Conservatives Versus Wildcats: A Sociology of Financial Conflict
Simone Polillo
Abstract
Common understandings of money, credit, and banking, rely on notions of efficiency--how well they work in allocating resources and coordinating economic activities. This book, by contrast, focuses on how money, credit, and banking are implicated in conflict. It examines how financial elites in general, and certain bankers in particular, create new financial instruments in order to consolidate and reproduce their wealth over time, turning money into an instrument of exclusion, and couching their practices in ideologies of sound banking. Yet, since the boundaries thus erected create resistance, ... More
Common understandings of money, credit, and banking, rely on notions of efficiency--how well they work in allocating resources and coordinating economic activities. This book, by contrast, focuses on how money, credit, and banking are implicated in conflict. It examines how financial elites in general, and certain bankers in particular, create new financial instruments in order to consolidate and reproduce their wealth over time, turning money into an instrument of exclusion, and couching their practices in ideologies of sound banking. Yet, since the boundaries thus erected create resistance, the book also traces the emergence of rival elites (wildcats) who, by increasing the circulation of existing currencies, or incorporating new actors in financial markets through the production of altogether new instruments, attempt to transgress these boundaries.
Keywords:
Money,
Banks,
Credit,
Finance,
Conflict,
Ideology,
Elites,
Markets,
Boundaries,
Legitimacy
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780804785099 |
Published to Stanford Scholarship Online: September 2013 |
DOI:10.11126/stanford/9780804785099.001.0001 |