ABSTRACT
The current global financial crisis has raised awareness of the impact the world of finance has on the economy and the future of democracy. Following the crisis, this book aims at a deep understanding of the human psycho-social dynamics beneath the surface of the financial industry, its markets and institutions. It seeks to understand why the seemingly rational world of economic behavior, with its calculated models and predictions, at times goes horribly wrong.
This book uses the discipline of socio-analysis to explore the meaning of money, markets and the broad financial world that so strongly affects our daily lives. Socio-analysis contributes to an awareness and understanding of underlying unconscious desires, fantasies and illusions that bring about the irrational inflation of faith and trust in the world of money, finance and capital(ism). The insight that the financial crisis ‘was essentially psychological in origin’ (Robert Shiller) and that the world of finance is broadly shaped if not determined by irrational often unconscious factors is not yet broadly shared. This book appears to be one of the first, if not the first contribution that explicitly focuses on what is beneath the surface of money, finance and capital. It invites the reader to explore the financial world in depth.
The aim of this book is to provide businesses, organizational consultants, students, researchers and interested persons more broadly with a detailed exploration of the psycho-social dynamics of the financial industry as it exists currently within the capitalist system. The contributors to this book come from Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, The Netherlands, UK, and USA.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|71 pages
Money
chapter 5|16 pages
Inside the minds of the money minders
chapter 6|15 pages
The attempted murder of money and time
part II|173 pages
Finances
chapter 8|15 pages
Sense-making stories and evaluative cultures of fund managers
chapter 9|15 pages
What, me worry?
chapter 10|14 pages
The failure of risk management in the financial industry
chapter 12|15 pages
Trading opportunities and risks
chapter 13|14 pages
Roles, risks and complexity
chapter 14|15 pages
When profit seeking trumps safety
chapter 16|16 pages
The consumer credit boom and its aftermath in Hungary
chapter 17|12 pages
Falling bankers and falling banks
part III|99 pages
Capitalism
chapter 21|14 pages
The financial crisis
chapter 22|15 pages
Profit as organizing meaning
chapter 23|14 pages
Anti-oedipal dynamics in the sub-prime loan debacle
chapter 24|14 pages
Capitalist imperatives and the democratie capacities' constraint
part |15 pages
Conclusion