Digital innovations in insurance, ‘InsurTech’, bring together two transformational forces in our contemporary world – risk and digitization. InsurTech has been celebrated and criticized. A literature on the social studies of insurance provides valuable and more nuanced insights into the social, cultural, and technological properties of InsurTech but it tends to analyze these at the firm level. This article brings together themes from assemblage and international political economy theories to integrate analysis of the structure of the global industry and the role of cross-border regulatory arrangements with the firm-level insights of the social studies of insurance literature. The article examines differentiation in the industry structure between stages of the insurance value chain, between incumbent and start-up insurers and Big Tech, and across jurisdictions and regions. It also examines the most globally significant regulatory responses to InsurTech: from the International Association of Insurance Supervisors, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the US National Association of Insurance Commissioners. It shows that the nuance and ethical content that is evident at the firm level in the social studies of insurance literature is interacting with similar nuance and ethical content in global regulatory arrangements.

Quantitative easing (QE) has been a favourite tool of central banks in their post-financial crisis monetary policy apparatus. Social science literature has interpreted QE as a shift away from performative governance characterising pre-crisis monetary policy. With reference to the Bank of England’s experience, I offer a reinterpretation of QE as a performative intervention in the conditions of financial markets, as an attempt to alter the state of financial markets away from dysfunctionality and towards efficiency. I claim that, following the financial crisis, the model of complete and efficient markets – a mainstay in central banking prior to the crisis – was transformed from a real-world approximation to a ‘performative object’ to be achieved. In deploying the balance sheet, central banks attempt to performatively enact complete and efficient markets. The article rejects the claim of discontinuity between pre-crisis and post-crisis monetary policy, arguing that QE is a continuation of inflation targeting though with important innovations. While pre-crisis performativity relied on central bankers’ communicative framing of market expectations, QE is performative via the ontological shaping of financial markets, driven by epistemic models. The article relies on a set of 51 interviews with central bankers and financial market participants and a corpus of documents.

Over the past 25 years, performativity has emerged as a salient focus in social sciences, yet its meta-theoretical analysis remains limited. What is performativity? How is it located empirically and treated theoretically across disciplines? Analyzing 6,741 published articles and books deploying the term performativity, this paper proposes a framework to explore performativity and reviews the transdisciplinary literature that employs the term in academic practice. Drawing on an updated version of Actor-Network Theory and studying performativity in terms of its impact on the constituents of an agencement, i.e., devices (D), actors (A), representations (R), and networks (N), we outline the term’s theoretical landscape and summarize the general threads of performativity research. The paper defines performativity as a representational intervention involving a material act of describing devices, actors, representations, or networks that affects one or more of them. The literature demonstrates that such interventions can manifest as discourses, embodied engagements, speech acts, or scientific models, among other forms.

Culture is increasingly articulated by financial actors and financial firms as a solution to the dislocations of contemporary capitalism. It therefore matters, not just how actors behave, but how they articulate culture and what importance they accord it. Drawing on pragmatist sociology, the present paper takes this injunction seriously and reports the findings of a field study involving 29 interviews with senior members of financial firms whose understanding of culture and its importance were interrogated directly. The discourse concerning purposeful culture articulated in these interviews simultaneously recognises current arrangements between finance and society as fractured while positing organisational culture initiatives as the most realistic means of repairing said fracture. The paper draws on these findings to argue that, despite masquerading as a call for change, purposeful culture discourse has the effect of protecting against calls to rethink or radically transform the roles and effects of finance in society. The paper thus contributes to sociological perspectives on finance by illustrating how existing cultural discourse in financial markets serves as a kind of conservative critique where shortcomings are conceded in a way which insulates finance from wider structural change.

This article derives four propositions for conceptualizing resistance to the Americanization of finance in advanced economy states. Resistance entails truncation of market-based financial innovations in line with political profit-sharing arrangements between governments, bankers, and other coalitional interests locked in a game of bank bargains. Resistance transpires through two key power structures in the national architecture for economic statecraft: the political executive and the financial supervisory system. Since change does not occur in a vacuum, resistance manifests as political bricolage amid idiosyncratic enabling and constraining factors comprising the broader public policy environment. Lastly, resistive capacity by state bricoleurs is contingent upon leeway for executive power and coherence of the financial supervisory system in relation to the underlying system of representative democracy. Using Canada as an exploratory case, it is shown that federal policymakers effectively truncated the Americanization of Canadian finance through strategic political and regulatory interventions geared toward preserving the incumbent profit-sharing arrangement with its Big Six banks. In line with the growing body of scholarship illuminating neoliberalism as governance through markets rather than a freeing of market forces, the findings suggest that truncation enabled re-regulation of Canadian finance along the grain of financial globalization as opposed to deregulation per se.

Enamoured by gamified FinTech platforms and the rise of investment cultures on social media, young people are turning to financial markets to take control over their future in a present shaped by instability and crisis. Recently, the story of young investors has been dominated by sensationalist accounts of speculative investing (i.e., GameStop). But alongside these speculative traders exists the young passive investor, who steadily invests in safe, diverse assets to grow their wealth over their lifetime. The figure of the passive young investor points to a larger social phenomenon of a maturing asset economy where major assets such as property are out of reach, but financial assets have emerged to allow young people to live an assetised life. To understand why young investors are turning to financial markets as an instrument of wealth accumulation, I argue that these practices emerge as a response to young people’s affective state of precariousness. This precariousness emerges from their material and discursive context that includes a retreating welfare state, wage stagnation, limited employment pathways, and individualised risk management. This affective atmosphere of precariousness pushes young people to seek stability and security wherever they can, and for young investors, this is found in financial assets.

This article explores the puzzling ups and downs of Tesla, going through one the most volatile stock market swings of the recent past, under conditions of financialised capitalism. We adopt a conjunctural approach, highlighting both the macro and micro dynamics shaping the firm’s financial market trajectory. Among these, meticulously maintained narratives, boosted by social media, attracted dedicated followers, while the rise of new retail trading platforms and excitement around Tesla’s index inclusion helped in producing its stock ‘mementum’. This volatility was further supported by an exceptionally large volume of financial derivatives trading, paralleling a public battle between short sellers and the company’s defenders. The resulting stock market boom enabled Tesla to stabilise its finances, whilst its ‘mercurial’ CEO Elon Musk negotiated the largest executive compensation package in US corporate history, turning him into the world’s richest individual. In conclusion, we argue that Tesla serves as an emblematic case of an increasingly tech-driven financialised capitalism, which scholars could use as a window to study future conjunctures.

Digital credit – short-term microcredit distributed over a digital platform, such as a mobile phone – has become hugely popular in Kenya, with over six million Kenyans having taken out at least one digital loan over the last decade. While there is a small but growing body of literature on the problems associated with digital credit (such as its high costs and contributions to over-indebtedness), far less attention has been paid to the regulatory debates in Kenya or elsewhere. This article charts the rise of digital credit in Kenya and the process of regulating the sector, which culminated in the CBK (Amendment) Act, 2021. Due to its almost exclusive focus on previously unregulated lenders, the Act had limited efficacy: it did not affect most of the digital lending market, which is largely controlled by partnerships between banks and mobile network operators. Using concepts from business power theory, we argue that the shape of the legislation can be attributed to the market-led ideology of the Kenyan government and the structural power of the telecommunications giant Safaricom and its partner banks. This case provides important lessons for other countries, where fintechs in general and digital credit, in particular, are on the rise.

What shapes fossil-fuel investment and divestment decisions? What are pension funds’ climate-related considerations? And how do conceptions of portfolio risk influence these issues? Danish pension funds constitute a rare and understudied cohort of investors who have undertaken comparatively progressive fossil-fuel investment decisions. Simultaneously, diversification and market rationality have frequently been invoked as obstacles to divestment and active ownership. Using the Danish experience, this article conducts an archaeological analysis of the concept of portfolio risk, unearthing the various ways in which it has shaped fossil-fuel investment decisions. The analysis identifies five key aspects through which the concept has hampered Danish pension funds’ active ownership and fossil-fuel divestment decisions (sector diversification, externalities, market rationality, dispersed ownership, and passive index investing). The article argues that these discursive aspects have reinforced a passive tendency within finance capitalism to bolster the status quo, thereby supporting prevailing market actors and the continued extraction of fossil fuels.

This article introduces a new conceptual framework for examining the transformation of central banks’ activities at the intersection of science and politics. It builds on the results of the contributions gathered in this special section on the scientization of central banking, to which this article also provides an introduction. We start with an analysis of Martin Marcussen’s concept of ‘scientization’, originally formulated to describe the changes within central banks since the 2000s. After highlighting how Marcussen’s concept has raised different interpretations, we broaden our scope to examine how ‘scientization’ is applied in the wider social sciences, extending beyond the study of central banks. This brings to the fore two ideas: scientization as ‘boundary work’ (redrawing the line between ‘science’ and ‘non-science’) happening both in the public-facing (‘frontstage’) and internal (‘backstage’) activities of organizations. Finally, we suggest how these two ideas can be used to reinterpret ‘scientization’ of central banks as the emergence of central banks as ‘boundary organizations’. This reframing allows us to untangle and clarify the phenomena previously conflated under the original concept of scientization, offering a more coherent framework for ongoing research on central banks.

Proponents of climate and energy transition contend that productive investment in green and sustainable infrastructures can reduce global carbon emissions while at the same time unlock potential for a great surge of development. However, under the current regime of financialized capitalism, political economists and financial geographers also question whether transitioning into such a green and decarbonized world economy is actually feasible. With global profits accruing primarily through financial channels and transactions, mission-oriented investment in the real economy is lagging. Besides, global imbalances between Northern and Southern countries and continued reliance on resource use and commodity production further challenge a global and inclusive climate transition. This article addresses these challenges and presents three key avenues of green de-financialization, involving strategies to (i) re-embed finance within sustainable modes of production, (ii) reform regimes of financial governance, and (iii) restrain finance’s role in existing modes of production and consumption. Central to the analysis is that the state needs to provide regulatory frameworks and incentives to make such a change happen. However, with vested financial and corporate interests contesting the shift to global sustainability, it remains to be seen to what degree it can coordinate such a transition at the global level.

Since the Paris Agreement, interest in decarbonization and sustainable finance has grown rapidly. Within the prevalent derisking regime, investment for decarbonization must come predominantly from the private sector. However, growth in ‘sustainable finance’ assets is not necessarily causing more sustainability-advancing productive investment to drive the green transition. We thus argue that sustainable finance is not exclusively about investing or providing finance, but crucially also about changing corporate practices toward greater sustainability. To shed light on how private financial actors can influence sustainability in a derisking context and to facilitate this broader research perspective on sustainable finance, we introduce the conceptual framework of ‘channels of influence’. These channels are different strategies and mechanisms used by private actors that influence the behavior of financial and non-financial corporations to increase financial flows to sustainable productive investments. We identify ten channels of influence concerning sustainable finance: (1) initial financing; (2) refinancing; (3) (re)insurance; (4) ratings; (5) climate-litigation; (6) company engagement; (7) divestment; (8) reputation; (9) coalition-building; and (10) standard-setting. These are grouped according to the specificity and breadth of their sustainability impact. Using these channels enables private actors to advance sustainability within the status quo of state-market relations and regulation.

This article investigates the scientization process in central banks, using the Bank of England (BoE) as a case study. Its main goal is to clarify the interactions and tensions among three dimensions of scientization: contributory, policymaking and legitimizing. To do so, we outline an ideal type of contributory scientization in central banks, whereby they become active contributors to science. The article derives empirically observable characteristics for this ideal type, regarding leadership and staff profiles, use of internal resources, composition of external networks, and publication and discursive outputs. The BoE is then contrasted to this ideal type of a central bank thoroughly involved in contributory scientization. The empirical material includes archives and interviews as well as three databases providing quantitative information from the 1970s to 2019. We find that the development of contributory scientization is strategically motivated, often generating tensions with policymaking and legitimizing dimensions. Our findings suggest that scientization in central banks is best understood as a three-dimensional, non-linear process, rather than a steamroller.

This research essay explores how US dollar centrality and strength may impede decarbonization. First, I suggest that because US dollar centrality enables higher US household consumption and imports, and US household consumption is comparatively carbon-intensive, centrality can increase per capita emissions and carbon-intensive consumption in the United States. Second, I explore how US dollar strength can compromise the monetary autonomy and capacity to finance decarbonization for dollar-exposed emerging market economies. They are negatively impacted most notably in the areas of trade, external debt, and investment. Finally, US dollar strength also has the potential to limit the competitiveness of US green manufacturing and exports. US currency overvaluation means that green technologies produced in the United States can be comparatively expensive in global markets. I conclude with a discussion of future research and policy implications.

Financial institutions spanning Global North and South are increasingly adopting an agenda of ‘women’s financial inclusion’. The women’s inclusion agenda in finance reflects dynamics of deep marketization that prescribe common economic policy solutions, transcending formerly significant distinctions of geography and social context. In this case, the closing of gender gaps is the universally proscribed policy. Yet this agenda elicits vastly different practices in ‘high’ finance registers where women are recruited as professionals, and microfinance registers where women are incorporated as borrowers. Relating multisited ethnographic materials from a US gender diversity organization and microfinance institutions in India, we ask: on what terms does inclusion take place? First, we examine how gender is constructed across finance institutions by essentializing women as virtuous. These constructions play out according to context-specific gender politics on questions of women’s economic empowerment – concerning neoliberal iterations of feminism in the US case, and financialization of social reproduction in India. Second, what do women’s everyday engagements with the inclusion agenda indicate about the terms of financial inclusion? Women contend with characterizations of themselves as risk-averse professionals and responsible borrowers, respectively, with ambivalence. Their contextually located ambivalent responses are points of both leverage and critique for the financial inclusion agenda.

This article documents the historical evolution of economic expertise at the Banque de France (BdF), from the late-nineteenth to early-twenty-first centuries. Criticizing presentism and conceptual reductionism in the notion of scientization, I characterize the evolution of economic expertise at the BdF as being a result of ‘field effects’ emerging from the BdF’s attempts to build state capacity. The BdF’s development of economics expertise should be interpreted as a way of negotiating the boundaries between various fields (private banking, technocracy, academia, and international central banking). In particular, I highlight two distinct boundary arrangements: technicalization and academization. From the late-nineteenth century to the 1960s, the rise of technical functions results from a dual positioning at the boundary between, respectively, the state and the market, and national and international institutions. The BdF’s nationalization, in the mid-twentieth century, fostered its integration into the administrative and technocratic field, putting it in competition with other ‘technicalized’ institutions. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the BdF negotiated new arrangements with the academic field. Finally, as a member of the European System of Central Banks since 1999, the BdF has sought scientific legitimacy to have a say in European monetary policymaking.

The financial industry has become increasingly entangled with environmental matters of concern, constituting the phenomenon of ‘green’ finance. In this Forum, we approach green finance as financial climate governance to highlight its claim on finance’s role as legitimate and capable steward of the planet’s climate. This claim to govern and its promise to achieve desirable environmental conditions have made green finance a crucial object of investigation. However, we observe a growing fragmentation of green finance research along various fault lines, such as levels of analysis, normative positions, or academic structures. Calling for reassembling green finance scholarship, we posit a need for more integrative approaches, motivating this Forum’s central question: what integrative moves across socioeconomic research can enhance our understanding and judgement of green finance? The Forum gathers three contributions focused on: (1) integrating macro- and micro-approaches in green finance studies; (2) examining the politics of green finance as knowledge contestations; and (3) confronting stasis in green finance by exploring researchers’ agencies, emotions, and normativities. By reassembling green finance scholarship through integrative moves, we suggest marking green finance as a shared concern and fostering collective perspectives to bring clarity and constructive critique to what has become a dominant pursuit in facing the socioecological crisis.

Amidst the global ascent of financial technologies (FinTech), Argentina presents a critical case for examining how these platforms shape debt relations among marginalized households. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this article draws on quantitative data from the Central Bank of the Republic of Argentina and the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, alongside qualitative findings from a case study conducted in Buenos Aires’ largest slum. The article conceptualizes FinTech as an integral part of the lower tiers of the credit market, functioning as a mechanism for extending debt. The findings reveal that FinTech platforms do not displace existing credit sources but instead operate alongside them, providing new channels for debt that deepen financial dependence. FinTech’s role in marginalized communities, therefore, is less about banking the unbanked and more about reconfiguring access to unsecured debt, allowing for immediate consumption amidst financial instability. The article in this way contributes to the literature on FinTech by offering an understanding of FinTech’s embeddedness in everyday financial practices, showing how marginalized users engage with FinTech as a tactical response to their socio-economic conditions, exercising agency within constrained circumstances shaped by debt and financial precarity.

The complexities and contradictions of ‘green’ finance demand multidimensional perspectives in critical socioeconomic research. Current studies often remain fragmented, focusing either on global financial structures or micro-level practices without fully integrating both. This essay advocates for a more integrated analytical approach, employing three components: constructions, cleavages, and complementarities. At the micro-level, green finance is constructed by diverse actors, influencing macro-level financial governance and capital flows. Conversely, macro-structural shifts, driven by geopolitical and institutional dynamics, shape micro-level activities forging new alliances and oppositions – cleavages. Since the responses of actors and their institutional context to green finance are diverse, new institutional and agentic complementarities emerge. How green finance alters the relationship between financial markets and political-economic institutions, and how this unfolds across national economies, shapes our understanding of capitalist varieties and the emergence of new actors and networks. The essay contends that linking these dimensions and integrating micro- and macro-approaches enables scholarship to pursue a shared understanding of green finance and its (in)capacities to confront socioecological crises under financial capitalism.

This article focuses on the elites governing central banks in order to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into central bank scientization. We first critically discuss the ‘politics of scientization’ as a discursive strategy that depoliticizes monetary policy under neoliberalism. We then propose an alternative, sociological approach to scientization, defining it as a reconfiguration of power dynamics in favour of the scientific field and asking whether there has been a recent increase in the share of actors from this field in central bank governance. Using global data from our prosopographical database, we analyse the educational and professional backgrounds of central bank governors worldwide from 2000 to 2020. We combine descriptive statistics, geometric data analysis, and qualitative analysis to examine global trends and variations between the Global South and North. Our findings contradict the hypothesis of a linear socio-historical process wherein academic professionals and qualified scholars replace ‘less scientific’ actors from political, bureaucratic, or financial fields. Instead, we reveal diverse dynamics shaping global monetary governance.