For decades, the banking industry seemed to be a Swiss watch, quietly ticking along. But the recent financial crisis hints at the true nature of this sector. As Simone Polillo reveals in Conservatives Versus Wildcats, conflict is a driving force. Conservative bankers strive to control money by allying themselves with political elites to restrict access to credit. Barriers to credit create social resistance, so rival bankers—wildcats—attempt to subvert the status quo by using money as a tool for breaking existing boundaries. For instance, wildcats may increase the circulation of existing currencies, incorporate new actors in financial markets, or produce altogether new financial instruments to create change. Using examples from the economic and social histories of 19th-century America and Italy, two decentralized polities where challenges to sound banking originated from above and below, this book reveals the collective tactics that conservative bankers devise to legitimize strict boundaries around credit—and the transgressive strategies that wildcat bankers employ in their challenge to this restrictive stance.

In the years leading up the global financial crisis, the European Union (EU) had emerged as a central actor in global financial governance, almost rivalling the United States in influence. While the USA and the EU continue to dominate financial rule setting in the post-crisis world, the context in which they do so has changed dramatically. Pre-crisis ideas about laissez-faire regulation have been discarded in favour of more interventionist ones. The G20 and the Financial Stability Board have been charged with stronger coordination of global efforts. At the same time, jurisdictions have re-emphasized the need "to get their own regulatory house in order" before committing to further global harmonization. And through banks failures and massive bail-outs, the financial sector – hitherto a driving force behind the cross-border integration of finance – has been reconfigured. This book asks a straightforward question: what have these and other key post-crisis trends in global finance done to the position that the European Union occupies in it? The contributions to this book analyse the link between financial governance in the European Union and on the global level from diverse theoretical angles, and they cover the main issues that will shape the future European role on the global regulatory stage. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

‘Liquidity’, or rather lack of it, lies at the heart of the ongoing global financial crisis. In this collection of essays, the metaphor of money as liquidity, and the model of crisis it entails, is deliberated by a range of scholars from economics, history, anthropology, literature, and sociology. This volume offers a rhetorical explanation of the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which metaphors of money are produced, circulate, and fail. These essays, first presented at "After the Crash, Beyond Liquidity," a conference on money and metaphors held at the University of Virginia, USA, in October of 2009, were drafted in the wake of global uncertainty, TARP bailouts, the Great Recession, programs of stimulus and austerity, and recurrent threats of sovereign default in the EU. They question the language of liquidity and flows that is characteristic of everyday business, exposing what metaphors of money hide and explaining why the idea of liquidity has proved so durable. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

"At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds ... In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, Ruef draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports. Through a resolutely comparative approach, Between Slavery and Capitalism identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today."--Publisher's Web site.

The Routledge Companion to Banking Regulation and Reform provides a prestigious cutting edge international reference work offering students, researchers and policy makers a comprehensive guide to the paradigm shift in banking studies since the historic financial crisis in 2007. The transformation in banking over the last two decades has not been authoritatively and critically analysed by the mainstream academic literature. This unique collection brings together a multi-disciplinary group of leading authorities in the field to analyse and investigate post-crisis regulation and reform. Representing the wide spectrum of non-mainstream economics and finance, topics range widely from financial innovation to misconduct in banking, varieties of Eurozone banking to reforming dysfunctional global banking as well as topical issues such as off-shore financial centres, Libor fixing, corporate governance and the Dodd-Frank Act. Bringing together an authoritative range of international experts and perspectives, this invaluable body of heterodox research work provides a comprehensive compendium for researchers and academics of banking and finance as well as regulators and policy makers concerned with the global impact of financial institutions.

A reevaluation of what money is—and what it might be Questions about the nature of money have gained a new urgency in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Even as many people have less of it, there are more forms and systems of money, from local currencies and social lending to mobile money and Bitcoin. Yet our understanding of what money is—and what it might be—hasn't kept pace. In The Social Life of Money, Nigel Dodd, one of today’s leading sociologists of money, reformulates the theory of the subject for a postcrisis world in which new kinds of money are proliferating. What counts as legitimate action by central banks that issue currency and set policy? What underpins the right of nongovernmental actors to create new currencies? And how might new forms of money surpass or subvert government-sanctioned currencies? To answer such questions, The Social Life of Money takes a fresh and wide-ranging look at modern theories of money. One of the book’s central concerns is how money can be wrested from the domination and mismanagement of banks and governments and restored to its fundamental position as the "claim upon society" described by Georg Simmel. But rather than advancing yet another critique of the state-based monetary system, The Social Life of Money draws out the utopian aspects of money and the ways in which its transformation could in turn transform society, politics, and economics. The book also identifies the contributions of thinkers who have not previously been thought of as monetary theorists—including Nietzsche, Benjamin, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Hardt and Negri. The result provides new ways of thinking about money that seek not only to understand it but to change it.

The world of money is being transformed as households and organizations face changing economies, and new currencies and payment systems like Bitcoin and Apple Pay gain ground. What is money, and how do we make sense of it? Money Talks is the first book to offer a wide range of alternative and unexpected explanations of how social relations, emotions, moral concerns, and institutions shape how we create, mark, and use money. This collection brings together a stellar group of international experts from multiple disciplines—sociology, economics, history, law, anthropology, political science, and philosophy—to propose fresh explanations for money's origins, uses, effects, and future. Money Talks explores five key questions: How do social relationships, emotions, and morals shape how people account for and use their money? How do corporations infuse social meaning into their financing and investment practices? What are the historical, political, and social foundations of currencies? When does money become contested, and are there things money shouldn't buy? What is the impact of the new twenty-first-century currencies on our social relations? At a time of growing concern over financial inequality, Money Talks overturns conventional views about money by revealing its profound social potential.

Microsociologists seek to capture social life as it is experienced, and in recent decades no one has championed the microsociological approach more fiercely than Randall Collins. The pieces in this exciting volume offer fresh and original insights into key aspects of Collins’ thought, and of microsociology more generally. The introductory essay by Elliot B. Weininger and Omar Lizardo provides a lucid overview of the key premises this perspective. Ethnographic papers by Randol Contreras, using data from New York, and Philippe Bourgois and Laurie Kain Hart, using data from Philadelphia, examine the social logic of violence in street-level narcotics markets. Both draw on heavily on Collins’ microsociological account of the features of social situations that tend to engender violence. In the second section of the book, a study by Paul DiMaggio, Clark Bernier, Charles Heckscher, and David Mimno tackles the question of whether electronically mediated interaction exhibits the ritualization which, according to Collins, is a common feature of face-to-face encounters. Their results suggest that, at least under certain circumstances, digitally mediated interaction may foster social solidarity in a manner similar to face-to-face interaction. A chapter by Simone Polillo picks up from Collins’ work in the sociology of knowledge, examining multiple ways in which social network structures can engender intellectual creativity. The third section of the book contains papers that critically but sympathetically assess key tenets of microsociology. Jonathan H. Turner argues that the radically microsociological perspective developed by Collins will better serve the social scientific project if it is embedded in a more comprehensive paradigm, one that acknowledges the macro- and meso-levels of social and cultural life. A chapter by David Gibson presents empirical analyses of decisions by state leaders concerning whether or not to use force to deal with internal or external foes, suggesting that Collins’ model of interaction ritual can only partially illuminate the dynamics of these highly consequential political moments. Work by Erika Summers-Effler and Justin Van Ness seeks to systematize and broaden the scope of Collins’ theory of interaction, by including in it encounters that depart from the ritual model in important ways. In a final, reflective chapter, Randall Collins himself highlights the promise and future of microsociology. Clearly written, these pieces offer cutting-edge thinking on some of the crucial theoretical and empirical issues in sociology today.

This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of how politics shape housing markets and vice-versa. It demonstrates how housing impacts a variety of social and political phenomenon including populist politics, generational divides, wealth inequality, monetary policy, and the welfare state. Housing and housing markets have important implications for economic stability, public policy, domestic politics and wealth inequality in Europe and beyond. Yet despite its importance, housing has received relatively little attention in comparative politics scholarship. The contributions within this volume push the scholarship of housing into fresh, innovative directions. The chapters focus on housing’s contribution to wealth inequality, how housing constrains governments’ policy choices in welfare state reform and how it can strengthen governments’ hands in financial regulation. Other contributions reveal the impact of housing on central bankers’ motivations for implementing monetary expansion, highlight the generational divide in gaining access to home-ownership, demonstrate how housing-driven wealth inequality steers voters political preferences towards right-wing populism, and explain how housing gradually shifted from being a social right to an object of investment in Europe, even within its most egalitarian states. These contributions cover a diversity of cases in Western and Eastern Europe and theoretical paradigms that will appeal to scholars and policy makers alike. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of West European Politics.

A comprehensive and illuminating account of the history of credit in America—and how it continues to divide the haves from the have-nots The Economy of Promises is a far-reaching study of credit in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Synthesizing and surveying economic and social history, Bruce Carruthers examines how issues of trust stitch together the modern U.S. economy. In the case of credit, that trust involves a commitment by debtors to repay money they have borrowed from lenders. Each promise poses a fundamental question: why does the lender trust the borrower? The book tracks the dramatic shift from personal qualitative judgments to the impersonal quantitative measurements of credit scores and ratings, which make lending on a much greater scale possible. It discusses how lending is shaped by the shadow of failure, and the possibility that borrowers will break their promises and fail to repay their debts. It reveals how credit markets have been shaped by public policy, regulatory changes, and various political factors. And, crucially, it explains how credit interacts with economic inequality, contributing to vast and enduring racial and gender differences—which are only exacerbated by the widespread use of credit scores and ratings for “big data” and algorithmic decision-making. Bringing to life the complicated and abstract terrain of human interaction we call the economy, The Economy of Promises is an important study of the tangle of indebtedness that, for better or worse, shapes and defines American lives.