This book challenges amoral views of finance as the leading realm in which mammon – wealth and profit – is pursued with little overt regard for morality. The author details an enhanced ethical emphasis by leading Anglo–American professionals in the aftermath of the 2007–8 global financial crisis. Instead of merely stressing expert knowledge, professionals sought to overcome the alleged impossibility of serving “two masters” – mammon and God – by embracing religious finance, socio-economic inequality, sustainability and other overtly moral issues. Continuities in liberal values and ideas, however, limited the impact of this enhanced ethical emphasis to restoring the professional authority, as well as to more fundamentally reforming of Anglo–American finance following the most severe period of instability since the Great Depression. Providing a nuanced account of post-crisis change and continuity in a crucially important industry, Campbell-Verduyn advances a dynamic, process-based understanding of authority that will appeal to international political economists and sociologists alike.

This Palgrave Pivot aims to examine the bourgeoning relationship between the Principles for Responsible Investment and the Credit Rating Industry. Since May of 2016, when the partnership was initially publicised, the PRI have endeavoured to incorporate Credit Rating Agencies into its initiative via its ‘ESG in Credit Ratings Initiative’, and have been working diligently to find, and create common ground between Credit Rating Agencies and Institutional Investors seeking to be more forward-looking in their investment approaches. However, in recent years the ‘Big Two’ Credit Rating Agencies – Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s – have finally received record fines for their conduct in the run-up to the Financial Crisis. There is a need, then, to examine the incorporation of the Credit Rating Agencies into such a progressive initiative. To achieve this objective, this book examines the field of ‘responsible investing’, the credit rating industry, and the power dynamic that exists between the rating industry, investors, and the PRI (via its ‘Initiative’).

Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009 several hundred different ‘cryptocurrencies’ have been developed and become accepted for a wide variety of transactions in leading online commercial marketplaces and the ‘sharing economy’, as well as by more traditional retailers, manufacturers, and even by charities and political parties. Bitcoin and its competitors have also garnered attention for their wildly fluctuating values as well as implication in international money laundering, Ponzi schemes and online trade in illicit goods and services across borders. These and other controversies surrounding cryptocurrencies have induced varying governance responses by central banks, government ministries, international organizations, and industry regulators worldwide. Besides formal attempts to ban Bitcoin, there have been multifaceted efforts to incorporate elements of blockchains, the peer-to-peer technology underlying cryptocurrencies, in the wider exchange, recording, and broadcasting of digital transactions. Blockchains are being mobilized to support and extend an array of governance activities. The novelty and breadth of growing blockchain-based activities have fuelled both utopian promises and dystopian fears regarding applications of the emergent technology to Bitcoin and beyond. This volume brings scholars of anthropology, economics, Science and Technology Studies, and sociology together with GPE scholars in assessing the actual implications posed by Bitcoin and blockchains for contemporary global governance. Its interdisciplinary contributions provide academics, policymakers, industry practitioners and the general public with more nuanced understandings of technological change in the changing character of governance within and across the borders of nation-states.

The public relations profession positions itself as expert in building trust throughout global markets, particularly after crisis strikes. Successive crises have tainted financial markets in recent years. Calls to restore trust in finance have been particularly pressing, given trust’s crucial role as lubricant in global financial engines. Nonetheless, years after the global financial crisis, trust in financial markets remains both tenuous and controversial. This book explores PR in financial markets, posing a fundamental question about PR professionals as would-be ‘trust strategists’. If PR promotes its expertise in building and restoring trust, how can it ignore its potential role in losing trust in the first place? Drawing on examples from state finance, international lending agencies, trade bodies, financial institutions and consumer groups in mature and emerging financial centres, this book explores the wide-ranging role of PR in financial markets, including: State finance and debt capital markets Investor relations, M&A and IPOs Corporate communications for financial institutions Product promotion and consumer finance Financial trade associations and lobbying Consumerism and financial activism. Far reaching and challenging, this innovative book will be essential reading for researchers, advanced students and professionals in PR, communication and finance.

Professional organizations - such as accounting and consulting firms, law firms, and investment banks - are fundamental to the functioning of the global economy. Yet many of the most powerful are notoriously private. This book uncovers the complex, messy, and surprisingly emotional challenges of leading professional organizations - revealing the realities that lies beneath the 'professional' surface which these organizations present to the outside world. Individual professionals - highly educated, highly intelligent, and highly opinionated - are generally reluctant to see themselves as followers and may be equally reluctant to put themselves forward as leaders. They value their autonomy and confer authority on their leaders on a highly contingent basis. How does a professional come to be seen as a leader within a professional organization? How do leaders maintain their position once they have reached the top of their organization? How do they navigate the complex power relationships among their professional colleagues and actually get things done? Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas analyses the complex power dynamics and interpersonal politics that lie at the heart of leadership in professional organizations. It is based on Laura Empson's scholarly research into the world's leading professional organizations across a range of sectors, including interviews with over 500 senior professionals in 16 countries. It draws on the latest organizational and leadership theory to analyse in detail exactly how professionals come together to create 'leadership'. It identifies how change happens within professional organizations and explains why their leaders so often fail.

No matter who you are or what you aim to achieve, power determines whether you succeed or fail. But while power dynamics permeate every interaction in the workplace, the concept is very poorly understood or managed in practice. Everyone has influence over some people and is under the influence of others, and must choose how to deal with these realities in daily interactions. This book offers a comprehensive and applied understanding of power in a professional scenario: where it comes from, how it moves and what that means in practice for how professionals work together. Drawing on numerous recent case studies, this book offers a toolbox that anyone can apply, including explanations of the different forms of power, the two ways power can move between parties, the perils of power, how to create accountability, the intersection of power and ethics, and tools for maintaining power relationships with both superiors and subordinates. It provides employers and employees alike the means to understand, manage, and exert the power necessary to control their own circumstances.

Every day presents new challenges as the face of global economics changes. In this first book in the Emerald Studies in Finance, Insurance, and Risk Management, expert editors and contributors come together to discuss global response to new uncertainty and challenges.

Foreign exploitation of economic crises in the developing world has been a central claim of neoliberal critics. This important and recurring international theme is the subject of closer scrutiny in this new collection, where contributors offer competing interpretations of the interaction between international and domestic forces after crises.

As well as marking the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the consequent unleashing of the global financial crisis, 2018 is also the year of negotiations on the terms of the UK's exit from the European Union. Within a decade the banking world has witnessed two epochal events with potential to redraw the map of international financial centres: but how much has this map actually changed since 2008, and how is it likely to change in the near future? International Financial Centres after the Global Financial Crisis and Brexit gathers together leading economic historians, geographers, and other social scientists to focus on the post-2008 developments in key international financial centres. It focuses on the shifting hierarchies of New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Zurich, Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and Tokyo to question whether Asian financial centres have taken advantage of the crisis in the West. It also examines the medium-effects of the crisis, the level of regulation, and the rise of new technology (fintech). By exploring these crucial changes, it questions whether shifts in the financial industry and the global landscape will render these centres unnecessary for the functioning of the global economy, and which cities are likely to emerge as hubs of new financial technology.

Economists occupy leading positions in many different sectors including central and private banks, multinational corporations, the state and the media, as well as serving as policy consultants on everything from health to the environment and security. Power and Influence of Economists explores the interconnected relationship between power, knowledge and influence which has led economics to be both a source and beneficiary of widespread power and influence. The contributors to this book explore the complex and diverse methods and channels that economists have used to exert and expand their influence from different disciplinary and national perspectives. Four different analytical views on the role of power and economics are taken: first, the role of economic expert discourses as power devices for the formation of influential expertise; second, the logics and modalities of governmentality that produce power/knowledge apparatuses between science and society; third, economists as involved in networks between academia, politics and the media; and forth, economics considered as a social field, including questions of legitimacy and unequal relations between economists based on the detention of various capitals. The volume includes case studies on a variety of national configurations of economics, such as the US, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Mexico and Brazil, as well as international spaces and organisations such as the IMF. This book provides innovative research perspectives for students and scholars of heterodox economics, cultural political economy, sociology of professions, network studies, and the social studies of power, discourse and knowledge. “The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9780367817084, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.”