Social Studies of Finance

This paper analyzes the contestedness of contemporary operations of capital by looking at the conflictual constellation between corporate security frameworks and 'logistical resistance'. In recent years, protest movements around the world have engaged in acts of logistical resistance-such as blocking ports, occupying financial districts and disrupting infrastructural flows-with the intention of rendering capitalist transactions inoperable. Corporate actors increasingly regard these movements as threats to their operations and implement security frameworks such as Business Continuity Management (BCM) in finance and Supply Chain Security (SCS) in logistics. These security strategies help to maintain connectivity between heterogeneous operations of capital. Logistical resistance targets this connectivity and constitutes a threat to endeavours to 'secure circulation'. We analyze the uneasy relationship between logistical resistance and corporate security strategies. To do so we adopt an operational perspective that provides a particularly revealing lens for looking at technologies of security, which try to protect and maintain operations, as well as practices of resistance that try to disrupt or block them. We argue that both practices of resilience and resistance rely on and enact a particular ontology of operations. We combine our conceptual considerations concerning operations of capital, security and resistance with an analysis of particular cases: the role of BCM during public protests in Frankfurt's financial district which attempted to interrupt the banking business, and the role of SCS during attempts to block seaports in the context of Occupy Oakland and demonstrations against a recent G20 summit in Hamburg.

ABSTRACT This article argues the Malaysian state has developed Islamic finance in conjunction with two distinct strategies of subject formation. In its first phase, in the 1980s, a central objective was the financial inclusion of Malays. Islamic finance was part of an identity-building project and intended to integrate this disadvantaged indigenous majority into the national economy. By the 2000s the state had  succeeded in fostering a Malay Muslim middle class through aggressive affirmative action policies. Currently, Islamic finance is being redeployed as a technique for the neoliberal entrepreneurialization of the Malay  Muslim population. Empirically, this shift is evident in efforts by experts to move Islamic finance away from a reliance on what they call “debt-based” devices to ones referred to as “equity based.” This entails substituting devices that reformers contend replicate the credit and lending instruments characteristic of “conventional finance” with instruments instead premised on investment, partnership, and risk sharing that they argue more faithfully adhere to the discursive tradition of Islam. [Islam, development, neoliberalism, Islamic finance, debt]

The recent dispersion of algorithms throughout a large part of social life makes them valid analytical objects for sociology in the twenty-first century. The ubiquity of algorithms has led to increased public attention, scrutiny and, consequently, regulation. That is the focus of this paper. I will show that such regulatory processes are not just aimed at preventing certain algorithmic activities, but that they are also co-producing algorithms. They determine, in specific settings, what an algorithm is and what it ought to do. I will illustrate this by comparing two different European regulations aimed at algorithmic practices: the regulation of trading algorithms in the German High Frequency Trading Act and in the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II), and the regulation of personal data processing in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The article radically challenges the conventional view of modern banking as financial intermediation and rejects the mutually-related notion, firmly entrenched in both the mainstream and alternative imaginary, of fractional reserve banking. By contrast, it argues that modern banks are peculiar financiers which, far from banking other people's money, are originally and primarily involved with making money by creating a most fundamental institution of capitalism: liquidity. Crucially, central to the bank-engendered creation of liquidity is a negotiation of value that does not involve any formal lending of cash by a creditor - in fact, it does not require a creditor at all. Instead, it relies on a quid pro quo of debts performed by means of discounting whereby a regime of fluid property relations of mutual indebtedness, commonly known as debt finance, is established. In this regime of liquidity money is constructed as entirely a debtors' money: it is the outcome of a process of monetisation of bank debts entangled with a capitalisation of other people's debts.

When Costa Rican regulators set water rates, they effectively transform the human right to water into a price. I propose the notion of a “calculation grammar” to grasp the inventive patterns and vibrant social engagements that fuse the ethical investments, ontological assumptions, and quantified expressions involved in this process. This grammar governs the relative weights and proportions of the elements in numeric propositions, giving them distinct meanings and political valences. The liveliness of these propositions derives from the power of numeric techniques in their inevitably place-specific expressions as well as from the legal principles of sociality that enable them. I follow the mathematical formula regulators use to set water prices to reveal the inconspicuous financialization of human rights and the humanitarization of finance as they currently unfold across technocratic centers of calculation. I also argue for an ethnographic approach that remains committed to the ontological indivisibility of the technical and the cultural in any quantification effort. [human rights, prices, water,  calculation, regulation, finance, Costa Rica]

In the context of the recent financial meltdown, the financial industry has frequently been accused of being indifferent to the irregular practices of its members or even to be criminogenic. But how do actors of the financial industry respond to such accusations and defend themselves? How do they justify their actions when facing legal charges as well as public blame? This article elucidates these questions through a rare ethnographic case: the first criminal trial of a trader involved in the manipulation of Libor, which took place in London in 2015. Tied to at least $300 trillion contracts, Libor is a benchmark that plays a key role in the financial industry. The paper offers a sociological framework to capture the justifications of financial wrongdoings, arguing that they are structured around three elements: (a) a conception of rules; (b) a narrative; (c) a form of responsibility. I distinguish three justifications: the one of the maker, of the interpreter and of the user. I finally discuss how these justifications contribute to the general tolerance towards white-collar crime.

The recently rising field of Critical Data Studies is still facing fundamental questions. Among these is the enigma of digital subjectivation. Who are the subjects of Big Data? A field where this question is particularly pressing is finance. Since the 1990s traders have been steadily integrated into computerized data assemblages, which calls for an ontology that eliminates the distinction between human sovereign subjects and non-human instrumental objects. The latter subjectivize traders in pre-conscious ways, because human consciousness runs too slow to follow the volatility of the market. In response to this conundrum Social Studies of Finance has drawn on Actor-Network Theory to interpret financial markets as technically constructed networks of human and non-human actors. I argue that in order to develop an explicitly critical data study it might be advantageous to refer to Maurizio Lazzarato’s theory of machinic subjugation instead. Although both accounts describe financial digital subjectivation similarly, Lazzarato has the advantage of coupling his description to a clear critique of and resistance to finance.

Financial models vary according to their ability to shape markets. This ability depends on the way models are used in institutional settings. In contrast to the prevalent view that involvement in organizational practices almost automatically makes models performative, this paper argues that institutional design might obstruct potential model performativity. This crucial issue determines whether models are strongly or only ‘generically’ or ‘effectively’ performative. The empirical study of the usage of the discounted cash flow (DCF) model presented in this paper offers an example of an application practice that significantly limits the model’s performative power.

In this paper, we examine the process of risk commodification involved in the creation of a market for weather derivatives in Europe. We approach this issue through an in-depth qualitative study in which we focus on the commensuration process by which promoters try to draw weather risk into the financial world. By offering a concrete description of a derivatives market as a meeting place between different metrics, our results highlight the failure of a process of commensuration-a phenomenon not so often studied empirically in the literature-and its unexpected results. Compared to existing research, we use the theoretical framework provided by to enrich the literature on commensuration specifically as regards the different forms of agreement to which commensuration attempts can lead. Our results highlight the crucial role of a common interest for commensuration to succeed, and the conditions necessary for this common interest to occur. We conclude that there are limits to the thesis of financial theory, according to which all kinds of risks can be transformed into financial risk, and exchanged on financial markets.

The sovereign debt market represents one of the most active and highly regarded fields of financial transaction. Nevertheless, the trading of public debt securities is no natural phenomenon. It is the fruit of a long social and political process. We have chosen the history of France's public finances as the subject of our empirical investigation because France represents a unique example of marketization of state finances outside the capitalist mode of production. We posit that the birth of this market system can be traced back to the introduction of the paulette tax in 1604, a reform which modified the rules governing the granting, valuation and transmission of public offices, creating the necessary conditions for a market on which these titles could be exchanged freely. This paper is based on archival research and information gathered from the French National Archives and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF). The concept of socio-technical devices proposed by Çalısķan and Callon provides a theoretical reference framework to the extent that it allows us to define the nature of the market relations established. However, the case of the office market brings to the fore the need to distinguish between marketization and the notion of market agencement. The market for offices came about less from economic theories or practices than from political

In the last decades, revolutionary changes in financial markets, instruments, and institutions have stimulated empirical and theoretical investigations into the interaction of the financial and the "real" side of economic systems. While a considerable body of empirical investigations seems to provide evidence of positive correlations between stock market development and economic growth, there is no consensus in other social sciences as to whether there are twoway linkages, and if so, how to conceive a possible mechanism of interaction. Particularly, the hypergrowth and ubiquity of financial markets has triggered controversial debates on how to understand today's economic landscape. With the objective of clarifying the relationship between finance and economy, this article restructures the present debate through the lenses of Talcott Parsons's and Niklas Luhmann's theories of social systems. Basic system-theoretical ideas on social aspects of finance and economy as well as on uncertainty and risk hint at new insights into the global system of finance that might go far beyond explanatory models of causality.

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It is known that some key elements of modern consumer credit were originally developed in department stores. However, almost no attention has been given to new developments in this area. This paper studies the case of retail credit in Chile. Special attention is given to a particular technique known as “to sow” (or issuing small loans to risky consumers that are made to grow by carefully following and classifying purchase and debt behavior), whose success has been enabled by the development of a wide quantitative datascape. Following the practice of “sowing” helps to understand how consumer credit is not only mediated by market devices, but how it practically works as a device of marketing on its own.

Existing research on how increasing household debt becomes seen as normal by consumers focuses on the shifting moral meanings of debt. Examining the rapid escalation of mortgage debt in post-socialist Hungary, we propose a different approach. We use practice theory to identify credit use as 'ordinary consumption' (Gronow and Warde, 2001), undertaken not for its own sake but to enable other meaningful practices. We find that mortgage debt grew due to the co-evolution of norms of a normal life centred on the home and credit instruments that facilitated and, eventually, locked in these norms. This 'naturalization' process (Wilk 2009) did not so much shift the meaning of debt but rather stripped it of meaning, making it increasingly unreflected. The process relied on mortgage instruments that served as invisible background infrastructures providing access to credit. This invisibility, however, is not a natural characteristic of mortgages, we argue, but a contested quality, and it was achieved by particular selling devices and discourses. Our analysis stresses the politics of invisibility and highlights the commercial interests at play in relegating highly risky, foreign-currency denominated mortgages into the background. Emphasising the socio-material structuring of this process, we conclude by situating both meaning-based and unreflected naturalization processes in a common framework, as contingent qualities of credit consumption. 2

In this paper, I suggest that financial products simultaneously inhabit two regimes of valuation: calculative and consumptive. There are constant endeavors in the market to develop formal mathematical methods of valuation and to use them as a base for investment decisions. Using the example of contingent convertible bonds (“cocos”), I argue that our understanding of how financial markets function would remain limited if we were to focus only on those formal endeavors. In the case of cocos, stringent mathematical valuation is impossible due to the contingent nature of this product and many future uncertainties. Based on various empirical materials, I demonstrate that the lack of established valuation tools is complemented and compensated by the purposeful efforts to sell this product. Cocos are categorized as simple bonds in order to be sold; they are associated with brands; their risks are marketed in a particular way. This consumptive regime of valuation allows for determining value and investing where formal mathematical valuation is deferred. Thus, incorporating the insight that marketing constitutes markets, the paper sheds light on how financial markets function, and amends the purely calculative perspective of mainstream finance. Furthermore, the paper relates consumptive finance to major issues in critical finance, such as power and governance, risk ignorance and financial illiteracy. More generally, it argues that active selling efforts represent a severe research gap in critical and social studies of finance and should be more clearly outlined and developed.

In this paper, we examine the issue of the process of risk commodification through derivatives, a process that had not been precisely studied in the literature yet. We approach this issue through an indepth qualitative study of a new derivatives market that implies the interactions of different actors around the notion of risk: the European Market for weather risk. Building on Thevenot's framework (1991/2006), we describe risk commodification as a justification process by which the promoters try to drag risk into the Market World. Our results offer a concrete description of a derivatives market as a meeting place between different worlds, and allow to precisely characterize the market structure, which remains remote from the initial objective of its initiators. These findings highlight the complexity of risk commodification and suggest that there are limits to the thesis of financial theory according to which all kinds of risks can be transformed into financial risk and exchanged on financial markets.

Contemporary financial markets have recently witnessed a sea change with the ‘algorithmic revolution’, as trading automats are used to ease the execution sequences and reduce market impact. Being constantly monitored, they take an active part in the shaping of markets, and sometimes generate crises when ‘they mess up’ or when they entail situations where traders cannot go backwards. Algorithms are software codes coding practices in an IT significant ‘textual’ device, designed to replicate trading patterns. To be accepted, however, they need to comply with regulatory texts, which are nothing else but codes of conduct coding accepted practices in the markets. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in order to open these black boxes, while trying to describe their existence as devices encapsulating several points of views. I address the question of a possible misalignment between those visions, and more specifically try to draw the consequences raised by such discrepancies as regards the future of financial regulation.

The article intertwines the history of the American credit card, its standardization, and interactional realization with the latest developments in payment systems. Understanding both credit cards and systems like Apple Pay or blockchain-based applications as part of an administrative longue durée, it argues for a different understanding of the Internet of Things. It should be understood both as a technical-informational and as an accounting infrastructure, with tensions arising between both segments.

Ongoing European financial market integration relies on the creation of harmonized and centralized market infrastructures: the little-known institutions and systems that settle financial transactions across borders. Since the constitutional conception of market integration within the EU entails creating ‘a level playing field’ for competition, a fundamental problem emerges of how to provide that centralization and harmonization without violating the core principles of an open market economy either through private monopolization or public privatization. The paper presents a socio-technological study of a recent major infrastructure initiative by the European Central Bank, called Target2 Securities (T2S). Embedding the analysis of the struggles and debates around the birth and development of T2S in an analysis of the structural problem of competition and centralization in European financial market integration, the paper suggests an alternative perspective to that of performativity currently dominating the research field.

In this essay, we provide a materialist analysis of Adam McKay’s 2015 film The Big Short. We contend that while, on one level, the film appears to be a celebration of several idiosyncratic traders on Wall Street who use rhetorical invention to outwit the industry, on another level, the film can be read as a genealogically informed account of the biopolitical relationship between the oikos and the polis and Main Street and Wall Street. We conclude by advocating for an account of the 2008 financial crisis that is sensitive to the historically overdetermined relationship among rhetoric, politics, and economic power.

Amid escalating claims about the promises and perils of emergent financial technologies (fintech), critical investigation of the extent to which specific technological changes in global finance are truly ‘disruptive’ is sorely needed. Yet, IPE has engaged little with the growing focus on fintech in popular and regulatory debates, as well as in Social Studies of Finance (SSF). This article and accompanying special issue foreground ‘infrastructures’ as a heuristic for injecting nuance into debates on the emergence, limits and implications of technological changes in global finance while bringing IPE into conversation with perspectives on fintech in cognate literatures. Building on insights developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS), we argue that tracing the ways in which infrastructures enabling financial markets to operate are assembled out of multiple old and new socio-technical devices offers productive avenues for addressing key questions arising from several entanglements underpinning technological change. The findings of contributions to this special issue are linked to two key themes in debates on the impacts of technological change: financial inclusion and financial stability. Further avenues are proposed for examining the infrastructures in which technological change occurs in global finance and beyond, while fostering on-going dialogues between IPE, STS and SSF.

This essay partakes in the dialogue between history, anthropology, and
social theory on the topic of debt as a social relation. Drawing on sources from nineteenth-century Switzerland, it examines everyday routines of debt collection in liberalism by taking the seized collateral object to the center of historical analysis. It is shown how the attached goods in a debtor’s household became an object of knowledge for nineteenth-century framers of law as well as for ordinary debtors. I make use of anthropological theory in order to describe the legal techniques of delineating and extracting collateral, and show how these legal techniques implied specific knowledge practices. I then look at two borderline cases of collateralization: the pawning of mobile goods and the imprisonment of insolvent debtors. Overall, on an epistemological level, debt collection appears as a double movement: it provided basic tools to untangle property relationships, yet all the while it created new, unpredictable complications. Thus debt collection was a distinctive arena in which the uneasy conceptual relationship between people and things in nineteenth-century liberalism unfolded. From this conceptual node I propose a historical epistemology of the collateral object.

Le poids et le rôle économique grandissant de la finance constituent le point de départ de la caractérisation du phénomène de financiarisation par la littérature économique. Cette qualification critique met en évidence l’importance prise par la finance à travers ses marchés, ses instruments (notamment les produits dérivés), ses acteurs, ses institutions et ses visées, soulignant la captation et l’accumulation des profits au détriment de l’ « économie réelle » par le déploiement de logiques essentiellement spéculatives. Le capitalisme financier, faisant système, subordonne ainsi l’ensemble des différents pans de la société en imposant ses référents normatifs et ses rapports de force, captant l’essentiel de la valeur et instituant des mécanismes de rentes financières.

The paper examines how discourses about the financial crisis were constructed in 2007 and the first half of 2008 in various Swiss and German banks. Based on ethnographic materials, this paper analyses the organisation of discussions and presentations about the future in financial institutions and argues that such analysis can contribute significantly to our understanding of global ignorance before and during the crisis. Forecasting discourses are rigorously structured in such a way that the production of unrealistic predictions and, thus, of fictions and illusions is more or less inevitable. Particularly in the representational mode (or at the front stage, according to Erving Goffman), the pressure imposed by the audience's expectations leads to forecasts that are rigid, formal, number-oriented and rather artificially precise. Because the convention at the front stage is to present a scientifically justified and unambiguous definition of the situation, major uncertainties and potential surprises are downplayed or largely excluded; in this way, ignorance and fictions about the future are created. It might be argued that these social enforcements are so rigid that even during the crisis only minor discursive shifts could be observed.

This chapter considers what two sociologies of markets have got to do with Organisation Studies. Special attention is paid to two main strands. First, an overview is given of how economic organisations were understood in the new economic sociology developed (mostly) in the US after M. Granovetter's essay on embeddedness drew attention to the role played by social networks in economic action. The chapter then turns to how the 'new new economic sociology' produced (mostly) in Europe after the performative turn initiated by Callon´s Laws of the Markets (1998) challenged this account by pointing instead to the role played by devices or agencements in processes like calculation,

This short essay presents the case for a renewed research agenda in STS focused on the political economy of technoscience. This research agenda is based on the claim that STS needs to take account of contemporary economic and financial processes and how they shape and are shaped by technoscience. This necessitates understanding how these processes might impact on science, technology and innovation, rather than turning an STS gaze on the economy.

Administrative cultures of local governments have changed significantly, internalizing an imperative of "municipal debt management" that increasingly entangles city halls with financial markets. This new culture is enabled by innovative technologies, shifting rationalities as well as changing social relations, reflected in strenuous budgeting systems and the mobilization of derivatives and private financial experts. We discuss how these financial innovations are presented as logical solution to municipalities facing budget constraints, yet should be situated in conditions of austerity, New Public Management-agendas and crisis-related market conjunctures. The chapter reviews recent literature and presents empirical material from various European cases.

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. This realization has led to cries for change—yet there is little popular awareness of possible alternatives. Beyond Debt describes efforts to create a transnational economy free of debt. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Rudnyckyj shows how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on scholarship that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how Islamic finance is deployed to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, Rudnyckyj shows how experts seek to create a new “geoeconomics”—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.

Ever larger parts of life and nature are integrated in our socioeconomic system as future cash flows, augmenting obscure, unstable and unsustainable debt structures. The larger and deeper these debt structures grow, the larger, more multifaceted and destructive the inequality divide in our societies becomes. It is now normal for people to live indebted, as it is normal for young students to have their future monetised through student loans, the debt implications of which may never escape. What forces normalise these abnormal and unsustainable patterns and our rather admissive/submissive response to them? How our lives and future have been monetised and where have our social consent and agency been in these processes? Is there a way out, before crossing the boundary of social sustainability and environmental collapse? The three books examined here offer refreshing and complementary perspectives on these 'big questions' on which our monetised future depends.

The issue concerning performativity has been under debate in the field of social studies of finance in the past few years. Until recently, the trend has consisted in transforming the original concept of Austin from its linguistic base into a concept, which takes into account the critiques of Bourdieu. Assuming this, should we consider the question that a linguistic approach is not suitable for the studies of markets ? We postulate that not, that there is still a place for an Austinian analysis of financial markets, with regard to the relationship between performativity and normativity.

In this article, I apply an analysis of affects to results from my fieldwork of companies working in Algorithmic Trading and High-Frequency Trading (HFT), also known as “automated trading”. In order to delineate the affective specificity and singularity of the socio-technical ecology (affectif) in algorithmic finance, I use affect analysis to capture the multidimensional nature of human-machine relations. A historical comparison with previous affective relations in financial markets, such as attraction to the stock market ticker and syntheses with screens in manual trading, renders visible multiplied and intensified complex multi-frequential bonds – material, electrical, visual, acoustic, cognitive and bodily – between humans and machines. This is somewhat counterintuitive, because it means that automation in fact intensifies complex human-machine relations. Moreover, it is the intensity of these affective relations that underpins the coherence of HFT socio-technical systems. In order to account for the distinctiveness of affective relations in algorithmic finance I suggest the concept of affective symbiosis.
In the following section, I will give a short introduction to automated trading. This introduction will be of a rather general nature and focus selectively on those aspects that are relevant for the topic of this book chapter.

Abstract: Social studies of finance can be split in two types: studies that have paid attention to “market devices” (such as scorings and credit cards) enacted by financial firms and studies that analyze new practices and modes of “ordinary calculation” developed by consumers of financial services around the world. This article is part of a broader project that aims at opening a different path that locates social studies of
domestic finances at the intersection where both kinds of calculation – the big data of market devices and the small data of ordinary financial practices- can be simultaneously observed. More specifically, this article discusses some of the methodological challenges faced from this new position, particularly, how we used some of the traces left by big data and how we dealt with an surprising “commercial circuit” founded in our material.

Mobilisant une variété de cadres théoriques issus des sciences sociales, les auteurs, membres de l'Association des Études Sociales de la Finance, font le point sur quinze années de recherches interdisciplinaires. Ils proposent une perspective critique des représentations portées par le paradigme dominant de la finance contemporaine, en les confrontant aux réalités financières.
À travers une étude fine de ses instruments, du fonctionnement de ses intermédiaires financiers et de ses institutions, ils analysent la fabrique de la finance : la structuration des dispositifs bancaires et financiers, leur capacité à prescrire l'action et à la contrôler, les modes et les pratiques de régulation mis en œuvre et, plus globalement, le processus de financiarisation. Ils s’adressent ainsi à toutes celles et tous ceux qui souhaitent mieux comprendre cet étrange et si puissant univers.

Table des matières :

Avant-propos. Pour une approche interdisciplinaire de la finance
Isabelle Chambost, Marc Lenglet et Yamina Tadjeddine

Introduction. Ce que la finance fabrique
Olivier Godechot

Partie 1 : Remise en cause du paradigme classique dominant

Chapitre 1. Domestication sociologique d'un produit financier. Le cas des dérivés
David Martin

Chapitre 2. Comment maîtriser le risque porté par les produits financiers ?
Pierre de Larminat

Chapitre 3. Le service financier, un bien singulièrement social
Yamina Tadjeddine

Chapitre 4. Imaginaires politiques et moraux des pratiques financières
Horacio Ortiz

Partie 2 : Analyse des dispositifs bancaires et financiers

Chapitre 5. Les marchés boursiers juniors et les PME : une relation idyllique ?
Le cas de l'Alternative Investment Market
Valérie Revest

Chapitre 6. Travail institutionnel de justification dans la notation de crédit : la réaffirmation du pouvoir des agences
Benjamin Taupin

Chapitre 7. Le rôle des analystes financiers dans la construction sociale de la valeur financière
Isabelle Chambost

Chapitre 8. Force de travail et formation professionnelle dans les banques
Marnix Dressen

Chapitre 9. Banques coopératives : une place sociale dans la finance ?
Pascale Moulévrier

Partie 3 : Analyse des modes et des pratiques de régulation

Chapitre 10. Structures et dispositifs de la finance responsable
Élise Penalva-Icher

Chapitre 11. Déontologie financière et régulation des pratiques : un paradoxe redoublé
Marc Lenglet

Chapitre 12. La régulation financière : questions de point de vue
Jacques-Olivier Charron

Partie 4 : Processus de financiarisation

Chapitre 13. Les territoires de la finance, le cas parisien
Yamina Tadjeddine

Chapitre 14. Les partenariats public-privé (PPP) : des justifications scientifiques et vulgaires entre besoin de financement et gouvernance microéconomique
Géry Deffontaines

Chapitre 15. Le tissage de notre vie quotidienne et de la finance
Jeanne Lazarus

Chapitre 16. Les ressorts de la domination financière. Le cas des LBO
Isabelle Chambost

Chapitre 17. Penser la finance comme rapport social : la gestion d'actifs, nouvelle arène du conflit capital-travail
Sabine Montagne

Postface
Michel Aglietta

Bibliographie générale
Notices biographiques

The post-disciplinary ethos is to work after and with the modern disciplines; to draw on theories and methods developed in different disciplinary contexts, but to do so in ways that might shed new light on evolving financial practices and the worlds these create.

How exactly did the neoliberal imaginary that Konings describes gain so much traction? Was its speculative temporality smoothly translated into practice from the writings of Hayek and others as he suggests, or was its production a messier, more contested, and more contingent affair? In this brief commentary, I go back to one of the key historical moments that he examines, the Volcker shock of 1979-82, and examine some of the more mundane political and technical struggles that defined the early Reagan Administration’s efforts to put the neoliberal speculative logic into practice. By revealing the often-flawed material efforts that go into producing speculative temporalities, I argue that such struggles might allow us to arrive at a less teleological account of the resilience of neoliberalism.

Most of the time, religion viewed as a motive for conflict and has emerged as a key component in many current and past conflicts. However, religion does not always drive violence; it is also an integral factor in the peace building and reconciliation process. So, this paper assessed the peace building contribution role of the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), following the post-2007 election violence in Kenya. The National Council of Churches of Kenya took instant humanitarian and peace building roles during the 2007 election violence. There was the provision of psychosocial support to address issues of trauma occasioned by loss of lives and infliction of emotional and physical harm. In addition, it also conducted the provision of food and non food items. Moreover, capacity building workshops for church leaders were held to build their capacity in mediation and peace building skills. Furthermore, In addition, ecumenical joint services were held incorporating the Christians, the Muslims and the Hindus. Finally, the Council was involved in influencing the passage of pieces of legislation such as the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Act , National Cohesion and Integration Act, The Constitutional Review Act of 2008, and the Witness Protection Act in the Kenyan Parliament. In general, The paper deals with issues such as the general background of the role of religion in Africa as both source of conflict and peace building; the cause and impacts of 2007 election violence in Kenya; the background and the role of religious institution (National Council of Churches of Kenya) in the post 2007 election violence in Kenya; and my conclusion is included at last. In short, I tried to assess to what extent religious institutions should play a role in managing conflict based on religious connections in Africa by taking the case study of Kenya.

This article deals with the seemingly paradoxical location of European hedge funds as a rational response to the constraints particular to this sector of activity. Instead of setting up shop in the wide open spaces of peripheral areas of big cities the way large banking and financial groups have, hedge funds have preferred to concentrate their facilities downtown in upscale districts such as Vendôme, Marigny, Mayfair and Saint James Park. These districts now accommodate these start-ups of modern finance that advocate financial leverage, risk-taking and secrecy. This article is based on a dual quantitative and qualitative analysis of the location of hedge funds in London and Paris. I aim to show that their location in high-end areas is due to a rational informational approach, since their address is a signal to investors and employees alike, especially for independent firms that lack a reputation and refuse to provide information to the public.

Financial competencies are about knowledge and understanding of both, financial concepts and financial risks, as well as the confidence to put them into practice. Ludic didactic strategies can be oriented towards knowledge acquisition of such skills. This paper aims to describe the impact of the use of a ludic didactic strategy to acquire financial competencies in undergraduate Management students in the CARAO – UASLP. This study is correlational, longitudinal with a quantitative approach that includes a quasiexperiment. A previous financial competencies diagnosis was performed as well as a latter one in an experimental and control group using a test and a survey. All of the students allocated in the second semester were tested and surveyed. The intervention done only in the experimental group was through a board game called “Cashflow 101” during a period of time of two months. The test outcomes show that most students require financial education and according to the survey approximately 70% has never used financial services altogether. Nevertheless, a relationship was found among financial competencies and various aspects of social contexts, such as owning a house or a car, which seem to increase the chances of having used financial services. Overall, it is clear that the use of the board game serves as a ludic tool for developing financial skills in a ludic form.