Adam Leaver
Biographic Data
| ID | 85608 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adam Leaver |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adam |
| FAMILY NAME | Leaver |
| SIGNATURE | LEAVER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6199-6057 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 342 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
When the Abu Dhabi United Group Came to Town: Constructing an Organisational Fix for State Capitalism through the Manchester Life Partnership
For many cities, the entry of financial actors into housing opens new geopolitical relations with overseas entities, including state‐backed investors such as sovereign wealth funds. These transformations raise the question of the extent to which real estate enables the urbanisation of state capitalism, understood as the expansion of the state's role as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital. Our paper answers this question through an analysis…
How financial products organize spatial networks: "Analyzing collateralized debt obligations and collateralized loan obligations as "networked products
During the 2010s, collateralized loan obligations rapidly became a trillion-dollar industry, mirroring the growth profile and peak value of its cousin-collateralized debt obligations-in the 2000s. Yet, despite similarities in product form and growth trajectory, surprisingly little is known about how these markets evolved spatially and relationally. This paper fills that knowledge gap by asking two questions: how did each network adapt to achieve …
The changing spatial arrangements of global finance: Financial, social and legal infrastructures
The spatial arrangements of global finance have changed significantly over the last 30 years, entangling new actors, relations and sites. Infrastructures have developed to stabilize change and complexity. The collection advocates for a broader understanding of infrastructures that includes - but moves beyond - supporting technologies of Bloomberg terminals, telephony, and high-speed cabling. In particular, it highlights other infrastructural form…
From homes to assets: Transcalar territorial networks and the financialization of build to rent in Greater Manchester
Over the last decade, Greater Manchester's city-regional centre has become an important site for build to rent (BTR) housing development in the UK. The growth of this new tenure raises important empirical and conceptual questions about how far and through what means BTR has extended in post-industrial cities like Manchester, as well as how to theorise the global-local relations involved in BTR development. Drawing on a self-built database of 155 …
Finance as 'bizarre bazaar: Using documents as a source of ethnographic knowledge
Markets and finance have long attracted ethnographic interest but the nature of their activity - opaque, secretive and increasingly placeless - precludes traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we propose documents as an alternative access point to these organisations as an ethnographic object of enquiry. Documents do not only present a written record, but they also enact relationships and encode tacit understandings. We develop Geer…
Creating and dissolving social groups from New Guinea to New York: On the Overheating of Bounded Corporate Entities in Contemporary Global Capitalism
Attempts to create and fix the boundaries of various social entities have always been central features of modern capitalism. Such entities have always had the potential for either instability, on the one hand, or a lack of flexibility that is experienced by many as threatening, on the other. Such tensions have reached a point of intensification with the overheating of contemporary global capitalism. In this paper, we compare two examples of the c…
What a Waste: Outsourcing and How it Goes Wrong
This is the first ever book to analyse outsourcing – contracting out public services to private business interests. It is an unacknowledged revolution in the British economy, and it has happened quietly, but it is creating powerful new corporate interests, transforming the organisation of government at all levels, and is simultaneously enriching a new business elite and creating numerous fiascos in the delivery of public services. What links the …
Fuzzy knowledge: An Historical Exploration of Moral Hazard and Its Variability
This paper revisits Baker's historical work on moral hazard, which argues that Pauly's 1968 intervention represents a clear break in an otherwise linear history of the term. For Baker, Pauly redefined moral hazard fundamentally, shifting the term from an insurance industry definition which centred on character and temptation to an economics definition that emphasized maximizing agents and incentives. This paper takes issue with that assessment an…
Unsustainable employment portfolios
This Debates and Controversies contribution introduces the notion of an employment portfolio to explore how economies create combinations of employment. It is not simply the number of jobs but the factor share distributed to labour and the sectoral mix and composition that matter. Three case studies of employment portfolio (Australia, California and the UK) are used to show how previous attempts at structural reform failed to deliver sustainable …
(How) Do Devices Matter in Finance
This article distinguishes between different concepts of device. In traditional English usage, as in the Foucauldian or Deleuzian concept, devices exist in a context of power, opportunism and force. Through argument and evidence about hedge funds and financial innovation, we argue that this kind of non-Callonian device is ubiquitous in finance so that the idea of device can be part of a much more political analysis of the present-day capitalism. …
Accounting for national success and failure: Rethinking the UK case
This article presents some basic political arithmetic on UK economic performance, including empirics on the sources of new job creation and regional differences. These empirics support an argument about the need for new measures and concepts of national success and failure. This is so because, as we show in the UK case, the standard post 1940 economic measures of GDP and unemployment give a seriously misleading picture of national success. This i…
Remaking Retirement Investors: Behavioural Economics and Defined-Contribution Occupational Pensions
Summoned up within the defined-contribution (DC) plans that now predominate in the UK and USA, the financial subject of the retirement investor is identified by behavioural economics as the crucial problem to be solved in present-day occupational pension provision. Interventions are being made that: promote individual participation in plans through auto-enrolment techniques; increase the rate at which individuals make tax-favoured payments into p…
Misrule of experts? The financial crisis as elite debacle
This paper is about knowledge limits and the financial crisis. It begins by examining various existing accounts of crisis which disagree about the causes, but share the belief that the crisis represents a problem of socio-technical malfunction which requires some kind of technocratic fix: the three variants on this explanation are the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure. This paper proposes an alternative explanation which frame…
After the Great ComplacenceFinancial Crisis and the Politics of Reform: Financial Crisis and the Politics of Reform
This book addresses two important questions: first, why did financial innovation lead to the crisis in the banking sector that developed in 2007–8; and, second, why the political reform of finance has apparently proved so difficult across a variety of political jurisdictions? This ambitious book draws on a team of researchers from different disciplines to develop an innovation and distinctive argument in response to these two critical issues. In …
Haldane's Gambit: Political Arithmetic and/or a New Metaphor
This article considers the body of work which Andrew Haldane has published since the onset of financial crisis. It draws a distinction between two kinds of criticism in that work: Haldane's interference through political arithmetic on the costs of finance and Haldane's big concept of the financial network using metaphors drawn from the life sciences. His readers have mainly focused on Haldane's innovation through concept and network metaphor whil…
Ownership matters: Private equity and the political division of ownership
This article returns to the issue of how ownership matters. It does so by developing a critique of the ‘advantage-value-return’ framework of assumptions about value creation from the product market, which are recurrent in resource based strategy and many other discourses that highlight what managers can do and the variable governance of management by owners. It then uses a case analysis of private equity and presents empirics which show how the f…
Hedge Funds as ‘War Machine’: Making the Positions Work
The paper criticises current metaphorical characterisations of hedge funds as either trader/arbitrageurs or speculator/gamblers. We argue that these two different characterisations share a definition–identity–outcome frame within which hedge funds are separate and distinct from other financial actors, and engaged in an activity of buying and selling assets with ‘real’ and fixed risk/return characteristics. To break with this frame, our article ma…
A different take: Hollywood's unresolved business model
Since the late 1980s, academic literature has polarised over how to represent organisational change and financial resolution within Hollywood. For some, Hollywood is an example of flexible production with win-win outcomes for all. For others, the major studios have entrenched their global power at the expense of others. This paper presents a different take on Hollywood which builds on the observations of stock market analysts about the absence of…
Reconceptualizing financial innovation: Frame, Conjuncture and Bricolage
This article argues for a reconceptualization of financial innovation which, as culprit and victim of the current crisis, is now damned by those who once praised it. But what is financial innovation? The dominant answers from mainstream finance and social studies of finance share variations on a rationalistic view whereby financial innovation is about improving markets or at least extending the sphere of rational calculability. Because improvisat…
Art for Art's Sake or Selling Up
This article explores the discrepancy between the vision of the broadcast producer as a creative in pursuit of `art for art's sake' and current trends within the broadcasting sector, where large `super-indies' dominate and smaller producer-owners become rich by selling up. At a theoretical level, the article explores how representations of the producer as artist frame the historic and current policy debates, so that `liberating the creative' has …
Everything for Sale: How Non-Executive Directors Make a Difference
Corporate Governance and Impossibilism
This paper presents a mixed methods analysis of corporate governance and develops an argument that governance is impossibilist because it inflates expectations and sets fundamentally unattainable objectives. Disappointment with corporate governance is justified because proceduralisation plus new mechanisms (such as the insistence on more independent non-executive directors) have little ascertainable positive effect on shareholder value and firm p…
Is the Stock Market a Disciplinary Institution? French Giant Firms and the Regime of Accumulation
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the EU under the Framework 6 ESEMK project. Notes 1. John Thornhill & Martin Arnold, ‘Sarkozy and Royal head for poll showdown’, Financial Times, 23 April 2007. 2. Ibid. 3. William Lazonick & Mary O'Sullivan, ‘Maximising Shareholder Value: A New Ideology for Corporate Governance’, Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2000), pp. 13–35. 4. Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver & Karel…
New Actors in a Financialised Economy and the Remaking of Capitalism
The authors would like to thank colleagues in the ESRC Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) Cultural Economy Theme, especially Sarah Green, for their discussions on the remaking of capitalism. The views expressed here are those of the three authors. Notes 1. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt & Jonathon Perraton, Global Transformations (Stanford University Press, 1999); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, To…
The democratization of finance? Promises, outcomes and conditions
This paper analyses the ‘democratization of finance’ or the promise that all households can make money and/or manage risk by buying appropriate financial services products. It does so by exploring the reasons for discrepancy between what is promised and what can be delivered. Our analysis starts from the economic promises and political pitches for the democratization of finance since the early 1990s and the corollary emphasis on promoting mass fi…
The democratization of finance? Promises, outcomes and conditions
This paper analyses the ‘democratization of finance’ or the promise that all households can make money and/or manage risk by buying appropriate financial services products. It does so by exploring the reasons for discrepancy between what is promised and what can be delivered. Our analysis starts from the economic promises and political pitches for the democratization of finance since the early 1990s and the corollary emphasis on promoting mass fi…
Reconceptualizing financial innovation: Frame, Conjuncture and Bricolage
This article argues for a reconceptualization of financial innovation which, as culprit and victim of the current crisis, is now damned by those who once praised it. But what is financial innovation? The dominant answers from mainstream finance and social studies of finance share variations on a rationalistic view whereby financial innovation is about improving markets or at least extending the sphere of rational calculability. Because improvisat…
Misrule of experts? The financial crisis as elite debacle
This paper is about knowledge limits and the financial crisis. It begins by examining various existing accounts of crisis which disagree about the causes, but share the belief that the crisis represents a problem of socio-technical malfunction which requires some kind of technocratic fix: the three variants on this explanation are the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure. This paper proposes an alternative explanation which frame…
Remaking Retirement Investors: Behavioural Economics and Defined-Contribution Occupational Pensions
Summoned up within the defined-contribution (DC) plans that now predominate in the UK and USA, the financial subject of the retirement investor is identified by behavioural economics as the crucial problem to be solved in present-day occupational pension provision. Interventions are being made that: promote individual participation in plans through auto-enrolment techniques; increase the rate at which individuals make tax-favoured payments into p…
(How) Do Devices Matter in Finance
This article distinguishes between different concepts of device. In traditional English usage, as in the Foucauldian or Deleuzian concept, devices exist in a context of power, opportunism and force. Through argument and evidence about hedge funds and financial innovation, we argue that this kind of non-Callonian device is ubiquitous in finance so that the idea of device can be part of a much more political analysis of the present-day capitalism. …
New Actors in a Financialised Economy and the Remaking of Capitalism
The authors would like to thank colleagues in the ESRC Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) Cultural Economy Theme, especially Sarah Green, for their discussions on the remaking of capitalism. The views expressed here are those of the three authors. Notes 1. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt & Jonathon Perraton, Global Transformations (Stanford University Press, 1999); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, To…
Against agency: A Positional Critique
This paper uses the changing historical and theoretical frames within which management pay and investor claims are considered to provide a critique of the functionalist approach of agency and to develop an alternative, positional explanation of rewards. The first part of the paper draws on the contrast between the pre-1940 critique of the rentier and the post-1980 discursive construction of the shareholder to raise important contemporary question…
Finance as 'bizarre bazaar: Using documents as a source of ethnographic knowledge
Markets and finance have long attracted ethnographic interest but the nature of their activity - opaque, secretive and increasingly placeless - precludes traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we propose documents as an alternative access point to these organisations as an ethnographic object of enquiry. Documents do not only present a written record, but they also enact relationships and encode tacit understandings. We develop Geer…
Hedge Funds as ‘War Machine’: Making the Positions Work
The paper criticises current metaphorical characterisations of hedge funds as either trader/arbitrageurs or speculator/gamblers. We argue that these two different characterisations share a definition–identity–outcome frame within which hedge funds are separate and distinct from other financial actors, and engaged in an activity of buying and selling assets with ‘real’ and fixed risk/return characteristics. To break with this frame, our article ma…
From homes to assets: Transcalar territorial networks and the financialization of build to rent in Greater Manchester
Over the last decade, Greater Manchester's city-regional centre has become an important site for build to rent (BTR) housing development in the UK. The growth of this new tenure raises important empirical and conceptual questions about how far and through what means BTR has extended in post-industrial cities like Manchester, as well as how to theorise the global-local relations involved in BTR development. Drawing on a self-built database of 155 …
Fuzzy knowledge: An Historical Exploration of Moral Hazard and Its Variability
This paper revisits Baker's historical work on moral hazard, which argues that Pauly's 1968 intervention represents a clear break in an otherwise linear history of the term. For Baker, Pauly redefined moral hazard fundamentally, shifting the term from an insurance industry definition which centred on character and temptation to an economics definition that emphasized maximizing agents and incentives. This paper takes issue with that assessment an…
Is the Stock Market a Disciplinary Institution? French Giant Firms and the Regime of Accumulation
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the EU under the Framework 6 ESEMK project. Notes 1. John Thornhill & Martin Arnold, ‘Sarkozy and Royal head for poll showdown’, Financial Times, 23 April 2007. 2. Ibid. 3. William Lazonick & Mary O'Sullivan, ‘Maximising Shareholder Value: A New Ideology for Corporate Governance’, Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2000), pp. 13–35. 4. Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver & Karel…
Haldane's Gambit: Political Arithmetic and/or a New Metaphor
This article considers the body of work which Andrew Haldane has published since the onset of financial crisis. It draws a distinction between two kinds of criticism in that work: Haldane's interference through political arithmetic on the costs of finance and Haldane's big concept of the financial network using metaphors drawn from the life sciences. His readers have mainly focused on Haldane's innovation through concept and network metaphor whil…
How financial products organize spatial networks: "Analyzing collateralized debt obligations and collateralized loan obligations as "networked products
During the 2010s, collateralized loan obligations rapidly became a trillion-dollar industry, mirroring the growth profile and peak value of its cousin-collateralized debt obligations-in the 2000s. Yet, despite similarities in product form and growth trajectory, surprisingly little is known about how these markets evolved spatially and relationally. This paper fills that knowledge gap by asking two questions: how did each network adapt to achieve …
The changing spatial arrangements of global finance: Financial, social and legal infrastructures
The spatial arrangements of global finance have changed significantly over the last 30 years, entangling new actors, relations and sites. Infrastructures have developed to stabilize change and complexity. The collection advocates for a broader understanding of infrastructures that includes - but moves beyond - supporting technologies of Bloomberg terminals, telephony, and high-speed cabling. In particular, it highlights other infrastructural form…
Creating and dissolving social groups from New Guinea to New York: On the Overheating of Bounded Corporate Entities in Contemporary Global Capitalism
Attempts to create and fix the boundaries of various social entities have always been central features of modern capitalism. Such entities have always had the potential for either instability, on the one hand, or a lack of flexibility that is experienced by many as threatening, on the other. Such tensions have reached a point of intensification with the overheating of contemporary global capitalism. In this paper, we compare two examples of the c…
A different take: Hollywood's unresolved business model
Since the late 1980s, academic literature has polarised over how to represent organisational change and financial resolution within Hollywood. For some, Hollywood is an example of flexible production with win-win outcomes for all. For others, the major studios have entrenched their global power at the expense of others. This paper presents a different take on Hollywood which builds on the observations of stock market analysts about the absence of…
When the Abu Dhabi United Group Came to Town: Constructing an Organisational Fix for State Capitalism through the Manchester Life Partnership
For many cities, the entry of financial actors into housing opens new geopolitical relations with overseas entities, including state‐backed investors such as sovereign wealth funds. These transformations raise the question of the extent to which real estate enables the urbanisation of state capitalism, understood as the expansion of the state's role as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital. Our paper answers this question through an analysis…
Unsustainable employment portfolios
This Debates and Controversies contribution introduces the notion of an employment portfolio to explore how economies create combinations of employment. It is not simply the number of jobs but the factor share distributed to labour and the sectoral mix and composition that matter. Three case studies of employment portfolio (Australia, California and the UK) are used to show how previous attempts at structural reform failed to deliver sustainable …
Art for Art's Sake or Selling Up
This article explores the discrepancy between the vision of the broadcast producer as a creative in pursuit of `art for art's sake' and current trends within the broadcasting sector, where large `super-indies' dominate and smaller producer-owners become rich by selling up. At a theoretical level, the article explores how representations of the producer as artist frame the historic and current policy debates, so that `liberating the creative' has …
Different Worlds of Motoring: Choice, Constraint and Risk in Household Consumption
The article shows how the old economic variable of income can be related to spatial location and used to reinforce recent revisionism in sociology which questions the automatic link between consumption and identity. The diversity of motoring experience is demonstrated through a case study of motoring in inner and outer London which draws on a variety of resources, including interviews from two London boroughs, survey evidence on household expendi…
Everything for Sale: How Non-Executive Directors Make a Difference
The Third Way and the Jammed Economy
LIKE PLANNING IN THE 1930s or New Liberalism in the 1910s, 'The Third Way' is now being offered as a new political problematic with the potential to reconstruct problems and define new solutions which previously eluded Labour and old social democracy. In response, this polemic questions the Third Way's analysis and policy prescriptions in the area of the economy. The first section presents an analysis of how the economy is represented and concept…
The Third Way and the Jammed Economy
LIKE PLANNING IN THE 1930s or New Liberalism in the 1910s, 'The Third Way' is now being offered as a new political problematic with the potential to reconstruct problems and define new solutions which previously eluded Labour and old social democracy. In response, this polemic questions the Third Way's analysis and policy prescriptions in the area of the economy. The first section presents an analysis of how the economy is represented and concept…
Different Worlds of Motoring: Choice, Constraint and Risk in Household Consumption
The article shows how the old economic variable of income can be related to spatial location and used to reinforce recent revisionism in sociology which questions the automatic link between consumption and identity. The diversity of motoring experience is demonstrated through a case study of motoring in inner and outer London which draws on a variety of resources, including interviews from two London boroughs, survey evidence on household expendi…
Financialization and Strategy: Narrative and Numbers
Considering the recent impact of the capital market on corporate strategy, this text analyzes, through argument and supportive case studies, how pressures from the capital bull market of the 1990s and bear market of the early 2000s, have reshaped management action and calculation in large, publicly quoted US and UK corporations. Beginning with the dissatisfaction with classical strategy and its limited engagement with the processes of financializ…
Is the Stock Market a Disciplinary Institution? French Giant Firms and the Regime of Accumulation
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the EU under the Framework 6 ESEMK project. Notes 1. John Thornhill & Martin Arnold, ‘Sarkozy and Royal head for poll showdown’, Financial Times, 23 April 2007. 2. Ibid. 3. William Lazonick & Mary O'Sullivan, ‘Maximising Shareholder Value: A New Ideology for Corporate Governance’, Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2000), pp. 13–35. 4. Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver & Karel…
New Actors in a Financialised Economy and the Remaking of Capitalism
The authors would like to thank colleagues in the ESRC Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) Cultural Economy Theme, especially Sarah Green, for their discussions on the remaking of capitalism. The views expressed here are those of the three authors. Notes 1. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt & Jonathon Perraton, Global Transformations (Stanford University Press, 1999); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, To…
The democratization of finance? Promises, outcomes and conditions
This paper analyses the ‘democratization of finance’ or the promise that all households can make money and/or manage risk by buying appropriate financial services products. It does so by exploring the reasons for discrepancy between what is promised and what can be delivered. Our analysis starts from the economic promises and political pitches for the democratization of finance since the early 1990s and the corollary emphasis on promoting mass fi…
Against agency: A Positional Critique
This paper uses the changing historical and theoretical frames within which management pay and investor claims are considered to provide a critique of the functionalist approach of agency and to develop an alternative, positional explanation of rewards. The first part of the paper draws on the contrast between the pre-1940 critique of the rentier and the post-1980 discursive construction of the shareholder to raise important contemporary question…
Art for Art's Sake or Selling Up
This article explores the discrepancy between the vision of the broadcast producer as a creative in pursuit of `art for art's sake' and current trends within the broadcasting sector, where large `super-indies' dominate and smaller producer-owners become rich by selling up. At a theoretical level, the article explores how representations of the producer as artist frame the historic and current policy debates, so that `liberating the creative' has …
Everything for Sale: How Non-Executive Directors Make a Difference
Corporate Governance and Impossibilism
This paper presents a mixed methods analysis of corporate governance and develops an argument that governance is impossibilist because it inflates expectations and sets fundamentally unattainable objectives. Disappointment with corporate governance is justified because proceduralisation plus new mechanisms (such as the insistence on more independent non-executive directors) have little ascertainable positive effect on shareholder value and firm p…
Ownership matters: Private equity and the political division of ownership
This article returns to the issue of how ownership matters. It does so by developing a critique of the ‘advantage-value-return’ framework of assumptions about value creation from the product market, which are recurrent in resource based strategy and many other discourses that highlight what managers can do and the variable governance of management by owners. It then uses a case analysis of private equity and presents empirics which show how the f…
Hedge Funds as ‘War Machine’: Making the Positions Work
The paper criticises current metaphorical characterisations of hedge funds as either trader/arbitrageurs or speculator/gamblers. We argue that these two different characterisations share a definition–identity–outcome frame within which hedge funds are separate and distinct from other financial actors, and engaged in an activity of buying and selling assets with ‘real’ and fixed risk/return characteristics. To break with this frame, our article ma…
A different take: Hollywood's unresolved business model
Since the late 1980s, academic literature has polarised over how to represent organisational change and financial resolution within Hollywood. For some, Hollywood is an example of flexible production with win-win outcomes for all. For others, the major studios have entrenched their global power at the expense of others. This paper presents a different take on Hollywood which builds on the observations of stock market analysts about the absence of…
Reconceptualizing financial innovation: Frame, Conjuncture and Bricolage
This article argues for a reconceptualization of financial innovation which, as culprit and victim of the current crisis, is now damned by those who once praised it. But what is financial innovation? The dominant answers from mainstream finance and social studies of finance share variations on a rationalistic view whereby financial innovation is about improving markets or at least extending the sphere of rational calculability. Because improvisat…
After the Great ComplacenceFinancial Crisis and the Politics of Reform: Financial Crisis and the Politics of Reform
This book addresses two important questions: first, why did financial innovation lead to the crisis in the banking sector that developed in 2007–8; and, second, why the political reform of finance has apparently proved so difficult across a variety of political jurisdictions? This ambitious book draws on a team of researchers from different disciplines to develop an innovation and distinctive argument in response to these two critical issues. In …
Haldane's Gambit: Political Arithmetic and/or a New Metaphor
This article considers the body of work which Andrew Haldane has published since the onset of financial crisis. It draws a distinction between two kinds of criticism in that work: Haldane's interference through political arithmetic on the costs of finance and Haldane's big concept of the financial network using metaphors drawn from the life sciences. His readers have mainly focused on Haldane's innovation through concept and network metaphor whil…
Accounting for national success and failure: Rethinking the UK case
This article presents some basic political arithmetic on UK economic performance, including empirics on the sources of new job creation and regional differences. These empirics support an argument about the need for new measures and concepts of national success and failure. This is so because, as we show in the UK case, the standard post 1940 economic measures of GDP and unemployment give a seriously misleading picture of national success. This i…
Remaking Retirement Investors: Behavioural Economics and Defined-Contribution Occupational Pensions
Summoned up within the defined-contribution (DC) plans that now predominate in the UK and USA, the financial subject of the retirement investor is identified by behavioural economics as the crucial problem to be solved in present-day occupational pension provision. Interventions are being made that: promote individual participation in plans through auto-enrolment techniques; increase the rate at which individuals make tax-favoured payments into p…
Misrule of experts? The financial crisis as elite debacle
This paper is about knowledge limits and the financial crisis. It begins by examining various existing accounts of crisis which disagree about the causes, but share the belief that the crisis represents a problem of socio-technical malfunction which requires some kind of technocratic fix: the three variants on this explanation are the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure. This paper proposes an alternative explanation which frame…
Unsustainable employment portfolios
This Debates and Controversies contribution introduces the notion of an employment portfolio to explore how economies create combinations of employment. It is not simply the number of jobs but the factor share distributed to labour and the sectoral mix and composition that matter. Three case studies of employment portfolio (Australia, California and the UK) are used to show how previous attempts at structural reform failed to deliver sustainable …
(How) Do Devices Matter in Finance
This article distinguishes between different concepts of device. In traditional English usage, as in the Foucauldian or Deleuzian concept, devices exist in a context of power, opportunism and force. Through argument and evidence about hedge funds and financial innovation, we argue that this kind of non-Callonian device is ubiquitous in finance so that the idea of device can be part of a much more political analysis of the present-day capitalism. …
What a Waste: Outsourcing and How it Goes Wrong
This is the first ever book to analyse outsourcing – contracting out public services to private business interests. It is an unacknowledged revolution in the British economy, and it has happened quietly, but it is creating powerful new corporate interests, transforming the organisation of government at all levels, and is simultaneously enriching a new business elite and creating numerous fiascos in the delivery of public services. What links the …
Fuzzy knowledge: An Historical Exploration of Moral Hazard and Its Variability
This paper revisits Baker's historical work on moral hazard, which argues that Pauly's 1968 intervention represents a clear break in an otherwise linear history of the term. For Baker, Pauly redefined moral hazard fundamentally, shifting the term from an insurance industry definition which centred on character and temptation to an economics definition that emphasized maximizing agents and incentives. This paper takes issue with that assessment an…
Creating and dissolving social groups from New Guinea to New York: On the Overheating of Bounded Corporate Entities in Contemporary Global Capitalism
Attempts to create and fix the boundaries of various social entities have always been central features of modern capitalism. Such entities have always had the potential for either instability, on the one hand, or a lack of flexibility that is experienced by many as threatening, on the other. Such tensions have reached a point of intensification with the overheating of contemporary global capitalism. In this paper, we compare two examples of the c…
Finance as 'bizarre bazaar: Using documents as a source of ethnographic knowledge
Markets and finance have long attracted ethnographic interest but the nature of their activity - opaque, secretive and increasingly placeless - precludes traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we propose documents as an alternative access point to these organisations as an ethnographic object of enquiry. Documents do not only present a written record, but they also enact relationships and encode tacit understandings. We develop Geer…
Economics (25 works) · Political science (20 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (18 works) · Business (16 works) · Politics (14 works) · Finance (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Market economy (7 works)