Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2202678
Karen Ho
ABSTRACT The critical and interdisciplinary scholarship analyzing finance, and specifically the relationship between financialization and inequality, has ballooned over the past twenty years. The increasing power and influence of financial and investment values, practices, policies, and networks have worked to leverage existing inequalities and construct novel regimes of accumulation that have increased socioeconomic precarity and dismantled socioeconomic protections for most. This fraught and unequal landscape has reinvigorated scholarly research and discussion on the role of finance in capitalism and on finance's relationship to other historical processes of inequality. Not surprisingly, much of this work on finance has faced similar questions and pitfalls as the critical scholarship on capitalism, namely, how to represent, analyze, and account for finance's power and influence without over-empowering, totalizing, presuming, or rendering inevitable finance's ability to remake the world in its own image. This Afterword engages this quandary, arguing that a dual approach is necessary – one that simultaneously shows finance's local contingencies, historical specificities, and unexpected trajectories alongside an approach that demonstrates finance's catalyzation of longstanding unequal structures produced through racial capitalism and colonialism to intensify contemporary inequality.
{"title":"Afterword of ‘Financial frontiers': towards conceptualizing finance that engages both power and contingency","authors":"Karen Ho","doi":"10.1080/17530350.2023.2202678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2202678","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The critical and interdisciplinary scholarship analyzing finance, and specifically the relationship between financialization and inequality, has ballooned over the past twenty years. The increasing power and influence of financial and investment values, practices, policies, and networks have worked to leverage existing inequalities and construct novel regimes of accumulation that have increased socioeconomic precarity and dismantled socioeconomic protections for most. This fraught and unequal landscape has reinvigorated scholarly research and discussion on the role of finance in capitalism and on finance's relationship to other historical processes of inequality. Not surprisingly, much of this work on finance has faced similar questions and pitfalls as the critical scholarship on capitalism, namely, how to represent, analyze, and account for finance's power and influence without over-empowering, totalizing, presuming, or rendering inevitable finance's ability to remake the world in its own image. This Afterword engages this quandary, arguing that a dual approach is necessary – one that simultaneously shows finance's local contingencies, historical specificities, and unexpected trajectories alongside an approach that demonstrates finance's catalyzation of longstanding unequal structures produced through racial capitalism and colonialism to intensify contemporary inequality.","PeriodicalId":46876,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Economy","volume":"7 1","pages":"453 - 461"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78532717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2216214
M. Ralph
ABSTRACT This article uses original archival research to revise the scholarly consensus on convict leasing to demonstrate that it first emerges on US soil in Kentucky’s eighteenth century frontier society (rather than in the Deep South in the wake of the 13th amendment) and that it began in a prison filled with incarcerated white people (rather than as a way to keep African Americans trapped in a condition analogous to slavery). Convict leasing was born on the frontier – in the hazy netherworld between slavery and freedom, between British colonial geographies and the territories settlers seized from indigenous peoples to establish a sovereign republic. I argue that convict leasing constituted a novel financial frontier that tethered slaveholding to new strategies for adjudicating debt to new lease arrangements for private firms. More specifically, I argue that convict leasing was inaugurated in the US in Kentucky because of its unique relationship to three related developments: the birth of the domestic slave trade, the debut of incarceration as a pervasive mode of punishment, and the plight of debtors in the aftermath of the American Revolution. This article demonstrates how Kentucky moved from being foremost understood as a geographic frontier – the expanding boundary of a new republic – to a financial frontier as the westward march of slave coffles prepared Kentucky to launch a hemp industry that was uniquely profitable. The desperate plight of debtors in the context of booming hemp profits made them especially vulnerable to Joel Scott’s innovative model for extracting profit from prison labor based on techniques African workers had developed for transforming a recalcitrant plant into an economic marvel. In this context, incarcerated white people were subjected to a labor regimen that had heretofore largely been restricted to enslaved black workers. This geographic frontier and financial frontier ushered in new legal frontiers, including the threshold marking a shift from colonial subjects to incarcerated citizens.
{"title":"Slavery and incarceration in the frontier: the origin of convict leasing","authors":"M. Ralph","doi":"10.1080/17530350.2023.2216214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2216214","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article uses original archival research to revise the scholarly consensus on convict leasing to demonstrate that it first emerges on US soil in Kentucky’s eighteenth century frontier society (rather than in the Deep South in the wake of the 13th amendment) and that it began in a prison filled with incarcerated white people (rather than as a way to keep African Americans trapped in a condition analogous to slavery). Convict leasing was born on the frontier – in the hazy netherworld between slavery and freedom, between British colonial geographies and the territories settlers seized from indigenous peoples to establish a sovereign republic. I argue that convict leasing constituted a novel financial frontier that tethered slaveholding to new strategies for adjudicating debt to new lease arrangements for private firms. More specifically, I argue that convict leasing was inaugurated in the US in Kentucky because of its unique relationship to three related developments: the birth of the domestic slave trade, the debut of incarceration as a pervasive mode of punishment, and the plight of debtors in the aftermath of the American Revolution. This article demonstrates how Kentucky moved from being foremost understood as a geographic frontier – the expanding boundary of a new republic – to a financial frontier as the westward march of slave coffles prepared Kentucky to launch a hemp industry that was uniquely profitable. The desperate plight of debtors in the context of booming hemp profits made them especially vulnerable to Joel Scott’s innovative model for extracting profit from prison labor based on techniques African workers had developed for transforming a recalcitrant plant into an economic marvel. In this context, incarcerated white people were subjected to a labor regimen that had heretofore largely been restricted to enslaved black workers. This geographic frontier and financial frontier ushered in new legal frontiers, including the threshold marking a shift from colonial subjects to incarcerated citizens.","PeriodicalId":46876,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Economy","volume":"99 1","pages":"337 - 349"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86097971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2189146
Julia Elyachar
ABSTRACT How might archival fragments of an economic anthropologist of post-Ottoman Egypt speak to current debates about finance and financialization? Literature in critical financial studies often reads as if financialization began in 1970 and moves outward from the global North like a mobile frontier remaking the world in its image. But if there is anything like a ‘frontier of finance,' it moved from East to West long before the Industrial Revolution. Through readings of ‘ethnographers of finance’ in archives of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, I disrupt common views of finance as an intrinsic agent of extraction, colonialism, and imperialism to show how finance entails multiple and overlapping processes that make debt valuable. From such a perspective, attention to finance and revaluation in the late Ottoman Empire can invigorate debates about financialization more broadly, including in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in the United States.
{"title":"Relational finance: Ottoman debt, financialization, and the problem of the semi-civilized","authors":"Julia Elyachar","doi":"10.1080/17530350.2023.2189146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2189146","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT How might archival fragments of an economic anthropologist of post-Ottoman Egypt speak to current debates about finance and financialization? Literature in critical financial studies often reads as if financialization began in 1970 and moves outward from the global North like a mobile frontier remaking the world in its image. But if there is anything like a ‘frontier of finance,' it moved from East to West long before the Industrial Revolution. Through readings of ‘ethnographers of finance’ in archives of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, I disrupt common views of finance as an intrinsic agent of extraction, colonialism, and imperialism to show how finance entails multiple and overlapping processes that make debt valuable. From such a perspective, attention to finance and revaluation in the late Ottoman Empire can invigorate debates about financialization more broadly, including in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in the United States.","PeriodicalId":46876,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Economy","volume":"479 1","pages":"323 - 336"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76371835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2177322
H. Appel
ABSTRACT U.S. and Europe-based banks and international financial institutions including the IMF have been central to critical accounts of Africa’s place in global capitalism. And yet since 2008 these institutions have been in retreat on the continent, partially replaced by Pan African Banks. Putting ethnographic work with Africa-based finance professionals into dialogue with heterodox economic thinking on banks and currency sovereignty, I argue that we must not only analyze the geographic shift in where banks are headquartered and who owns them, but also generate empirical and theoretical shifts in what a bank is, what it does, and to what effect, especially in terms of the relationship between currencies, social violence, and imperial and racial power.
{"title":"Pan African capital? Banks, currencies, and imperial power","authors":"H. Appel","doi":"10.1080/17530350.2023.2177322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2177322","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT U.S. and Europe-based banks and international financial institutions including the IMF have been central to critical accounts of Africa’s place in global capitalism. And yet since 2008 these institutions have been in retreat on the continent, partially replaced by Pan African Banks. Putting ethnographic work with Africa-based finance professionals into dialogue with heterodox economic thinking on banks and currency sovereignty, I argue that we must not only analyze the geographic shift in where banks are headquartered and who owns them, but also generate empirical and theoretical shifts in what a bank is, what it does, and to what effect, especially in terms of the relationship between currencies, social violence, and imperial and racial power.","PeriodicalId":46876,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Economy","volume":"50 1","pages":"392 - 408"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84254291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-17DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2176344
Andrea Ballestero
ABSTRACT Financialization is often understood as an expansive, spreading wave, coming from an energetic, global center of finance and creating new financial frontiers at its edges. Instead of presuming this expansive wave, I show how financial frontiers are flickering arrangements. Rather than spreading continuously, financial frontiers come into being, go dormant, and reignite with intensity. This temporal dynamic becomes apparent when we trace the specific techno-legal devices that proliferate at financial frontiers. I focus on the financial trust, an instrument that, despite its prominence in financial circles, has received comparatively little attention beyond legal scholarship. I chart three historical moments in Costa Rica when the trust appears as a frontier device opening the nature of property, enabling the transformation of ecological processes into sources of rent, and redrawing relations between public and private actors interested in water protection. At these flickering frontiers, the trust does much more than channel and shield financial wealth. As a device, the trust makes fundamental assumptions about social life explicit and opens possibilities for some actors to translate those assumptions into social forms.
{"title":"Trusts at the financial frontier: the flickering forms of property, water, and governance","authors":"Andrea Ballestero","doi":"10.1080/17530350.2023.2176344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2176344","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Financialization is often understood as an expansive, spreading wave, coming from an energetic, global center of finance and creating new financial frontiers at its edges. Instead of presuming this expansive wave, I show how financial frontiers are flickering arrangements. Rather than spreading continuously, financial frontiers come into being, go dormant, and reignite with intensity. This temporal dynamic becomes apparent when we trace the specific techno-legal devices that proliferate at financial frontiers. I focus on the financial trust, an instrument that, despite its prominence in financial circles, has received comparatively little attention beyond legal scholarship. I chart three historical moments in Costa Rica when the trust appears as a frontier device opening the nature of property, enabling the transformation of ecological processes into sources of rent, and redrawing relations between public and private actors interested in water protection. At these flickering frontiers, the trust does much more than channel and shield financial wealth. As a device, the trust makes fundamental assumptions about social life explicit and opens possibilities for some actors to translate those assumptions into social forms.","PeriodicalId":46876,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Economy","volume":"18 1","pages":"423 - 438"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91200137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-13DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2176342
A. Muehlebach
ABSTRACT This article explores the contract as a mediating device at the financial frontier. Focusing on contracts signed and breached in two instances across 150 years in Berlin, Germany, I argue that contracts are frontier devices that are both durable and volatile in that they seek to bind together two unlike – even incommensurable – contracting parties into formally equal partnerships. Contracts thus seek to enforce certainty and predictability into potentially risky environments and relations and attempt to fix futures in specific ways. I show that the recurrent strategy of extracting value from water infrastructures through contractually regulated private debt financing must be accompanied by an analysis of the intense politics of public secrecy and disclosure that erupt around the contract as labile frontier device, over and over again.
{"title":"Contract as frontier device, or, the political publics of water infrastructures","authors":"A. Muehlebach","doi":"10.1080/17530350.2023.2176342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2176342","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the contract as a mediating device at the financial frontier. Focusing on contracts signed and breached in two instances across 150 years in Berlin, Germany, I argue that contracts are frontier devices that are both durable and volatile in that they seek to bind together two unlike – even incommensurable – contracting parties into formally equal partnerships. Contracts thus seek to enforce certainty and predictability into potentially risky environments and relations and attempt to fix futures in specific ways. I show that the recurrent strategy of extracting value from water infrastructures through contractually regulated private debt financing must be accompanied by an analysis of the intense politics of public secrecy and disclosure that erupt around the contract as labile frontier device, over and over again.","PeriodicalId":46876,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Economy","volume":"10 1","pages":"363 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85866590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-10DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2186918
James W. Williams
ABSTRACT Amidst growing signs of inequality, poverty, and marginalization, there have been calls for a new approach to funding the social sector organizations tasked with addressing these challenges. Rather than paying for services, governments and philanthropists are being encouraged to fund programs based on their ‘outcomes.’ This paper explores this growing movement around ‘outcomes-based funding’ (OBF) suggesting that outcomes in this context embody a distinctly financial logic and reflect an effort to turn the work of charities and nonprofits into a type of pseudo asset. The paper teases out these dynamics and their implications based on one particular form of OBF, the social impact bond, a financial instrument which uses private capital to fund social programs and calculates returns based on program outcomes. While SIBs have struggled as a market, the operations underlying these projects and informing the production of outcomes as investable assets have been carried forward into non-SIB work informing flows of public and philanthropic capital and embodying the practices of the larger OBF ecosystem. As a window into the new, outcomes-based nonprofit funding regime, the paper offers a unique lens and set of critical tools for exploring the relationship between capital, the social sector, and poverty governance.
{"title":"Charitable assets: social outcomes, financial values, and the new, nonprofit funding regime","authors":"James W. Williams","doi":"10.1080/17530350.2023.2186918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2186918","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Amidst growing signs of inequality, poverty, and marginalization, there have been calls for a new approach to funding the social sector organizations tasked with addressing these challenges. Rather than paying for services, governments and philanthropists are being encouraged to fund programs based on their ‘outcomes.’ This paper explores this growing movement around ‘outcomes-based funding’ (OBF) suggesting that outcomes in this context embody a distinctly financial logic and reflect an effort to turn the work of charities and nonprofits into a type of pseudo asset. The paper teases out these dynamics and their implications based on one particular form of OBF, the social impact bond, a financial instrument which uses private capital to fund social programs and calculates returns based on program outcomes. While SIBs have struggled as a market, the operations underlying these projects and informing the production of outcomes as investable assets have been carried forward into non-SIB work informing flows of public and philanthropic capital and embodying the practices of the larger OBF ecosystem. As a window into the new, outcomes-based nonprofit funding regime, the paper offers a unique lens and set of critical tools for exploring the relationship between capital, the social sector, and poverty governance.","PeriodicalId":46876,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Economy","volume":"82 1","pages":"513 - 528"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76792083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-24DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2176341
Horacio Ortiz
ABSTRACT Based on fieldwork carried out with professionals working in mergers and acquisitions, venture capital and private equity cross-border transactions in Shanghai, this article proposes to study how the financial industry is co-constituted with power relations outside of it. In these transactions, financial professionals combine standardized valuation and investment methods with imaginaries of states, economies and cultural and national identity, differentiated in terms of borders. These imaginaries propose various moral and political meanings about where money should go and what should be the role of the financial industry in the process. These are practices of ‘conversion’, where professionals maintain these different moral and political meanings as incommensurable but make them interdependent by bringing them together in exchanges of shares for money. This contributes to enclosures, where the meaning of the objects exchanged, for instance companies working in environmental protection and health, can only be articulated in terms of the power relations that the financial industry brings together in the transactions. Studying how financial imaginaries about value, investors and markets are co-constituted with other power relations contributes to understanding the roles of the financial industry in the production of global hierarchies.
{"title":"Financial frontiers: borders, conversions, enclosures","authors":"Horacio Ortiz","doi":"10.1080/17530350.2023.2176341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2176341","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Based on fieldwork carried out with professionals working in mergers and acquisitions, venture capital and private equity cross-border transactions in Shanghai, this article proposes to study how the financial industry is co-constituted with power relations outside of it. In these transactions, financial professionals combine standardized valuation and investment methods with imaginaries of states, economies and cultural and national identity, differentiated in terms of borders. These imaginaries propose various moral and political meanings about where money should go and what should be the role of the financial industry in the process. These are practices of ‘conversion’, where professionals maintain these different moral and political meanings as incommensurable but make them interdependent by bringing them together in exchanges of shares for money. This contributes to enclosures, where the meaning of the objects exchanged, for instance companies working in environmental protection and health, can only be articulated in terms of the power relations that the financial industry brings together in the transactions. Studying how financial imaginaries about value, investors and markets are co-constituted with other power relations contributes to understanding the roles of the financial industry in the production of global hierarchies.","PeriodicalId":46876,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Economy","volume":"6 1","pages":"439 - 452"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87508863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-22DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2186923
Cecilia Rikap
{"title":"Brexit’s hidden network of power: Comment of “Alt-Finance”","authors":"Cecilia Rikap","doi":"10.1080/17530350.2023.2186923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2186923","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46876,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Economy","volume":"58 1","pages":"768 - 772"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77803954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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