The limits to financialization

Abstract

Over the past decade, the concept of financialization has moved from the periphery to the mainstream of scholarly inquiry across several social–scientific disciplines, human geography among them. The subject of a burgeoning, variegated literature advancing both theoretical delineation and empirical substantiation, processes of financialization, on many accounts, belong alongside those of globalization and neoliberalization as the defining dynamics of late modern capitalism. In the spirit of fostering a constructive dialogue, this article develops a broadly based critique of such accounts, one structured around the core idea of limits. Financialization, it suggests, is substantively limited, both as a concept and as the array of real-world processes to which that concept variously pertains. The article identifies and fleshes out five key sets of such limits and the connections between them: analytic, theoretic, strategic, optic, and empiric limits. If the concept of financialization is to do substantially positive descriptive and explanatory work going forward, the article submits, these limits must be explicitly recognized and their implications explicitly factored in. This, the article concludes, is no small challenge.

Embedding financialization: a policy review of the EnglishAffordable Homes Programme

“…By way of a conclusion, it is appropriate to relect on the use of inancialization as a framing for the above analysis and the nature of housing policy based on the discussion earlier in Section 2. hat discussion relected a number of limitations (Christophers, 2015;Deutschmann, 2011) to how the literature on inancialization has developed. In response, the analytic framing in this paper has been based on seeing inancialization as an ongoing process that is one element of the continued neoliberalization of economies and societies more broadly.…”

“…4 he term has been deployed in a number of disciplines. Christophers (2015) identiies three foundational versions of inancialization: as processes of capital accumulation and proit generation, whereby capitalism as a system has become inancialized (Arrighi, 1994;Krippner, 2005;Stockhammer, 2004); in the realm of corporate motives and governance based around the shareholder value revolution (Froud et al, 2000); and, with the expansion of inance's inluence into the sphere of daily life, the lived experience (Martin, 2002). Deutschman (2011) argues that inancialization can be seen operating at the macro-level (such as the studies by Arrighi, Krippner and Stockhammer), meso-level (studies by Froud et al, 2000;Haslam et al, 2015) and the micro-level (studies such as Langley, 2008;Martin, 2002).…”

“…he utilization of the inancialization as a concept has been critiqued with Christophers (2015) setting out a series of limits (existing and potential) to this body of work and challenging academics who use the term to be rigorously speciic. To that end, the framing utilized in this paper does not see inancialization as a new process that has only existed for the past quarter of a century or that inancialization is an inevitable, all encompassing process.…”

“…England), it does address one of the other limits advanced by Christophers (2015) that of the empiric, by which Christophers means whether inancialization is a real process. Taking just one element of inancialization, the increasing use of debt inance, as stated above the use of private inance (debt) is not new, indeed it is older than capitalism (Graeber, 2011); however, inancialization is a real component of the processes involved with remoulding public services to the requirements of private capital.…”

Geografía de los desahucios por ejecución hipotecaria en las ciudades españolas: evidencias a partir de las viviendas propiedad de la SAREB

“…El contexto global de financiarización de la economía, vivida a partir de los años setenta del siglo XX (Lapavitsas, 2011), se tradujo, especialmente a partir de los noventa, en una financiarización del entorno construido (Lapavistsas, 2009;Christophers, 2015) y en la galopante especulación inmobiliaria apoyada en la conceptualización de la vivienda como un motor de creación y apropiación de rentas (Vives-Miró y Rullan, 2014). En otros términos, es aquello que varios autores han conceptualizado como financiarización de la vivienda (Aalbers, 2008;Rolnik, 2013).…”