Category Archives: Uncategorized

As of January 2021, I will be joining the Editorial Board of Socio-Economic Review. I am very honored to be able to contribute to a journal that has been so important to my career!

Socio-Economic Review is one of the top journals in political economy and economic sociology. It’s currently ranked 11/180 for Political Science and 6/150 for Sociology, with an impact factor of 3.774 (2019).

I’m currently one of three candidates nominated to replace Julia Moses as co-chair of the CES Political Economy and Welfare Research Network. As requested, I had written a few words on my vision for the network, when offering my candidacy. If you’re a member of this network and the ideas below appeal to you, please vote for me! Voting is possible until Wednesday, October 23.

“The strengths of our network are its openness to theoretical and methodological pluralism as well as its broad comparative approach to the study of political economy and the welfare state. If elected co-chair of the Network, I would like to strengthen ongoing activities in the three focus areas of this network (education and social policies; the comparative political economy of regime formation and change; cross-border connections). At the same time, my own interdisciplinary research interests make me particularly well-suited to appeal to colleagues working on new approaches to political economy, including junior and emerging scholars. As our profession is rethinking its strong reliance on face-to-face meetings for scholarly exchanges, I’m interested in developing new and inclusive ways in which our members can engage with or participate in this network, such as through social media. I would also like to continue ongoing collaborations with other CES research networks, including those currently in formation. Having divided my professional life between the United States and the European continent, I feel particularly well-suited to foster the ongoing dialogue between our network’s members on both sides of the Atlantic.”

We’re delighted to share publicly (for the first time) the Table of Contents of the forthcoming International Handbook of Financialization (Routledge 2019)!

Thanks to the great many positive responses, which exceeded even our highest expectations, a superb group of scholars has come together to make the forthcoming Handbook an already widely-anticipated success.

Please note that this table of contents may be subject to some changes before the anticipated publication date in early 2019.

Phil, Daniel & Natascha

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TABLE OF CONTENTS (as of July 2018)

 

1. Phil Mader, Daniel Mertens & Natascha van der Zwan: Introduction

 

Part A – Finance and Financialization: Taking Stock

2. Brett Christophers & Ben Fine: The Value of Financialization and the Financialization of Value

3. Christoph Deutschmann: The Socio-Economic Foundations of Financialization

4. Sheila Dow: Financialization and the Monetary Authorities: Post-Keynesian and Other Perspectives

5. Paul Langley: The Financialization of Life

6. Ismail Erturk: (title TBC)

 

Part B – Approaches to Studying Financialization

7. Ève Chiapello: Financialization as a Socio-technical Question

8. Samuel Knafo & Mareike Beck: Financialization and the Uses of History

9. Stefano Pagliari & Kevin Young: How is Financialization Reproduced Politically?

10. Dimitris Sotiropoulos & Ariane Hillig: Financialization in Heterodox Economics

11. Hadas Weiss: The Anthropological Study of Financialization

 

Part C – Structures, Spaces and Sites of Financialization

12. Manuel Aalbers, Rodrigo Fernandez & Gertjan Wijburg: The Financialization of Real Estate

13. Sarah Bracking: Financialization and the Environmental Frontier

14. Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner & Jeff Powell: Subordinate Financialization in Emerging Capitalist Economies

15. Rodrigo Fernandez & Reijer Hendrikse: Offshore Finance

16. Ewa Karwowski: Variegated Financialization in the Global South

17. Engelbert Stockhammer & Karsten Köhler: Financialization and Demand Regimes in Advanced Economies

18. Yingyao Wang: The State and Financialization

19. Brigitte Young: Financialization and Gendered Inequality

 

Part D – Actors, Agency, and Politics of Financialization

20. Benjamin Braun & Daniela Gabor: Central Banking, Shadow Banking, and Infrastructural Power

21. Jan Fichtner: The Rise of Institutional Investors

22. Felipe Gonzalez: Household Debt and the “Retailisation” of Finance

23. Brooke Harrington: Trusts and Financialization

24. Johannes Petry: Exchanges and Financialization: From Marketplaces to Agents

25. Dennis Stolz & Karen Lai: Philanthrocapitalism, Social Enterprises and Global Development

26. Lena Lavinas: The Collateralization of Social Policy in the Global South

27. Lisa Adkins, Kavita Datta & Vincent Guermond, Michael McCarthy, Paul Thompson & Jean Cushen: DISCUSSION FORUM on Labor and Financialization

 

Part E – Techniques, Technologies, and Cultures of Financialization

28. Rob Aitken: The Cultural Economy of Financial Subjectivity

29. Nathan Coombs & Arjen van der Heide: The Calculative and Regulatory Consequences of Risk Management

30. Laura Deruytter & Sebastian Möller: Financialized Practices and Rationalities of Local Authorities

31. Max Haiven: Culture and Financialization: Five Approaches

32. Jeanne Lazarus: Financial Literacy Education: A Questionable Answer to the Financialization of Everyday Life

33. Johnna Montgomerie: Debt Dependence and the Financialization of Everyday Life

 

Part F – Instabilities, Insecurities, and the Discontents of Financialization

34. Gerald Epstein: The Bankers’ Club and the Financialization of Crises

35. Beat Weber: (title TBC)

36. Andreas Nölke: Financialization and the Crisis of Democracy

37. Sunanda Sen: Uncertainty and Financialization

38. Matthias Thiemann: Why is There No Anti-Cyclical Regulation of Finance?

39. Christina Laskaridis, Nathan Legrand & Eric Toussaint: Struggles against Illegitimate Debt

40. Olivier Godechot: Financialization and the Increase in Inequality

 

Epilogue (TBC)

 

One of the biggest challenges in higher education is getting students to actively participate during class time, especially in larger groups. The traditional lecture format simply does not lend itself well for this. Luckily, there are plenty of other teaching techniques that not only motivate students to participate actively during class, but also ensure that the quality of participation increases. As a former quiet student myself, I find it important that class participation does not simply involve giving the loudest students a platform to comment on the course material. Instead, it should give all students the tools to find their voice and use it during class.

For that reason, I love doing fishbowl discussions during my classes. A fishbowl is a different way of organizing a debate. Students are divided into two concentric circles: a small group of students takes place in an inner circle, while the remainder of the class forms an outer circle around them. The students in the inner circle – within the fishbowl, if you will – take part in the discussion. The students in the outer circle observe the discussion and take note of what happens. After a few minutes, the course instructor halts the discussion in the inner circle and asks the observing students to reflect on what happened.  This way, even students who are not speaking are involved in the discussion. Several variations of the fishbowl discussion also exist.

Having used fishbowl discussion for various purposes in my courses over the years, I recently decided to do one in my Research Methods course. This course is part of the flipped classroom that I have written about here. With the lecture part of the course taking place online, it is even more important that class time is being spent in an active manner. For this reason, I decided to combine a fishbowl discussion with a mock interview for the workshop on qualitative interviewing.

This is how it worked: before coming to class, all students had to prepare a list of interview questions on a given topic. The type of respondent was also given. So in one workshop, students were to interview a fictional senior bureaucrat on government budget cutbacks, while in another workshop the mock interview was held with a fictional citizen on tax evasion. During the workshop, two volunteers played out the interview inside “the fishbowl”. The other students observed. To structure their observations, I had made bingo cards with a number of good and bad interviewing practices, using this website . Each time the students observed something from their bingo cards, they crossed off that box – until somebody had bingo of course!

At that point, we would halt the mock interview and have the student calling bingo comment on the observations he/she made and what had been missing from the interview. After a brief discussion, we would continue the interview with a new interviewer and interviewee. With the first round covering the beginning of the interview to approximately the half-way point and the second round picking up where we had left off until the end of the conversation, we were able to cover a full interview from start to finish.

Having taught this exercise a number of times now, I have found that it has consistently led to interesting observations and discussions, especially when students disagree on what they had observed!* It has also served the original purpose of the fishbowl exercise by allowing those students, who feel uncomfortable being at the center of attention in the classroom, to actively participate in the mock interview. For this reason, interview bingo has become a standard feature of my interviewing workshop. If you would like to try interview bingo for yourself, feel free to use this link to download the bingo cards (simply click on the bingo card shown to download a pdf-file).

*It should be added that the stakes are high: in the Netherlands, it is customary for the person who erroneously calls bingo to sing a song of choice as penalty 😊.

 
Dit werk valt onder een Creative Commons Naamsvermelding-NietCommercieel 4.0 Internationaal-licentie.

Today and tomorrow I will be attending the international meeting on the “Performativity and Governance of Actuarial Models,” hosted by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme in Paris. I will be presenting parts of my research on the financial origins of the Dutch pension system. Looking forward!

 

Last week, Routledge published the new edited volume by Valerie Boussard, Finance at Work, to which I contributed a chapter. From the back cover: “Finance at Work explores the world of financiers, be they finance-oriented CEOs, CFOs, financial journalists, mergers and acquisitions’ advisors or wealth managers.” The edited volume results from the Finance at Work symposium, held in 2014 at the University of Nanterre Paris Ouest.

My chapter, based on the paper I presented at the conference, analyzes how the field of finance is constituted through its interactions with outsiders. It follows the attempts of the AFL-CIO Committee for the Investment of Union Pension Funds to start its own employee-buyout fund, the Employee Partnership Fund (EPF), in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Based on original archival research, the chapter exposes the social boundaries separating the financial sector from organized labor, while illustrating the diffusion of financial sector norms and practices through the EPF project. In the chapter, I argue that the case of the EPF shows how financial expansion occurs through the socialization of critical outsiders into the world of finance.

A pre-publication version of the chapter can be found here.