Finance beyond function: Three causal explanations for financialization

In this article, I argue that the economization of social differences in the workplace is a political practice. I examine how, after the dismantling of corporate bureaucracies and affirmative action policies, diversity professionals create economic justifications for practices they regard as creating racial equity. Insofar as they do this to conveniently create markets for their expertise, diversity professionals work with, through, and around neoliberal logics, principles, and norms of the for‐profit firm. In asking why their strategies “work” in the era of the socially dispersed corporate form, I reflect on what it means for an American society to place more social value on the pursuit of profit than on racial justice.

Section: Corporate Cultures and Capitalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creating diversity markets through economization: The politics and economics of difference in neoliberal organizations

Arciniega

2021

“…In this article, we highlight the ambiguities of this financialization, and we connect these ambiguities to the way that CCT is appropriated by beneficiaries in debt and credit relationships. We propose a way of thinking about financialization as a political project (see also Pitluck, Mattioli, and Souleles 2018) through the relational uses of finance in defining and structuring social relations. We analyze how the monthly income provided by the cash transfer program reorganizes household budgets and creates networks of sociality, and we highlight how financial relations are deeply connected to these networks.…”

Section: Conditional Cash Transfermentioning

confidence: 99%

Gendered redistribution and family debt: The ambiguities of a cash transfer program in Brazil

Badue

Ribeiro

2018

Latin American conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs are usually regarded as policies of social protection that question the neoliberal agenda. This article suggests instead that the Brazilian CCT Bolsa Família (Family Grant) is ambiguous in the sense that it was consolidated in association with policies of expansion of financial markets in the country under the rubric of social rights and female emancipation. To analyze the ambiguities of the program, we first delve into official federal documents and practices, which expose the connections between financialization and cash transfer. Second, we build on ethnographic data investigating the financial lives of Bolsa Família beneficiaries in the city of São Paulo. Our findings suggest that there are two scales at which Bolsa Família is associated with financialization: on the national level, the state‐led policy of cash transfer provides the conditions for the expansion of the banking system, and vice versa; on the local level, among the beneficiaries, Bolsa Família and access to credit tools trigger lateral dependencies and family conflicts.

“…The anthropological study of financialization has successfully ventured into investment banks, into central banks, and onto trading floors (Cetina 2003; Holmes 2009; Ortiz 2014; Zaloom 2006). However, when studying nonprofessional financial practices ethnographically, anthropologists have focused almost exclusively on microfinance and neighboring subject matter (Pitluck, Mattioli, and Souleles 2018; Weiss 2020). This methodological bipolarity, which divides expert knowledge and financialized subjects as two discrete fields of anthropological inquiry, becomes particularly problematic when theorizing small‐time speculators' motives, practices, and trajectories in finance capitalism.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Gaming the crisis: Derivatives and unemployment in Spain

Núñez

2020

This article analyzes nonprofessional trading in derivatives during the Great Spanish Recession. It depicts playful engagements with speculative forms of credit and debt on the part of everyday people facing mass unemployment. The article calls into question contemporary theories of debt that characterize it as inherently destructive or inherently productive. My main argument suggests that credit‐debt dyads are constant sites of manipulation, negotiation, and improvisation informed by multiple registers of affect, knowledge, and value. In showing how play and playfulness arise in the field of finance, my research sheds light on extractive business models that exploit socioeconomic uncertainties as well as labor reforms advanced in times of recession. My ethnography traverses a variety of social terrains ranging from social media to brokerage firms, trading courses, stock exchanges, and self‐help workshops in order to complicate further the anthropological work on financialization. Without denying the negative and damaging effects of financialization, I focus on the contradictory ways in which ordinary citizens become financial subjects.