Afterword of ‘Financial frontiers': towards conceptualizing finance that engages both power and contingency

Karen Ho

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2023, vol. 16, issue 3, 453-461

Abstract: The critical and interdisciplinary scholarship analyzing finance, and specifically the relationship between financialization and inequality, has ballooned over the past twenty years. The increasing power and influence of financial and investment values, practices, policies, and networks have worked to leverage existing inequalities and construct novel regimes of accumulation that have increased socioeconomic precarity and dismantled socioeconomic protections for most. This fraught and unequal landscape has reinvigorated scholarly research and discussion on the role of finance in capitalism and on finance's relationship to other historical processes of inequality. Not surprisingly, much of this work on finance has faced similar questions and pitfalls as the critical scholarship on capitalism, namely, how to represent, analyze, and account for finance's power and influence without over-empowering, totalizing, presuming, or rendering inevitable finance's ability to remake the world in its own image. This Afterword engages this quandary, arguing that a dual approach is necessary – one that simultaneously shows finance's local contingencies, historical specificities, and unexpected trajectories alongside an approach that demonstrates finance's catalyzation of longstanding unequal structures produced through racial capitalism and colonialism to intensify contemporary inequality.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17530350.2023.2202678 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jculte:v:16:y:2023:i:3:p:453-461

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJCE20

DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2202678

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economy is currently edited by Michael Pryke, Joe Deville, Tony Bennett, Liz McFall and Melinda Cooper

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().