Unfinished business

This short commentary responds to James et al.’s report on the employment of economic geographers within in departments of business and management in UK universities. An initial ambivalence about the numbers of economic geographers working outside the sub-discipline has been replaced by growing concerns over the supply of early career economic geographers, the immediate pressures of the Research Excellence Framework and the growth and financial significance of business schools within the UK university sector. Collective action and collaboration by the remaining economic geographers is encouraged to stem the tide

FinTech platform regulation: Regulating with/against platforms in the United Kingdom and China

This paper develops case studies of the United Kingdom (UK) and China to analyse divergent national financial regulatory approaches to FinTech as a novel political economy of platforms. Regulating with platforms is core to the approach taken in the UK, where start-up and early-career platforms are enrolled into an innovation-friendly financial regulation regime that promotes consumption and competition balanced with stability. In China, meanwhile, measures are being instituted to enhance rules and restrictions imposed on FinTech platforms. BigTech-led FinTech expansion was encouraged to expedite financial reforms to fuel economic growth and ensure authoritarian state control, but regulation is now shown to be working against the furtherance of platform power

Capitalising on the crowd: the monetary and financial ecologies of crowdfunding

‘Crowdfunding’ is a method of raising money and finance to capitalise projects of various kinds. Drawing on the networking capabilities of the internet and software platforms, those seeking project funding appeal to potentially diverse audiences who are collectively referred to as ‘the crowd’. What practitioners, advocates and policymakers typically identify within crowdfunding is its ‘alternative’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘democratising’ qualities; that is, it is held to be a novel, digitally-rendered economic space which has the capacity to challenge established funding practices in banking, capital markets and venture capital networks, offering a more open and egalitarian source of capital for economic, social and cultural entrepreneurship. The paper develops the concept of ‘ecologies’, drawn from the geographies of money and finance literature, to advance a critical understanding of the crowdfunding economy that is sceptical of its apparent qualities. First, the concept of ecologies encourages the analysis of diverse and proliferative monetary and financial forms, enabling an understanding that avoids the binary opposition of ‘capitalist/alternative’ economic forms and which differentiates between the variegated crowdfunding ecologies that have emerged to date. Second, by foregrounding the intermediation processes and credit-debt relations of monetary and financial ecologies, it is argued that crowdfunding may largely replicate rather than disrupt the extant institutional and debt dynamics of funding practices. Third, by emphasizing the socio-spatial effects of monetary and financial ecologies, attention is drawn to the need for further research into the unevenness that mitigates against crowdfunding being as open and egalitarian as its advocates claim

Platform capitalism: the intermediation and capitalization of digital economic circulation

A new form of digital economic circulation has emerged, wherein ideas, knowledge, labour and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between geographically distributed but connected and interactive online communities. Such circulation is apparent across a number of digital economic ecologies, including social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and other manifestations of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Prevailing accounts deploy concepts such as ‘co-production’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ to explain digital economic circulation as networked exchange relations characterised by their disintermediated, collaborative and democratizing qualities. Building from the neologism of platform capitalism, we place ‘the platform’ – understood as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalization – at the centre of the critical analysis of digital economic circulation. To create multi-sided markets and coordinate network effects, platforms enrol users through a participatory economic culture and mobilize code and data analytics to compose immanent infrastructures. Platform intermediation is also nested in the ex-post construction of a replicable business model. Prioritizing rapid up-scaling and extracting revenues from circulations and associated data trails, the model performs the structure of venture capital investment which capitalizes on the potential of platforms to realize monopoly rents

Leveraging affect: mobilizing enthusiasm and the co-production of the musical economy

This chapter considers the promises and problems of fandom and enthusiasm within capitalism, with particular reference to rise of crowdsourcing as a means of mobilising fan enthusiasm to fund new creative projects, with a particular focus on the music industry. Crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative way of funding projects caused by the more cautious investments of record companies, and is the latest development here firms and companies have sought to harness the affect and emotions of fans. However, although crowdfunding may tap new sources of money, the process is not without its costs, both in terms of the demands placed on its users and of being able to navigate a system that requires reserves of social, cultural and financial capital

Collectors, investors and speculators: gatekeeper use of audience categories in the art market

This research examines gatekeepers' categorization work to assess and sort audience members. Using a multi-sited ethnography and interpretivist qualitative lens, we explore how high-value art gallerists sort buyers via categories, but also encourage conformity with preferred audience categories, both for artistic consecration goals and to discourage disruptive speculation. Categories served as reference points, with preferred and problematic buyer categories providing a discursive socialization tool, but also informing gatekeeping strategies, for example, problematic behaviors and buyer categories led to value-protecting gatekeeping and exclusion, often justified in moral terms. Monitoring continued throughout the relationship, with decisions considered both fair and necessary for gallerists’ professional practice. Gatekeeping decisions included long-term temporal considerations, prompting strategies including ‘placement,’ monitoring and audience recategorization. This extends gatekeeping beyond simply passing muster at the ‘gate.’ We also illustrate the dynamic and fluid nature of hidden categories, which provide gatekeepers with heightened abilities to punish perceived wrongdoing

Leveraging affect: mobilizing enthusiasm and the co-production of the musical economy

This chapter considers the promises and problems of fandom and enthusiasm within capitalism, with particular reference to rise of crowdsourcing as a means of mobilising fan enthusiasm to fund new creative projects, with a particular focus on the music industry. Crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative way of funding projects caused by the more cautious investments of record companies, and is the latest development here firms and companies have sought to harness the affect and emotions of fans. However, although crowdfunding may tap new sources of money, the process is not without its costs, both in terms of the demands placed on its users and of being able to navigate a system that requires reserves of social, cultural and financial capital