We are excited to submit our three-paper panel, “Putting the _____ Back in Financialization,” to the Business History Conference’s meeting next spring in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Over the past decade, sociologists and other social and cultural theorists have produced pioneering work on the phenomenon of “financialization,” broadly the growth of financial services as a share of economic activity and the growing influence of financial logics on state action and everyday life. Financialization, however, is all too often analyzed in abstract, almost metaphysical terms. Scholars allude to “unfettered” capitalism without reference to the governments whose rules shape this regime of accumulation. They discuss “webs” and “networks” of capital without examining the concrete monetary infrastructures that make these exchanges possible. They speak of financial profits without a close analysis of the institutions that constitute the financial sector. This disembodied view risks reducing a useful concept to a cypher.
The three papers on this panel each “bring back” an element that has been missing or muted in the recent scholarly discussions about financialization. Erin Cully’s paper, “From 3-6-3 to Wall Street,” shows how U.S. commercial banks found new sources of liabilities in the capital markets during the 1960s and 1970s, which made them more responsive to shareholder activism in the 1980s. Sean Vanatta’s paper, “The Fall of Fiscal Mutualism,” challenges the timing and institutional locus of financialization, arguing that state-level policymakers reallocated government assets, especially those of public employee pension systems, from public investments to private capital markets, not in the 1970s, but in the 1950s. David Freund’s paper argues that money itself was hardly a neutral medium of exchange, but a financial instrument in its own right, embodying, as a consequence of New Deal-era policy, the properties of a credit instrument. Together with our commenter, we hope to foster a conversation about how to invigorate the study of financialization through the use of historical methods which ground the theory in the practices of government officials, financial professionals, and other actors who made the webs and networks of unfettered, financialized capitalism.
Our complete abstracts and one-page c.v.s are attached. Sarah Quinn, associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington, has agreed to provide the comment. Should the committee accept our panel, we would kindly request that it be scheduled on either March 12th or March 14th to accommodate Professor Quinn's scheduling conflict on March 13th.
We are still seeking a chair for the panel. We thought it might be best to wait until the program committee had set the program, so that we could seek a scholar already committed to traveling to Charlotte. We eagerly seek the program committee’s advice on this score. Erin Cully (ecully@gradcenter.cuny.edu) is the contact person for this panel.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Erin Cully, Sean Vanatta, David Freund, and Sarah Quinn