Estudios de la Economía

From the CPPE Blog: Call for Papers for Financialization and its Limits: History, Context, Culture, a stream at the Critical Management Studies conference, 2013

Any discussion of the limits of neoliberalism would be incomplete with consideration of the roles of finance and financialization (Amato and Fantacci 2012). But, research within the social sciences of management, finance and, to a lesser extent, accounting has treated finance as standing apart from other disciplines. This has led to consideration of financialization as a unilateral process: that finance acts upon society as if it were wholly external and self-evident. This is, in part, derived from a particular conception of finance as a purely mathematical/quantitative field, although this formulation is relatively recent, emerging only in the 1960s with the so-called New Finance. As a result, financialization, as it is understood today (Johal et al. 2006), masks, in effect, a process that is fundamentally emergent and therefore incomplete (Poovey 1998). In particular, valuation, which lies at the heart of finance, is routinely presented as an objective, unproblematic practice. Yet, we argue, valuation is always political, as it selects a single expression of value, excluding all possible alternatives (Martin 2002) and thus circumscribing the field of possibilities. This might be no problem whilst it remains within sterile models, but once the social and political acts of valuation interact with lifeworlds that have not been redacted to the same extent, the collision is always unpredictable and potentially violent.

We invite papers that explore these issues, possibly touching upon the following themes: Continue reading →