About the Book
Like the term globalization ten years ago, financialization now increasingly supplies the concept for a process that concerns us all. Used more prominently in the past ten years by academics and journalists interested in the major players, motives and results of the intrusion of the capital market, it is also used in discussions about different processes at different sites in the economy and the financial outcomes and social effects.
Using extracts from key literature from a range of disciplines, expertly contextualized by the editors, this is the first reader to provide a comprehensive and critical overview of this diverse field.
Representing the different approaches to financialization as an economic and social process at micro and macro levels, this text gives readers from a range of subjects including finance, strategic management, economics and accounting an overview of this challenging and important subject.
Crisis with US sub-prime mortgages, paralysis in global credit markets and the run on Northern Rock all wake-up calls to the growing influence of finance and financial markets on the lives of ordinary people. Social scientists began debating financialization in the late 2000s much as they debated globalizsation in the 1990s, and this important book prepares the way by allowing readers to (re)define financialization for themselves.
The articles are grouped by discourse, covering not only inter-war liberal collectivism and current cultural economy, but also the agency theory of mainstream finance and political economy of various kinds. Helpful commentaries introduce each individual reading while section introductions analyze the assumptions, core propositions, achievements and limits in each distinct literature.
This book will challenge readers to bring a new understanding to the financialization of present day capitalism. It is an invaluable resource for students and researchers from business and management, plus all the social sciences with interests in political and cultural economy.