Distinguishing Financialization from Neoliberalism

This article contends that neoliberalism and financialization, although sharing much in common, are not synonymous developments. Not only do strongly financialized nations display structural, economic differences, they are also directed by alternative economic epistemologies, cultures and practices. The argument is made by examining the financialization of the UK economy since the mid-1970s. This shift was not simply part of a broad transition away from Keynesianism and towards free market fundamentalism. It was also one very much guided by the particular economic paradigm, discursive practices and devices of the City of London as financial elites took up influential positions in the Thatcher government. The discussion and case example highlight five epistemological elements specific to finance: the creation of money in financial markets, the transactional focus of finance, the centrality of financial markets to economic management, the orthodoxy of shareholder value, and the intense microeconomic approach to financial calculation. Such elements, in conjuction with neoliberalism’s reliance upon finance-blind neoclassical economics, lies at the cultural and epistemological distinction between fiancialization and neoliberalism. Identifying such distinctions opens up new possibilities for understanding financialization, elites, and the neoliberal condition that brought about the financial crash of 2007-08, as well as the political and economic crises that have followed

Secret Societies: Intimations of Organization

This paper uses the secret society to pose questions about the politics, epistemology and ontology of organizing. Against assumptions of transparency, or the possibility of hermeneutic understanding, I suggest that much organizing is actually invisible and opaque. The paper begins with a consideration of the characteristics of historical and contemporary organizational conspiracies, and then moves on to elaborate what sort of ‘facts’ need to be claimed about a secret society to bring it into existence. After a section on the politics of contemporary organizational conspiracies, the paper concludes with some speculations on what the example of the secret society can tell us about the paranoia required by contemporary organizational researchers, as well as the ontology of organizations. After all, we have still never seen an organization

Chapter 4. Extract of Africa: Towards the Equitable and Ecologically Sound Governance of Mining and Drilling

Background: Economists and political scientists have long recognised four kinds of goods: private, public, common-pool and club, the assumption being that category membership is determined by the physical properties of the goods themselves. But in the theory of plural rationality—the approach taken in this chapter—where specific goods end up is, to the extent that that is not determined by their physical properties, the outcome of a never-ending struggle between four kinds of social solidarity: individualism (which works towards privatisation), hierarchy (which favours the creation of public goods), egalitarianism (which is supported by common-pool goods) and fatalism (whose upholders enable club goods by the ease with which they can be excluded). Methodology: The study uses historical surveys and case-studies of different contexts where natural resource governance has upset harmonious relationship between different stakeholders. Application/Relevance to systems analysis: Our argument is that policy and governance, particularly in Africa, have allowed (indeed encouraged) individualism and hierarchy to dominate, thereby drowning out the other two institutional “voices”. The result, as we show by way of a continent-wide historical survey and three case-studies—REDD+ in the Democratic Republic of Congo, acid mine drainage in South Africa and oil extraction in Nigeria—has been “crap” governance (in contrast to good governance, which requires that all four voices are both heard and responded to by the others). Put another way, the “resource curse” is not the inevitable consequence of a country being heavily reliant on extractive industries; it stems from insufficient “clumsiness”: exemplified, as Kofi Annan has recently pointed out, by just two solidarities—multinational companies (individualism) and political leaders (hierarchy)—colluding to swindle the citizens out of their just rewards from their natural resources. Policy implications: Of policy implication, is the bringing-in of the two currently excluded voices, and we conclude by showing how, in relation to our case-studies, this can be achieved. Conclusion: Analyses of resource-related conflicts, especially in Africa, have often ignored the voices of the excluded social solidarities. Analysing this problem through a systems perspective will allow the incorporation of all voices as a way of constructing a more harmonious system in natural resource governance