French
Biographic Data
| ID | 17135 |
|---|---|
| NAME | French |
| FAMILY NAME | French |
| SIGNATURE | FRENCH |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6139-8070 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 795 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1932 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
“They are moving more national, that is a big problem”: Third sector mergers and acquisitions in English social housing
Despite a growing body of research concerned with the geographies of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the global economy, limited knowledge exists around their role in reshaping the third sector. Following decades of financialization, neoliberalism and austerity, England’s social housing sector presents an important opportunity to address this gap through a recent rise in M&A activity among housing associations, the country’s main form of socia…
Exploring the spatial composition of UK social housing
This paper explores the potentials and challenges of organising in (and at times against-and-beyond) social housing. Drawing on extended research across the UK with a range of tenants, activists, and housing staff we illustrate the need for fine-grained and spatially attuned analysis. In particular we adopt an autonomist Marxist ‘spatial composition analysis’, arguing that this approach is ideally placed to examine social housing struggles. We sh…
House and contents underinsurance: Insights from bushfire-prone Australia
Actually existing racial capitalism: Financialisation and bordering in UK housing associations
This paper provides a critical intervention into recent geographical debates on racial capitalism, interrogating the role that Housing Associations (HAs), the main form of UK social housing, play in its (re)production. Housing Associations are institutional, third-sector spaces within which novel forms of financialisation and bordering take place. Race is central to these processes, but insufficient critical attention has been afforded to the int…
Variegated intersections of neoliberalism and financialization
Speculating on Careless Lives: Annuitising the Biofinancial Subject
This paper is concerned with biofinancialisation; that is, with the ways in which contemporary processes of financialisation and biopolitics intermesh and interpolate. While the significance of the relation between the bios and circuits of finance has begun to be recognised, biofinancialisation remains little interrogated. In seeking to address this lacuna, the paper focuses on the recent transformation of the UK after-retirement market and, in p…
The Power of Definition: Brazil's Contribution to Universal Concepts of Indigeneity
This article builds on discussions about the potential benefits and difficulties with developing a universal definition of indigenous peoples. It explores the spaces made available for theorizing indigeneity by the lack of a definition in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007. Specifically, this article addresses the challenge presented by the diversity of groups claiming indigenous status in Brazil. …
Financializing space, spacing financialization
The paper develops a sympathetic geographical critique of the concept of financialization which seeks to account for the growing influence of financial markets over the unfolding of economy, polity and society. Processes of financialization are claimed to be manifest at a number of scales, from higher levels of instability within the economy as a whole, through pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets, to the equity effects of the fina…
The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation
In The Horrible Gift of Freedom, the cultural critic Marcus Wood channels the antiracist, anti-imperialist spirit of Frantz Fanon to expose, mock, deconstruct, and destabilize “the visual propaganda that narrativized the memory of abolition” from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century emancipation iconography through commemorative activities surrounding Britain's 2007 bicentennial of the Slave Trade Abolition Act (p. 13). In the opening ch…
Commentary
A very geographical crisis: The making and breaking of the 2007-2008 financial crisis
The paper argues that the origins of the financial crisis of 2007--2008 can ultimately be located in four spaces: in international financial centres, in particular, in the longstanding competition that has existed between London and New York; in the insularity of the everyday geographies of money that have emerged in such centres in the wake of the apparent hegemony of financialization; in the geographical recycling of surpluses and deficits and,…
We All Live in a Robbie Fowler House’: The Geographies of the Buy to Let Market in the UK
The buy to let market, produced through the re-regulation of the private rented market in the late 1980s and the promotion of a new mortgage product by the Association of Residential Letting Agents and private sector lenders in the 1990s, accounted for 12 per cent of all UK mortgage lending by 2007. Buy to let is popularly understood as a vehicle for speculative investment and as a means for securing long-term financial security through capital g…
Excessive Financialisation: Insuring Lifestyles, Enlivening Subjects, and Everyday Spaces of Biosocial Excess
The last two decades have witnessed, as part of a wider financialisation of British economy and society, a creeping privatisation of social welfare provision. Political justification for the expansion of privatised social insurance markets has frequently been couched in the language of responsibility. However, as the 'credit crunch' spectacularly attests and as studies of the dynamics of financialisation have succeeded in showing, financialised c…
All Gone Now”: The Material, Discursive and Political Erasure of Bank and Building Society Branches in Britain
This paper examines an apparent anomaly that lies at the heart of processes of financial exclusion within Britain. Given that the branch networks of banks and building societies have shrunk in size by about one‐third since 1989, a period during which the Government has launched a wide‐ranging set of policies to tackle financial exclusion, why is it that the issue of branch closure has been neutralised as a political issue? After providing evidenc…
Financial exclusion and the geography of bank and building society branch closure in Britain
Financial exclusion refers to those processes by which individuals and households face difficulties in accessing financial services. Economic geography was an important catalyst in developing research into processes of financial exclusion in the 1990s, focusing initially on the geographies of physical access. This research was motivated by a concern with the equity effects of financial systems, and identifying a general process of branch closure …
On the reproduction of the musical economy after the Internet
The focus of this article is a crisis of reproduction that beset the contemporary popular music industry from the late 1990s onwards. In the early 21st century the music industry began to suffer from declining sales, negative growth and financial losses. Explanations internal to the music industry identified the cause of the crisis as the rise of Internet piracy, although the emergence of software formats, such as MP3, and Internet distribution s…
Accounting for e-commerce: Abstractions, Virtualism and the Cultural Circuit of Capital
This paper considers the phenomenon of e-commerce as an achievement of serial acts of representation and re-representation. Drawing upon the concepts of virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital, we attempt to demonstrate the material consequences of economic abstractions. The paper looks at the constitutive role of virtualism within the development of a domain called e-commerce. Mobilized by a heterodox group of actors, including academics,…
Innovation and Social Learning: Institutional Adaptation in an Era of Technological Change
Journal Article Innovation and Social Learning: Institutional Adaptation in an Era of Technological Change Get access Shaun French Shaun French School of Geography, University of Nottingham, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Economic Geography, Volume 4, Issue 2, April 2004, Pages 219–220, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/4.2.219 Published: 01 April 2004
The new, new financial system? Towards a conceptualization of financial reintermediation
This paper attempts to develop a conceptual framework for analysing the impacts of the Internet and e-commerce upon industrial sectors. While a great deal has been written about the so-called ‘new economy’ much of it has been either speculative and hyperbolic, as in the ‘boom’ years of the late 1990s, or cynical and dismissive, as in the period since the collapse of ‘dot.com’ stocks in Spring 2000. We seek to move beyond and between these positio…
The automatic production of space
This paper is concerned with the changing nature of space. More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear. This paper is an attempt to map out this background. The paper begins by considering the nature of software. Subsequently, a simple audit is undertaken of where software is chie…
Gamekeepers and Gamekeeping: Assuring Bristol's Place within Life Underwriting
In this paper I report on research which traces out the fields-of-learning of underwriters working in the life assurance industry in Bristol. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, the financial services sector in Bristol, like that of many regional financial centres in the United Kingdom, grew significantly. Of particular note has been the local expansion, through relocation and new firm formation, of the life assurance industry. I arg…
Re-scaling the economic geography of knowledge and information: Constructing life assurance markets
The Evolution of the Law of Property: Property in after-War Constitutions
Financializing space, spacing financialization
The paper develops a sympathetic geographical critique of the concept of financialization which seeks to account for the growing influence of financial markets over the unfolding of economy, polity and society. Processes of financialization are claimed to be manifest at a number of scales, from higher levels of instability within the economy as a whole, through pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets, to the equity effects of the fina…
The automatic production of space
This paper is concerned with the changing nature of space. More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear. This paper is an attempt to map out this background. The paper begins by considering the nature of software. Subsequently, a simple audit is undertaken of where software is chie…
Excessive Financialisation: Insuring Lifestyles, Enlivening Subjects, and Everyday Spaces of Biosocial Excess
The last two decades have witnessed, as part of a wider financialisation of British economy and society, a creeping privatisation of social welfare provision. Political justification for the expansion of privatised social insurance markets has frequently been couched in the language of responsibility. However, as the 'credit crunch' spectacularly attests and as studies of the dynamics of financialisation have succeeded in showing, financialised c…
A very geographical crisis: The making and breaking of the 2007-2008 financial crisis
The paper argues that the origins of the financial crisis of 2007--2008 can ultimately be located in four spaces: in international financial centres, in particular, in the longstanding competition that has existed between London and New York; in the insularity of the everyday geographies of money that have emerged in such centres in the wake of the apparent hegemony of financialization; in the geographical recycling of surpluses and deficits and,…
We All Live in a Robbie Fowler House’: The Geographies of the Buy to Let Market in the UK
The buy to let market, produced through the re-regulation of the private rented market in the late 1980s and the promotion of a new mortgage product by the Association of Residential Letting Agents and private sector lenders in the 1990s, accounted for 12 per cent of all UK mortgage lending by 2007. Buy to let is popularly understood as a vehicle for speculative investment and as a means for securing long-term financial security through capital g…
Financial exclusion and the geography of bank and building society branch closure in Britain
Financial exclusion refers to those processes by which individuals and households face difficulties in accessing financial services. Economic geography was an important catalyst in developing research into processes of financial exclusion in the 1990s, focusing initially on the geographies of physical access. This research was motivated by a concern with the equity effects of financial systems, and identifying a general process of branch closure …
The new, new financial system? Towards a conceptualization of financial reintermediation
This paper attempts to develop a conceptual framework for analysing the impacts of the Internet and e-commerce upon industrial sectors. While a great deal has been written about the so-called ‘new economy’ much of it has been either speculative and hyperbolic, as in the ‘boom’ years of the late 1990s, or cynical and dismissive, as in the period since the collapse of ‘dot.com’ stocks in Spring 2000. We seek to move beyond and between these positio…
On the reproduction of the musical economy after the Internet
The focus of this article is a crisis of reproduction that beset the contemporary popular music industry from the late 1990s onwards. In the early 21st century the music industry began to suffer from declining sales, negative growth and financial losses. Explanations internal to the music industry identified the cause of the crisis as the rise of Internet piracy, although the emergence of software formats, such as MP3, and Internet distribution s…
Accounting for e-commerce: Abstractions, Virtualism and the Cultural Circuit of Capital
This paper considers the phenomenon of e-commerce as an achievement of serial acts of representation and re-representation. Drawing upon the concepts of virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital, we attempt to demonstrate the material consequences of economic abstractions. The paper looks at the constitutive role of virtualism within the development of a domain called e-commerce. Mobilized by a heterodox group of actors, including academics,…
Re-scaling the economic geography of knowledge and information: Constructing life assurance markets
Speculating on Careless Lives: Annuitising the Biofinancial Subject
This paper is concerned with biofinancialisation; that is, with the ways in which contemporary processes of financialisation and biopolitics intermesh and interpolate. While the significance of the relation between the bios and circuits of finance has begun to be recognised, biofinancialisation remains little interrogated. In seeking to address this lacuna, the paper focuses on the recent transformation of the UK after-retirement market and, in p…
Commentary
All Gone Now”: The Material, Discursive and Political Erasure of Bank and Building Society Branches in Britain
This paper examines an apparent anomaly that lies at the heart of processes of financial exclusion within Britain. Given that the branch networks of banks and building societies have shrunk in size by about one‐third since 1989, a period during which the Government has launched a wide‐ranging set of policies to tackle financial exclusion, why is it that the issue of branch closure has been neutralised as a political issue? After providing evidenc…
Actually existing racial capitalism: Financialisation and bordering in UK housing associations
This paper provides a critical intervention into recent geographical debates on racial capitalism, interrogating the role that Housing Associations (HAs), the main form of UK social housing, play in its (re)production. Housing Associations are institutional, third-sector spaces within which novel forms of financialisation and bordering take place. Race is central to these processes, but insufficient critical attention has been afforded to the int…
The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation
In The Horrible Gift of Freedom, the cultural critic Marcus Wood channels the antiracist, anti-imperialist spirit of Frantz Fanon to expose, mock, deconstruct, and destabilize “the visual propaganda that narrativized the memory of abolition” from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century emancipation iconography through commemorative activities surrounding Britain's 2007 bicentennial of the Slave Trade Abolition Act (p. 13). In the opening ch…
Gamekeepers and Gamekeeping: Assuring Bristol's Place within Life Underwriting
In this paper I report on research which traces out the fields-of-learning of underwriters working in the life assurance industry in Bristol. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, the financial services sector in Bristol, like that of many regional financial centres in the United Kingdom, grew significantly. Of particular note has been the local expansion, through relocation and new firm formation, of the life assurance industry. I arg…
The Power of Definition: Brazil's Contribution to Universal Concepts of Indigeneity
This article builds on discussions about the potential benefits and difficulties with developing a universal definition of indigenous peoples. It explores the spaces made available for theorizing indigeneity by the lack of a definition in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007. Specifically, this article addresses the challenge presented by the diversity of groups claiming indigenous status in Brazil. …
Variegated intersections of neoliberalism and financialization
The Evolution of the Law of Property: Property in after-War Constitutions
Re-scaling the economic geography of knowledge and information: Constructing life assurance markets
The automatic production of space
This paper is concerned with the changing nature of space. More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear. This paper is an attempt to map out this background. The paper begins by considering the nature of software. Subsequently, a simple audit is undertaken of where software is chie…
Gamekeepers and Gamekeeping: Assuring Bristol's Place within Life Underwriting
In this paper I report on research which traces out the fields-of-learning of underwriters working in the life assurance industry in Bristol. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, the financial services sector in Bristol, like that of many regional financial centres in the United Kingdom, grew significantly. Of particular note has been the local expansion, through relocation and new firm formation, of the life assurance industry. I arg…
Innovation and Social Learning: Institutional Adaptation in an Era of Technological Change
Journal Article Innovation and Social Learning: Institutional Adaptation in an Era of Technological Change Get access Shaun French Shaun French School of Geography, University of Nottingham, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Economic Geography, Volume 4, Issue 2, April 2004, Pages 219–220, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/4.2.219 Published: 01 April 2004
The new, new financial system? Towards a conceptualization of financial reintermediation
This paper attempts to develop a conceptual framework for analysing the impacts of the Internet and e-commerce upon industrial sectors. While a great deal has been written about the so-called ‘new economy’ much of it has been either speculative and hyperbolic, as in the ‘boom’ years of the late 1990s, or cynical and dismissive, as in the period since the collapse of ‘dot.com’ stocks in Spring 2000. We seek to move beyond and between these positio…
On the reproduction of the musical economy after the Internet
The focus of this article is a crisis of reproduction that beset the contemporary popular music industry from the late 1990s onwards. In the early 21st century the music industry began to suffer from declining sales, negative growth and financial losses. Explanations internal to the music industry identified the cause of the crisis as the rise of Internet piracy, although the emergence of software formats, such as MP3, and Internet distribution s…
Accounting for e-commerce: Abstractions, Virtualism and the Cultural Circuit of Capital
This paper considers the phenomenon of e-commerce as an achievement of serial acts of representation and re-representation. Drawing upon the concepts of virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital, we attempt to demonstrate the material consequences of economic abstractions. The paper looks at the constitutive role of virtualism within the development of a domain called e-commerce. Mobilized by a heterodox group of actors, including academics,…
All Gone Now”: The Material, Discursive and Political Erasure of Bank and Building Society Branches in Britain
This paper examines an apparent anomaly that lies at the heart of processes of financial exclusion within Britain. Given that the branch networks of banks and building societies have shrunk in size by about one‐third since 1989, a period during which the Government has launched a wide‐ranging set of policies to tackle financial exclusion, why is it that the issue of branch closure has been neutralised as a political issue? After providing evidenc…
Financial exclusion and the geography of bank and building society branch closure in Britain
Financial exclusion refers to those processes by which individuals and households face difficulties in accessing financial services. Economic geography was an important catalyst in developing research into processes of financial exclusion in the 1990s, focusing initially on the geographies of physical access. This research was motivated by a concern with the equity effects of financial systems, and identifying a general process of branch closure …
A very geographical crisis: The making and breaking of the 2007-2008 financial crisis
The paper argues that the origins of the financial crisis of 2007--2008 can ultimately be located in four spaces: in international financial centres, in particular, in the longstanding competition that has existed between London and New York; in the insularity of the everyday geographies of money that have emerged in such centres in the wake of the apparent hegemony of financialization; in the geographical recycling of surpluses and deficits and,…
We All Live in a Robbie Fowler House’: The Geographies of the Buy to Let Market in the UK
The buy to let market, produced through the re-regulation of the private rented market in the late 1980s and the promotion of a new mortgage product by the Association of Residential Letting Agents and private sector lenders in the 1990s, accounted for 12 per cent of all UK mortgage lending by 2007. Buy to let is popularly understood as a vehicle for speculative investment and as a means for securing long-term financial security through capital g…
Excessive Financialisation: Insuring Lifestyles, Enlivening Subjects, and Everyday Spaces of Biosocial Excess
The last two decades have witnessed, as part of a wider financialisation of British economy and society, a creeping privatisation of social welfare provision. Political justification for the expansion of privatised social insurance markets has frequently been couched in the language of responsibility. However, as the 'credit crunch' spectacularly attests and as studies of the dynamics of financialisation have succeeded in showing, financialised c…
Commentary
The Power of Definition: Brazil's Contribution to Universal Concepts of Indigeneity
This article builds on discussions about the potential benefits and difficulties with developing a universal definition of indigenous peoples. It explores the spaces made available for theorizing indigeneity by the lack of a definition in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007. Specifically, this article addresses the challenge presented by the diversity of groups claiming indigenous status in Brazil. …
Financializing space, spacing financialization
The paper develops a sympathetic geographical critique of the concept of financialization which seeks to account for the growing influence of financial markets over the unfolding of economy, polity and society. Processes of financialization are claimed to be manifest at a number of scales, from higher levels of instability within the economy as a whole, through pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets, to the equity effects of the fina…
The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation
In The Horrible Gift of Freedom, the cultural critic Marcus Wood channels the antiracist, anti-imperialist spirit of Frantz Fanon to expose, mock, deconstruct, and destabilize “the visual propaganda that narrativized the memory of abolition” from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century emancipation iconography through commemorative activities surrounding Britain's 2007 bicentennial of the Slave Trade Abolition Act (p. 13). In the opening ch…
Speculating on Careless Lives: Annuitising the Biofinancial Subject
This paper is concerned with biofinancialisation; that is, with the ways in which contemporary processes of financialisation and biopolitics intermesh and interpolate. While the significance of the relation between the bios and circuits of finance has begun to be recognised, biofinancialisation remains little interrogated. In seeking to address this lacuna, the paper focuses on the recent transformation of the UK after-retirement market and, in p…
House and contents underinsurance: Insights from bushfire-prone Australia
Actually existing racial capitalism: Financialisation and bordering in UK housing associations
This paper provides a critical intervention into recent geographical debates on racial capitalism, interrogating the role that Housing Associations (HAs), the main form of UK social housing, play in its (re)production. Housing Associations are institutional, third-sector spaces within which novel forms of financialisation and bordering take place. Race is central to these processes, but insufficient critical attention has been afforded to the int…
Variegated intersections of neoliberalism and financialization
Exploring the spatial composition of UK social housing
This paper explores the potentials and challenges of organising in (and at times against-and-beyond) social housing. Drawing on extended research across the UK with a range of tenants, activists, and housing staff we illustrate the need for fine-grained and spatially attuned analysis. In particular we adopt an autonomist Marxist ‘spatial composition analysis’, arguing that this approach is ideally placed to examine social housing struggles. We sh…
“They are moving more national, that is a big problem”: Third sector mergers and acquisitions in English social housing
Despite a growing body of research concerned with the geographies of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the global economy, limited knowledge exists around their role in reshaping the third sector. Following decades of financialization, neoliberalism and austerity, England’s social housing sector presents an important opportunity to address this gap through a recent rise in M&A activity among housing associations, the country’s main form of socia…
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (15 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (14 works) · Economics (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Political economy (5 works)