settler colonial contexts, individual contributions scrutinize the role of democratic societies, ideals, and ideologies of liberal democracy within global power geometries. By employing the multiple meanings of The Condition of Democracy, the collection addresses the preconditions of democratic rule, the state this form of governance is in, and the changing ways in which citizens can (still) act as the sovereign in liberal democratic societies. The books offer both challenging theoretical perspectives and rigorous empirical findings of how to conceive of democracy in our times, which will appeal to academics and students in social and political science, economics, and international relations amongst other fields. The focus on developments in the Middle East and North Africa will furthermore be of great usefulness to academics and the wider public interested in the repercussions of western democracy promotion as well as in contemporary struggles for democratization ‘from below’. During the last 50 years, liberal democracies have been exposed to a fundamental reorganization of their politico-economic structure that transformed them through the impact of neo-liberal economic doctrines focused on low taxation, free markets, and out-sourcing that have little regard in reality for democratic institutions or liberal values. The failures of the neoliberal ‘remedy’ for capitalism are now dramatically obvious through the banking crisis of 2008-2011, the increase in income inequality, the social and psychological damage caused by the austerity packages across Europe, and widespread dependence on experts whose influence over government policies typically goes without public scrutiny. While this has only accelerated the destruction of the social fabric in modern Western societies, the dramatic redistribution of wealth and an open 'politics for the rich' have also revealed the long-time well-covered alliance of the global oligarchy with the Far Right that has the effect of undermining democracy. The contributions to this volume discuss a wide variety of processes of transformation, the social consequences, dedemocratization and illiberalization of once liberal democracies through the destructive impact of neoliberal strategies. These strongly politico-economic contributions are complemented with general sociological analyses of a number of cultural aspects often neglected in analyses of democracy.

This book examines the treatment of culture and development in the discipline of economics, thereby filling a conspicuous gap in current literature. Economics has come a long way to join the ‘cultural turn’ that has swept the humanities and social sciences in the last half century. This volume identifies some of the issues that major philosophies of economics must address to better grasp the cultural complexity of contemporary economies. This book is an extensive survey of the place of culture and development in four theoretical economic perspectives—Neoclassical, Marxian, Institutionalist, and Feminist. Organized in nine chapters with three appendices and a compendium of over 50 interpretations of culture by economists, this book covers vast grounds from classical political economy to contemporary economic thought. The literatures reviewed include original and new institutionalism, cultural economics, postmodern Marxism, economic feminism, and the current culture and development discourse on subjects such as economic growth in East Asia, businesswomen entrepreneurs in West Africa, and comparative development in different parts of Europe. Zein-Elabdin carries the project further by borrowing some of the insights from postcolonial theory to call for a more profound rethinking of the place of culture and of currently devalued cultures in economic theory. This book is of great interest for those who study Economic development, International relations, feminist economics, and Economic geography

How is ‘crisis’, one of the most resonating words in the modern world, related to the mass media? Is crisis independent of the discourse practices of media text and talk? This book is a collection of studies that brings together current research into the ways in which crisis is constructed and communicated in contemporary media discourse. Studies in this book advance our understanding of crises as social events that are discursively constructed, performed, responded to, but also ‘rehearsed’ as a form of social practice. Relying on the application of techniques of discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA), including visual analysis, the book provides a wealth of empirical evidence on how crisis is mediated across a range of written, oral and visual media. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of media, who combine an interest in discourse analysis with disciplines as diverse as media and cultural studies, political communication, and sociology.