Financial Centres as Fields: Reflections on Habitus and Risk in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Andrew Dilley ()
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Andrew Dilley: University of Aberdeen

A chapter in Decision Taking, Confidence and Risk Management in Banks from Early Modernity to the 20th Century, 2017, pp 125-145 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract This article develops a new understanding of the financial centre as a unit of analysis. It draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s generative structuralism to argue that financial centres constitute fields that possess a distinctive habitus through which risk is judged. Furthermore, Douglass North’s New Institutional Economics is used to argue that this distinctive habitus is the product of a combination of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ forces: economic and business structures, the role of states, social networks, and cultural factors. It pushes beyond a simple geographical understanding of the financial centre while asserting that the financial centre is indeed a critical level of analysis. Moreover, the approach taken strongly suggests the need for historians of finance to incorporate broader macro-level political, economic, social and cultural developments into their analyses.

Keywords: Central Bank; Financial Organisation; Banking System; Political Culture; Money Market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:psitcp:978-3-319-42076-9_6

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-42076-9_6

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