The Global Financial Crisis and the Culture of Continual Growth

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2181272
AutoresFiona Allon (0000-0003-1932-1464, Association for Language Learning, autor de correspondencia), Guy Redden (0000-0003-3088-0881)
Año2012
Volumen5
Número4
Páginas375-390
Fecha de publicación2012-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Cultural Economy (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1753-0350 • E-ISSN: 1753-0369
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17530350.2012.703143
OpenAlexW2093060480
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas19
Referencias citadas42

The proximate causes of the global financial crisis (GFC) have been widely attributed to ‘financialisation’. However, we argue that the global financial crisis had cultural conditions of possibility that were imbricated with economic factors in complex ways. The idea that the crisis was the function of independent financial forces that spread through society fails to consider cultural rationalities that constituted the citizen as someone enjoined to improve their lives through consumption and speculative personal investment. The message that continual economic growth was both possible and the grounds for personal growth was normalised in the public sphere, reinforced by political spruiking and pervasive lifestyle media. But do we have the disciplinary resources to take cultural factors in the crisis seriously? A greater attention to culture and materiality, including the cultures of finance and markets, does not mean simply regarding ‘culture’ as the context in which markets take place: it involves examining the fashioning of financial identities and everyday consumption practices in arenas that are cultural as much as they are economic. This also includes addressing the complexities of financial subjects for whom the pursuit of life security and private wealth accumulation (through home ownership, property investment and equity withdrawal, for example) is increasingly dependent on debt and underpinned by greater levels of risk and insecurity

Capitalism · Consumption (sociology · Context (archaeology · Debt · Economics · Equity (law · Financial crisis · Financial market · Financial system · Financialization · Market economy · Materiality (auditing · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Finance