Financial Cultures and Crisis Dynamics

Bob Jessop, Brigitte Young, Christoph Scherrer, Bob Jessop, Brigitte Young, Christoph Scherrer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317681526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

The recent financial crisis exposed both a naïve faith in mathematical models to manage risk and a crude culture of greed that embraces risk. This book explores cultures of finance in sites such as corporate governance, hedge funds, central banks, the City of London and Wall Street, and small and medium enterprises. It uses different methods to explore these cultures and their interaction with different financial orders to improve our understanding of financial crisis dynamics.

The introduction identifies types of cultural turn in studies of finance. Part I outlines relevant research methods, including comparison of national cultures viewed as independent variables, cultural political economy, and critical discourse and narrative policy analysis. Part II examines different institutional cultures of finance and the cult of entrepreneurship. Part III offers historical, comparative, and contemporary analyses of financial regimes and their significance for crisis dynamics. Part IV explores organizational cultures, modes of calculation, and financial practices and how they shape economic performance and guide crisis management. Part V considers crisis construals and responses in the European Union and China.

This book's great strength is its multi-faceted approach to cultures of finance. Contributors deploy the cultural turn creatively to enhance comparative and historical analysis of financial regimes, institutions, organizations, and practices as well as their roles in crisis generation, construal, and management. Developing different paradigms and methods and elaborating diverse case studies, the authors illustrate not only how and why 'culture matters' but also how its significance is shaped by different financial regimes and contexts.

Part I

Researching cultures of finance

Theoretical foundations and methods

1 Sense- and meaning-making in the critique of political economy

Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop

The introduction to this volume argued for the intellectual use-value of the cultural turn in political economy and, in particular, its relevance to the analysis of finance. This chapter introduces one distinctive approach to the cultural turn that affirms its crucial contribution to political economy but also insists on the continued importance of taking seriously the specificity of social relations and their emergent dynamic in the field of political economy. While cultural political economy (hereafter CPE) applies the cultural turn, as its name implies, in the field of political economy, the general propositions and heuristic that inform its analysis can be applied elsewhere by combining them with concepts appropriate to other social forms, fields, institutional dynamics, and social practices. Given the concern of this volume with cultures of finance, we focus on the role of semiosis, that is, sense- and meaning-making, in the organization of economic and political relations and provide some comments on their structural aspects.

Cultural political economy

CPE is a distinctive and still evolving approach in the humanities and social sciences that highlights the contribution of the cultural turn (a concern with semiosis considered as sense- and meaning-making) to the analysis of the economic and the political, their articulation, and their embedding in wider sets of social relations in capitalist social formations at different scales up to and including world society. It has six features that together distinguish it from other versions of CPE that address similar topics: (1) the grounding of its version of the cultural turn, that is, its interest in semiosis or meaning-making, in the existential necessity of complexity reduction; (2) its interest in the mechanisms that shape the movement from social construal to social construction and their implications for the production and contestation of social relations of domination and hegemony; (3) its concern with the interdependence and co-evolution of the semiotic and extra-semiotic in general and in specific contexts and conjunctures; (4) its integration of individual, organizational, and societal learning into the dialectic of semiosis and structuration and, by extension, of path-shaping and path-dependency; (5) its analysis of the role of technologies, in a broadly Foucauldian sense, in shaping domination and hegemony; and (6) its de-naturalization of social imaginaries as part of a broader Ideologie- and Hegemoniekritik. This chapter focuses on themes one to four, with the first and third meriting most attention (for extended analysis of all themes, see Sum and Jessop 2013).

The editors’ introduction identified four types of cultural turn: thematic, methodological, ontological, and reflexive. The present authors identify mainly with the third and fourth. We do not confine CPE to the study of ‘cultural’ topics in political economy (for example, the economics of art markets, the creative industries, professional culture, the cultural influence of the mass media, the culturalization of the economy or economization of culture); nor do we argue that social scientific investigation should generally begin with meaning-making (for example, by starting with the analysis of discourse and discursive practices) as opposed to another entry-point (such as social structure or individual or collective agency). Rather we argue that, whether one starts with meaning-making or another analytical entry-point, an adequate explanation of political economy dynamics must sooner or later integrate semiosis into the analysis because intersubjective meaning-making is foundational to social practice. And, in terms of reflexivity, our approach not only critiques the categories and methods of orthodox political economy but also emphasizes the contextuality and historicity of its claims to knowledge. The North Atlantic Financial Crisis (or NAFC) illustrates this well as it casts doubt on (and should also prompt self-doubt about) orthodox economics and neo-liberal views of the self-regulating market. It follows that a self-consistent CPE calls for reflexivity on the part of social scientists about the conditions of their own practices. In this sense, CPE does not seek to add ‘culture’ to economics and politics as if each comprised a distinct area of social life and, a fortiori, entailed distinct objects for theoretical and empirical analysis that might then be explored in terms of their external interactions or mutual conditioning in specific situations.

Instead, arguing that all social phenomena have both semiotic and material properties, CPE studies their interconnections and co-evolution in structuring as well as construing social relations. Accordingly CPE aims to steer a path between two complementary theoretical temptations: ‘hard political economy’ and ‘soft cultural economics’. We refer to these for the sake of alliteration as well as contrast as the structuralist Scylla and constructivist Charybdis of political economy (for a summary, see Table 1.1). While the former reifies formal, market-rational, calculative activities and analyses them apart from their discursive significance and broader extra-economic context and supports, the latter subsumes economic activities under broad generalizations about social and cultural life (especially their inevitably semiotic character). Hard political economy tends to establish a rigid demarcation between the economic and the cultural, reifying economic objects, naturalizing homo economicus, and proposing rigid economic laws. At best, therefore, culture is regarded merely as an optional supplement in political economic analysis. At its most extreme, this leads to universalizing, transhistorical claims valid for all forms of material (or ‘economic’) provisioning. This is common in mainstream economics premised on reified and naturalized universal categories and rationalities as well as in orthodox Marxism with its essentialization of ‘iron’ economic laws. In other cases, mainstream economics tends to separate economizing activities from their extra-economic supports, to regard the economy as a self-reproducing, self-expanding system with its own laws, and to provide thereby the theoretical underpinnings for economic reductionism. This leads to thin accounts of how subjects and subjectivities are formed and how different modes of calculation emerge, come to be institutionalized, and get modified. In contrast, CPE follows critical political economists and, curiously, actor-network theory, in regarding capital not as a thing but as ‘a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things’ (Marx 1967: 717). CPE interprets the latter broadly to include not only natural resources, tools and machines, commodities, and so on, but also social resources, discursive practices, social technologies, organizational forms, and the like. For technical and economic objects are always socially constructed, historically specific, more or less socially embedded in – or disembedded from – broader networks of social relations and institutional ensembles, more or less embodied and habituated in individuals, and more or less institutionalized and routinized in collective agencies.

Table 1.1 Constructivist Charybdis and structuralist Scylla

Constructivist Charybdis	Structuralist Scylla
Grasps the semiotic-material construction of social relations, reveals their social embedding, and notes the performative impact of semiosis	Grasps the distinctiveness of specific economic categories, forms, and social relations and their structured/structuring nature in wider social formations
But finds it hard to define specificity of economic relations vis-à-vis other relations – because they are all equally discursive in character	But reifies such categories, regards economic structures as natural, and views agents as mere Träger (passive bearers) of economic logics
Strong risk of idealism, defining economic relations in terms of their manifest semiotic content	Strong risk of economic determinism, explaining economic processes in terms of ‘iron laws’
‘Soft Economic Sociology’	‘Hard Political Economy’

The second temptation is the sociological imperialism of radical social constructivism, according to which social reality is reducible to participants’ collectively created and reproduced meanings and understandings of their social world. Unfortunately, while such currents correctly reject a sharp division between the cultural and material and also stress the cultural dimensions of material life, they tend to lose sight of the specificity of economic forms, contradictions, institutions, and so on. This makes it hard to distinguish in material terms between capitalist and non-capitalist economic practices, institutions, and formations – they all become equally discursive and can only be differentiated through their respective semiotic practices, meanings, and contexts and their performative impact. This can lead to an arbitrary account of the social world that ignores the unacknowledged conditions of action as well as the many and varied emergent properties of action that go un- or mis-recognized by the relevant actors. It also ignores the many and varied struggles to transform the conditions of action, to alter actors’ meanings and understandings, and to modify emergent properties (and their feedback effects on the social world).

In contrast to the tendency in cultural studies to neglect the specificity and logic of economic as opposed to other social categories, CPE aims to show how the economic field is socially constructed, acquires its specific emergent features and distinctive logic and dynamics, and remains vulnerable to disruption and dislocation. Moreover, in revealing the socially constructed nature of the phenomena of political economy, CPE involves a form...