ABSTRACT
The recent financial crisis exposed both a naïve faith in mathematical models to manage risk and a crude culture of greed that embraces risk. This book explores cultures of finance in sites such as corporate governance, hedge funds, central banks, the City of London and Wall Street, and small and medium enterprises. It uses different methods to explore these cultures and their interaction with different financial orders to improve our understanding of financial crisis dynamics.
The introduction identifies types of cultural turn in studies of finance. Part I outlines relevant research methods, including comparison of national cultures viewed as independent variables, cultural political economy, and critical discourse and narrative policy analysis. Part II examines different institutional cultures of finance and the cult of entrepreneurship. Part III offers historical, comparative, and contemporary analyses of financial regimes and their significance for crisis dynamics. Part IV explores organizational cultures, modes of calculation, and financial practices and how they shape economic performance and guide crisis management. Part V considers crisis construals and responses in the European Union and China.
This book’s great strength is its multi-faceted approach to cultures of finance. Contributors deploy the cultural turn creatively to enhance comparative and historical analysis of financial regimes, institutions, organizations, and practices as well as their roles in crisis generation, construal, and management. Developing different paradigms and methods and elaborating diverse case studies, the authors illustrate not only how and why ‘culture matters’ but also how its significance is shaped by different financial regimes and contexts.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|58 pages
Researching cultures of finance
chapter 3|19 pages
Culture as discursive practice
part II|60 pages
Cultures of finance
chapter 4|21 pages
What price culture?
part III|46 pages
Cultural factors in financial crisis generation
part IV|61 pages
Economic imaginaries, financial calculation, and crisis dynamics
chapter 12|21 pages
A cultural political economy of financial imaginaries
part V|64 pages
Crisis construals and responses to financial crisis in Europe