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Details
- Examines a range of financial issues of popular concern: consumer borrowing, the pensions crisis, the sub-prime mortgage finance, and the rise of mutual funds
- Challenges the perception that the global markets, such as Wall St. and the City of London, dominate financial trends
- Innovative contribution to the sociology of finance literature
In the US and UK, saving and borrowing routines have changed radically and become closely bound-up with the capital markets of global finance. As mutual funds have increased in popularity and pension provision has been transformed, many more individuals and households have come to invest in stocks and shares. As consumer borrowing has risen dramatically and mortgage finance has been extended to those deemed sub-prime, so the repayments of credit card holders and mortgagors have provided the basis for the issue and trading of bonds and other market instruments.
The Everyday Life of Global Finance explores the unprecedented relationships that now bind society and the markets, challenging the dominant tendency to simply position recent developments in Wall Street and the City of London at the centre of contemporary finance. Grounded in literature from the sociology of finance and international political economy, drawing on the social theory of Callon, Foucault, and Latour, and informed by extensive empirical research, the book shows how global finance has become mundane and ordinary in Anglo-America. Finance is not 'out there somewhere', but is embedded in the calculative technologies and performances of reconfigured saving and borrowing networks, and is embodied through the assembly of everyday financial identities and self-disciplines. Society's new-found relationships with the financial markets are also shown, however, to be marked by stark inequalities, manifest contradictions, and political dissent.
The Everyday Life of Global Finance is thus an ambitious and innovative contribution to our understanding of the contemporary financial world.
Readership: Academics, researchers, and advanced students across the social science interested in the making of the financial system, and the current financial crisis.
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Introduction
1: Networks, Power, Identity, and Dissent
Part I: Saving
2: From Thrift and Insurance to Everyday Investment
3: Pensions and Everyday Investment
4: The Uncertain Subjects of Everyday Investment
5: Socially Responsible Investment
Part II: Borrowing
6: The Boom in Everyday Borrowing
7: Inequalities in Everyday Borrowing
8: The Uncertain Subjects of Everyday Borrowing
9: Dissent in Everyday Borrowing
Conclusion
10: The Sub-Prime Crisis
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Paul Langley, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Northumbria University
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Review(s) from previous edition
"The credit crisis shows the importance of understanding how everyday saving and borrowing interact with global finance. Langley provides a thorough, sophisticated and timely analysis. - Donald MacKenzie, Professor of Sociology, University of Edinburgh, and author of An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets
"This is a major study of how the 'democratization of finance' in our time has worked to create new identities for savers and borrowers. It challenges us all to think again about how we understand the remaking of present day capitalism." - Karel Williams, Professor of Accounting and Political Economy, University of Manchester
"In a major statement of the new IPE, Paul Langley demonstrates how everyday forms of saving and borrowing produce subject positions and financial identities among everyday actors that are the 'unrecognized' constitutive elements of the global financial order." - Mark Blyth, Associate Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
"This is an undeniably important and timely book. We are at a moment of significant change and uncertainty within the Anglo-American financial system within which many of us are irrevocably entangled due to our everyday roles as borrowers and/or savers. Langley reveals with skill and insight how we have arrived at this particular financial and political conjuncture and, in doing so, provides an important resource to help determine where we may be headed." - Andrew Leyshon, Professor of Economic Geography, University of Nottingham
