Material Cultures of Financialisation

Kate Bayliss, Ben Fine, Mary Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429808340
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This collection offers pathbreaking framing of the material culture of financialisation. It begins with a tight definition of financialisation in order to distinguish the phenomenon of financialisation from its effects and from the looser associations prevalent within much of the literature such as the presence of credit or even simply (more extensive) monetary relations. To locate financialisation within economic and social reproduction, of which material culture is a part, close attention is paid to the distinctive forms of financialisation arising from commodification, commodity form and commodity calculation. The differences in the extent to which, and how, these prevail are addressed through the innovative system of provision approach and its framing of material culture through use of ten distinctive attributes of such cultures, known as the 10Cs (Constructed, Construed, Conforming, Commodified, Contextual, Contradictory, Closed, Contested, Collective and Chaotic). This framing of the cultures attached to financialisation is then illustrated through case studies demonstrating the diverse ways in which shifting cultures have served to embed financialisation in our daily lives. After a discussion of the material culture of financialisation itself there are two sector examples which review financial cultures in the provision of water and housing. These are followed by considerations of financialisation in financial literacy and financial inclusion, the media and, finally, well-being.

The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of New Political Economy.

Introduction: material cultures of financialisation

Kate Bayliss, Ben Fine and Mary Robertson

ABSTRACT
This paper offers a wide-ranging introduction to the symposium on the material culture of financialisation. It begins by addressing the nature of financialisation itself, drawing on a tight definition in order to distinguish the phenomenon of financialisation from its effects and from the looser associations prevalent within much of the literature such as the presence of credit or even simply (more extensive) monetary relations. In order to locate financialisation within economic and social reproduction, of which material culture is a part, close attention is paid to the distinctive forms of financialisation arising from commodification, commodity form and commodity calculation. The differences in the extent to which, and how, these prevail are addressed through the system of provision approach and its framing of material culture through its use of 10 distinctive attributes of such cultures, known as the 10Cs (Constructed, Construed, Conforming, Commodified, Contextual, Contradictory, Closed, Contested, Collective and Chaotic). The analysis is then illustrated by reference to the papers that follow in this volume which demonstrate the diverse ways in which shifting cultures have served to embed financialisation in our daily lives. The first is on the material culture of financialisation itself and this is followed by a number of case studies that include the promotion of financial literacy and financial inclusion, well-being, the media and finally two sector examples are provided on housing and water.

Introduction

This paper offers a wide-ranging introduction to the symposium on the material culture of financialisation. This collection of papers provides a number of detailed examples of the diverse ways in which finance and financialisation have become absorbed into many aspects of everyday life and the way in which material cultures have adapted so that this has become increasingly normalised. Each of material culture (cultural political economy) and financialisation has now attracted extensive literatures, incorporating equally diverse sets of conceptualisations that have mixed relations to one another and to their objects of enquiry. Our approach sets out its own framings in dealing with financialisation itself and its relationships to economic and social reproduction, including material culture. These framings may appear to be arbitrary but each has its own logic relative to its subject matter and to one another, as well as in traversing the connections between financialisation and material culture. Like others, we seek to escape simple dichotomies in which finance is perceived to be either real or imagined (fictitious) by forging links in the context of finance between material practices and their associated meanings (Haiven 2014).

Our approach draws upon the system of provision (SoP) approach (Fine 2002, 2013a). It conceives the economy as dependent upon distinct but overlapping SoPs, most obviously attached but not confined to different sectors of commodity production (for consumption). These SoPs interact with the material cultures that shape norms, values, meanings and practices associated with provisioning. We characterise these material cultures in terms of a number of core features which has been termed the 10Cs – that these cultures are Constructed, Construed, Conforming, Commodified, Contextual, Contradictory, Closed, Contested, Collective and Chaotic. The 10Cs are designed to capture or to bridge both the complex nature of material cultures (the natures and contents of meanings) and the way in which they are forged through material and social processes. This general framing of material cultures attached to the economy by means of the SoP approach and the 10Cs is applied more specifically in case of financialisation in light of its being taken as a defining feature of contemporary, neoliberal capitalism and, correspondingly, a decisive factor in the restructuring and shaping of many if not all SoPs and their material cultures, as the papers in this volume testify.

However, not all provisioning takes the pure or ideal form of financialised commodity production and not all monetary relations are financialised, contingent upon how this is defined. Not only are there longstanding and increasingly complex cascades of monetary forms and practices (Jessop 2015) but these are also attached to equally diverse sets of economic practices and cultures (Dodd 2016), and theories of money (Lawson 2016).¹ Accordingly, the section ‘Pinning down financialisation’ begins by addressing the nature of financialisation itself, drawing on a tight definition drawn from Marxist political economy and attaching it to the accumulation of interest bearing capital. This is in order to distinguish financialisation as such from its diverse and wide-ranging effects and its looser associations within much of the literature with attachment to some sort of amorphous presence of credit or even simply (more extensive) monetary relations or ethos. These differences between financialisation and broader monetary relations within economic and social reproduction, of which material culture is a part, are addressed in the section ‘Commodification, commodity form and commodity calculation – ccfcc’ by drawing distinctions that prevail irrespective of financialisation as such, across the three elements of ccfcc. These three are present as forms or influences upon provisioning wherever there is commodity production even if the first alone of the three involves commodity production as such. Attributes of commodity production, however, can be present without commodity production as such, as with payment for being unemployed or retired, or nominal user charges for public services provided (commodity forms). Commodity calculation prevails when monetary valuation occurs (assessing cost or worth, for example, possibly as basis for action) without money actually passing hands. But, just as commodity production influences the material cultures of other forms of provisioning (what is the meaning of home-made if I can purchase in a shop?) so ccfcc reflect and even facilitate financialisation although they are not financialisation itself.

Nonetheless, because our experiences of financialisation are not direct, within the trading rooms of the City, ccfcc are crucial aspects in the formation of the material culture of financialisation, as these are how we tend to experience financialisation, possibly in paying a water bill, a mortgage or credit card interest.² Thus, our concern is not with the material culture of traders themselves, important though this is, but with the financialisation of everyday life which is experienced at a distance from the ‘boiler rooms’. Our general approach to traversing this distance is laid out in the section ‘From financialisation to culture’, and how it is to be operationalised in the section ‘The SoP approach – and the 10Cs’, by framing specific economic activities through the SoP approach, which seeks to unravel the interactions across monetary forms and the activities with which they are attached or associated. This in turn leads to the framing of corresponding material cultures through use of the 10Cs as previously suggested.

Now, through our analysis, the SoP/10Cs approach can come together with the insights gained from distinguishing between financialisation as such and its consequences through ccfcc. For the material culture of financialisation is associated with pressing for commodity calculation to be more pervasive, for it to lead to commodity form, and for commodity form to lead to commodification. None of this is, however, linear or guaranteed, and it is contradictory in that commodification at one point, housing, for example, may condition or even lead to decommodification elsewhere (the hard to house). Nonetheless, commodity calculation is the most pervasive form through which financialisation is materially, and hence culturally, experienced, although not financialisation itself, since it is a pre-condition for both commodity form and commodification, and, in turn, for financialisation, although one or other or all of these can be far removed from the direct experience of everyday life and even more so in how it is interpreted/experienced.

Nor is the presence of commodity calculation unique to the era of financialisation and its material culture, as was recognised by Oscar Wilde’s quip concerning the cynic knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing and, in more scholarly fashion, by Simmel’s view not that every relation had become monetised in practice so much as in thought.³ This is why, if we are to specify financialisation distinctively, it needs to be in terms of the current period of capitalism, and its attachment to neoliberalism, a leitmotif throughout our collection, with the corresponding tendency for economic and social reproduction, and its material cultures, to become incorporated into extensive and intensive forms of financialisation.

Although developed to understand the material culture of (commodity) consumption, the SoP/10Cs approach can be usefully extended to the material culture of financialisation. This is taken up in more detail in Fine (2017) which also serves to frame the other contributions, or case studies, covering financial literacy, exclusion and well-being, housing, water, and the media. The final section here deploys these case studies to illustrate and reflect back upon the approach laid out previously in the introduction – our sequentially structured concretisation of the complexities of material culture through financialisation, ccfcc, the SoP approach and the 10Cs.

Pinning down financialisation

Sporadic forays apart, over a life of little more than a decade, the notion of ‘financialisation’ has experienced a meteoric rise, accelerating in prominence in the wake of the global crisis. Significantly, see below, within the discipline of economics, its origins and continuing trajectory remain confined to the heavily marginalised fields of heterodox economics. Otherwise, as a scholarly ‘buzzword’ across the social sciences, it borders becoming a ‘fuzzword’ (Cornwall and Eade 2010). Specifically, it has been deployed with different meanings, methods and theories. As such, it is beginning to carry a similar burden as more longstanding concepts such as globalisation, neoliberalism and social capital, and has, significantly, overlapped with two of these.⁴ For Epstein (2005: 3), ‘In short, this changing landscape has been characterised by the rise of neoliberalism, globalization and financialization’.

Unsurprisingly, debates have emerged around the ambiguity over the meaning of financialisation. These have ranged over the extent, historical uniqueness, likely longevity and homogeneity of the incidence and effects of the rise of finance that financialisation is deemed to capture.⁵

In this introduction, we can hardly resolve continuing debates about whether financialisation is a useful let alone a valid concept. We can, on the basis of the articles in this special issue on the material culture of financialisation, address some of the main issues involved. And we do so with the benefits of having undertaken study of financialisation in its complex manifestation as material culture, thereby combining the abstract and general with the concrete and specific.

The first fundamental issue is how to define financialisation. Much of the literature has been casual, reflecting a lack of attention to any theory of finance and inclined to take its (expanded) presence as sufficient for working with pre-existing conceptual frameworks albeit with finance grafted on. Where finance theory is present, it does to some degree conceptually mirror the more casual, generally empiricist approaches, selectively drawing upon theories of finance as appropriate to the specific object of financialised study, whether it be the crisis or the everyday. Collectively, the result is to generate as amorphous a set of theories of financialisation as its scope in practice.⁶ In our own framings, we have sought to avoid such arbitrary intellectual opportunism.

The collective theoretical chaos around financialisation is synthesised, and even celebrated, by Erturk et al. (eds) (2008), identifying the contemporary period as one of ‘coupon pool’ capitalism. Their approach involves a triangulation of four framings, each deriving fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: material cultures of financialisation
• 2. The material and culture of financialisation
• 3. Material cultures of water financialisation in England and Wales
• 4. (De)constructing the financialised culture of owner-occupation in the UK, with the aid of the 10Cs
• 5. Cultivating the self-reliant and responsible individual: the material culture of financial literacy
• 6. The digital revolution in financial inclusion: international development in the fintech era
• 7. Financialisation, media and social change
• 8. From happiness to social provisioning: addressing well-being in times of crisis
• Index