Financial Cultures and Crisis Dynamics

Bob Jessop is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Lancaster University, UK. Brigitte Young is Professor for International Political Economy at the Institute of Political Science, University of Münster, Germany. Christoph Scherrer is Professor for Political Science and Director at the International Centre for Development and Decent Work, University of Kassel, Germany.

Part I: Researching Cultures of Finance: Theoretical Foundations and Methods 1. Sense- and Meaning-making in the Critique of Political Economy 2. The Cultural View on Financial Markets 3. Culture as Discursive Practice: Combining Cultural Political Economy and Discursive Political Studies in Investigations of the Financial Crisis Part II: Cultures of Finance 4. What Price Culture? Calculation, Commensuration, Contingency, and Authority in Financial Practices 5. Financialization and the Enterprise Decoy 6. Booms, Busts and the Culture of Risk Part III: Cultural Factors in Financial Crisis Generation 7. Financial Stability and Technological Fixes as Imaginary across Phases of Capitalism 8. Varieties of Capitalism: Beyond Simple Dichotomies 9. Competitive Concerns and Imaginaries in the Liberalization of European Finance Part IV: Economic Imaginaries, Financial Calculation, and Crisis Dynamics 10. Hedge Funds and the Limits of Market Efficiency as a Regulatory Concept 11. Derivatives as Weapons of Mass Deception and Elite Contestation: the Case of FIAT 12. A Cultural Political Economy of Financial Imaginaries: the (Re)Making of ‘BRIC’ and the Case of China Part V: Crisis Construals and Responses to Financial Crisis in Europe 13. Culture Matters: French-German Conflicts on European Central Bank Independence and Crisis Resolution 14. Interpretations of the EU Crisis and their Policy Implementation 15. Mark my Words: Discursive Central Banking in Crisis