…” They continue: “[I]t is an effort to specify what capital’s movement does, both to itself and across a whole range of social sites and activities” (ibid.: 129).
Embracing more practice-attuned approaches to study the multiple activities of global finance, however, risks denying “analytical validity to the category of capital” (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013: 10) and capitalism more generally (Leyshon & Thrift 2007; Preda 2013). In this regard, the social studies of finance have attracted the same sort of criticism as their related field, the social studies of economization and marketization (see, for example, Fine 2003; Christophers 2014). A useful bridging concept in this regard is that of “operations of capital”, recently developed by Mezzadra and Neilson (2013, 2015, 2019). Speaking from a critical political economy perspective that has had fruitful encounters with practice-oriented thinking, it helps develop a grounded understanding of the historio-geographically variegated operations of “global finance”:
Using the concept of operations of capital … opens a new angle for the critical analysis of the relation between capital and capitalism. An operation always refers to specific capitalist actors while also being embedded in a wider network of operations and relations that involve other actors, processes, and structures. This gives us two analytical avenues through which to examine the work done by an operation. The first, with its reference to specific capitalist actors, reveals the workings of capital in particular material configurations, shedding light on processes of valorization as well as on the frictions and tensions crisscrossing them in lived and grounded circumstances. The second focuses on the articulation of operations into larger and changing formations that comprise capitalism as a whole.
(Mezzadra & Neilson 2015: 6–7)
Thus, an operations of capital analytics does not solely focus on the everyday practices of finance – finance as work. Operations are quotidian and abstract at once, as they speak to the shared legal frameworks, conventions, metrics and rationalities of the global finance industry. These are recursively enacted in the everyday practices of financial economization, invoking a relation between the “micro” and the “macro”. It is through such operations, and the practices they come along with, that institutional landscapes emerge as material effects. In the case of this book, this implies moving back and forth between ethnography and world history (Hart & Ortiz 2014) – between the macro, historically grown, and the micro, accomplished in situ.
Financial keywords under scrutiny
A practical account of operations behind the formation of institutional landscapes also implies that we critically engage with how we narrate and represent these markets (Vogl 2015), which inevitably leads us to the question of keywords. Keywords are important empirical terms that are frequently used during everyday language (Williams 1985) but that – at a higher reflexive level – should always receive critical scrutiny. Even in scholarly texts, however, keywords are often taken for granted. Scrutinizing keywords can be done for a number of social fields, but this seems to be particularly pivotal with regard to the financial industry, as it often operates using an opaque language, with many things remaining obfuscated because they are considered too technical and the realm of experts. Here, “complexity is the enemy” (Foroohar 2016: 25). Keywords require both cultural and etymological analysis. Ironically, the words of an investment guru help here: in order to understand something you have to know not only what it is and how it operates, but how it came about and what beliefs and other influences operated upon it (Fraser-Sampson 2014: 19).
Financial “markets”
It is a common narrative in accounts of modern finance that the key function of financial “markets” is the “pursuit of new investment opportunities” (Kay 2015: 136) (“search”) and “the management of long-term assets that have already been acquired” (ibid.) (“stewardship”). Yet the abstract market metaphor not only fetishizes the “flesh-and-blood institutions” (Christophers 2015b: 92) making up financial markets but also conveys “the qualities of dispersion, anonymity and competition” (ibid.) when there is in fact centralization, socially dense relations and the “systemic power of large financial institutions” (ibid.). What is commonly called the “global financial market” actually more closely resembles a global allocation bureaucracy (Ortiz 2014), populated by players such as institutional investors, including pension funds, private equity firms and insurance companies.
The market metaphor also suggests that financial markets operate like commodity markets. Yet the former are ultimately not about bestowing something with exchange value and trading it as a commodity for a return. Even though tradability – often referred to as “liquidity” – is certainly a desirable feature of many financial products, these markets do not operate according to the same logics as commodity/production markets (Knorr-Cetina 2010). Rather, financial markets are about speculation and investment, and these activities involve claims and commitments exercised over time and oriented to the realization of future income.
Asset
An important term in this book that the reader will encounter regularly is that of the “asset”, the key pillar of institutional landscapes. Deriving from an Anglo-French legal term (aver a(s)setz/to have enough, with roots in the Latin words ad satis = to be enough/sufficient) that first surfaced in the middle of the sixteenth century (Murray 1884: 507), it originally denoted “the property of a deceased person that in the hands of his heir or executor is sufficient to pay his debts and legacies” (G. & C. Merriam Co. 1971 [1901]: 131) but quickly passed into a general sense of an “item of value owned” (ibid.) that can be converted into ready money, or that “serves as a resource or source of strength” (ibid.). This is notable, because, right from the beginning, the term implied that assets have an inherent quality that allows them to serve the cash needs of external parties. Today it is a key notion in economics and the world of investment management, describing “a resource with economic value that an individual, corporation or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide future benefit” (Barone 2019). Financial assets, in particular, represent investments in the assets and securities (bonds/stock/private equity) of other institutions, but increasingly also of urban and rural real estate, infrastructure or various forms of “natural capital”. In a more foundational sense, an asset is a “property that yields an income stream” (Birch 2017: 468) and is not meant for immediate sale.
Assets can also be intangible, with intellectual property rights and various forms of legal arrangements constructed around them (e.g. licensing), providing important income streams to financial investors and corporations. The process of turning something into a source of future income should be called “assetization”. It should not be equated with other popular political economy terms, such as “commodification” or “marketization”. Although certain types of assets –
