ABSTRACT
Financialisation is defined as a specific process for transforming the world, by practices, theories and instruments that originated in the financial sector and are now being used to reassess all sorts of questions, some of them theoretically far removed from that world. This chapter proposes a descriptive language to account for the distributed process. After resituating the concept of financialisation as used in the literature, the chapter also proposes to identify a certain number of basic operations that mark the stages along the road to financialisation, bringing out a gradual increase in financialisation, which can vary in intensity. The chapter focuses on the socio-technical arrangements that enable them to create the financing circuits in which they are the principal operators, the forms of knowledge and knowhow they use in these operations, and the techniques – primarily financial and legal – in which they are experts and on which their legitimacy is founded.
