Constructing and contesting City of London power: NGOs and the emergence of noisier financial politics

Existing literature on the City of London has tended to focus on its ‘structural power’, while neglecting political and narrative agency. This article acts as a corrective by presenting evidence to show that since the financial crash of 2008, the political terrain the City operates on has become more contested, crowded and noisier. The contribution develops a middle course between a positive assessment of the role of civil society in relation to global finance, and a more pessimistic reading. We demonstrate how macro-narratives and public storytelling both construct and contest City and financial sector power. In a new pattern since the financial crash, NGOs have moved from campaigns of limited duration and narrow focus, to a more sustained presence on macro-structural issues. Adopting a supply-demand framework for assessing governance and regulatory change we look at the emergence of the CityUK as a new advocacy arm and the strategies of three of the more prominent and focused NGOs that have mobilised in the aftermath of the crash: the Tax Justice Network’s (TJN) use of the ‘finance curse’; Positive Money on private endogenous money creation; and Finance Watch counterweight strategies at the level of European Union (EU). We suggest these mobilizations highlight the need for a more concerted and orchestrated construction of a global institutional civil society infrastructure in finance (a global financial public sphere) to achieve greater access, resources, scrutiny and oversight for a range of specialist expert NGOs

Constructing and contesting City of London power: NGOs and the emergence of noisier financial politics

Existing literature on the City of London has tended to focus on its ‘structural power’, while neglecting political and narrative agency. This article acts as a corrective by presenting evidence to show that since the financial crash of 2008, the political terrain the City operates on has become more contested, crowded and noisier. The contribution develops a middle course between a positive assessment of the role of civil society in relation to global finance, and a more pessimistic reading. We demonstrate how macro-narratives and public storytelling both construct and contest City and financial sector power. In a new pattern since the financial crash, NGOs have moved from campaigns of limited duration and narrow focus, to a more sustained presence on macro-structural issues. Adopting a supply-demand framework for assessing governance and regulatory change we look at the emergence of the CityUK as a new advocacy arm and the strategies of three of the more prominent and focused NGOs that have mobilised in the aftermath of the crash: the Tax Justice Network’s (TJN) use of the ‘finance curse’; Positive Money on private endogenous money creation; and Finance Watch counterweight strategies at the level of European Union (EU). We suggest these mobilizations highlight the need for a more concerted and orchestrated construction of a global institutional civil society infrastructure in finance (a global financial public sphere) to achieve greater access, resources, scrutiny and oversight for a range of specialist expert NGOs

Auditing with accountability : shrinking the opportunity spaces for audit failure

In recent years a number of high-profile company failures have raised fundamental questions about the willingness and/or ability of auditors to exercise the professional scepticism necessary for the production of robust audits. This report, co-written by Adam Leaver at the University of Sheffield and Leonard Seabrooke, Saila Stausholm and Duncan Wigan at Copenhagen Business School, examines the causes of those failures and makes a series of recommendations on how to resolve them. The report argues that audit failure takes place within a particular configuration of economic, cultural and regulatory arrangements which create the 'opportunity spaces' for poor practice. Shrinking those opportunity spaces therefore requires a multi-dimensional response, including the structural separation of audit and non-audit functions, a more robust system of fines and the integration of a civil society voice into the reform process to prevent regulatory capture

Against hollow firms : repurposing the corporation for a more resilient economy

The Covid-19 pandemic is revealing latent weaknesses at large, well-established companies who may now require state support. This report argues that those weaknesses pre-date the current pandemic and are a consequence of excesses in the non-financial corporate sector during the post-2008 economy. Those excesses include: i) historically high levels of dividends and buybacks which, in many cases, exceeded earnings and hollowed out reserves ii) the growth of low-prime debt, which risks being downgraded to junk in the current crisis and iii) a build-up of ‘fair valued’ assets, often intangible assets such as goodwill, which are vulnerable to write downs that could push firms into negative shareholder equity

The 1930s as black mirror: Visions of historical repetition in the global financial press, 2007-2009

Media coverage of the recent financial crisis has referred extensively to various past crises, and in particular to the events of the 1930s. This article suggests that the idea of the Great Depression has effectively come to function as a kind of historical ‘black mirror’ – a quasi-object within which conjuncture and historical representation interact to produce an image of capitalist history itself. Focusing on the journalistic output of four key financial publications, I trace how portrayals of the 1930s have evolved over the course of the crisis. I find that while the 1930s are frequently and consistently invoked in ways that purport to reveal the historicity of the crisis, these representations produce an oscillation between different visions of historical repetition, which in turn underpin competing interpretations of the crisis as it unfolds. In so doing, I argue, appeals to the 1930s have simultaneously served to conceal and disclose the constitutive relation of historical imagination to historical process – a double move that has had the paradoxical effect of both securing and undermining the reproduction of finance capitalism as we have come to know it

Assembling the Healthopolis: Competitive city‐regionalism and policy boosterism pushing Greater Manchester further, faster

Health and care policy is increasingly promoted within visions of the competitive city‐region. This paper examines the importance of policy boosterism within the political construction of city‐regions in the context of English devolution. Based on a two‐year case study of health and social care devolution in Greater Manchester, England, we trace the relational and territorial geographies of policy across and through new “devolved” city‐regional arrangements. Contributing to geographical debates on policy assemblages and city‐regionalism, we advance a conceptual framework linking crisis and opportunity, emulation and exceptionalism, and evidence and experimentation. The paper makes two key contributions. First, we argue health and care policy is increasingly drawn towards the logic of global competitiveness without being wholly defined by neoliberal political agendas. Fostering transnational policy networks helped embed global “best practice” policies while simultaneously hailing Greater Manchester as a place beyond compare. Second, we caution against positioning the city‐region solely at the receiving end of devolutionary austerity. Rather, we illustrate how the urgency of devolution was conditioned by crisis, yet concomitantly framed as a unique opportunity by the local state harnessing policy to negotiate a more fluid politics of scale. In doing so, the paper demonstrates how attempts to resolve the “local problem” of governing health and care under austerity were rearticulated as a “global opportunity” to forge new connections between place, health, and economy. Consequently, we foreground the multiple tensions and contradictions accumulating through turning to health and care to push Greater Manchester further, faster. The paper concludes by asking what the present crisis might mean for city‐regions in good health and turbulent times

Identity Switching in Disruptive Organizations: The Microfoundations of Transnational Activism for Economic Justice

How do entrepreneurs create organizations intended to disrupt an environment? And how do they stabilize them as organizations once they have made their mark? This talk provides a framework for understanding how issue entrepreneurs propel disruptive organizations by switching identities between different network domains. The talk draws on the emergence of global tax justice campaigns and data from fifteen years of para-ethnography. It identifies conditions for identity switching that highlight the importance and limitations of this strategy for organizational transformation in the world economy

Capital unchained: finance, intangible assets and the double life of capital in the offshore world

The rise of intangible assets such as brand names, research and development, patents and other forms of abstract capital such as digital platforms and data flows has confounded extant measures and concepts of capital and accumulation. What used to be a residual asset category known as 'goodwill' has now overtaken so-called fixed or tangible assets in the profitability and valuation of many leading corporations. Yet these intangible assets lead a double life as both spatial and temporal in some dimensions, yet fluid and spatio-temporally elusive in others. Using a framework focused on measuring (by accountants), managing (by corporations) and monitoring (by International Political Economy scholars and regulators), this article explores the longer term implications of accumulation of internationalised capital in intangible and abstract forms, and the prominent role of finance and offshore in giving mobility and fluidity to these forms of capital. The article suggests that while global value chain and global production network analyses have helped researchers and policy-makers to track increasingly fragmented and fluid networks of commodity production, there also is a need to follow the global double life of internationalised and financialised intangible assets and wealth flows, and parallel reorganisations of state forms in response to those transformations