Financial Peripheries: Elite and Everyday Finance in the Global South

Workshop | May 12–13, 2022

Research on the sociology and political economy of money and finance has dramatically expanded over the past several decades. However, this literature remains strongly focused on developments in wealthy countries, metropolitan financial hubs, and haut finance. Trends affecting developing and emerging markets have received less attention, despite the ambition to produce accounts of financial globalization. This is not for lack of relevance: financial crises, exchange rate instability, high inflation, “exotic” monetary policies, and other phenomena have long characterized the financial situation of the emerging economies, particularly Latin America and Eastern Europe. This workshop will explore the relevance of new work on these contexts to the recent economic sociology and political economy of money and finance, serving as the first step towards a thematic special issue of Finance and Society.

To this end, we seek to bring together research that bridges the micro-macro gap at two levels: political and economic elites and "everyday" finance. At the level of elites, the overall aim will be to understand how policymakers and economic elites in emerging economies shape the contemporary financial institutions they are part of. Real decision-makers (both public and private) too often remain a "black box" in recent literature. We hope to identify work that examines in empirical and theoretical depth the goals, strategies, and practices of public and private decision-makers and how these micro-level processes might interact to produce aggregate outcomes. For example, does elite competition contribute to financial instability? Who are the central bankers in these economies, how do they make their careers, and how do their origins shape their policy goals?

At the level of "everyday finance," we seek to develop the implications of micro-level perspectives in the economic sociology of money and finance for the macro-level outcomes that have traditionally concerned political economists. For example, the Zelizerian "social meaning of money" approach profoundly influenced the new economic sociology. However, for political economists, this approach may seem wanting insofar as the implications for "big picture" phenomena such as currency crises and inflation remain undeveloped. We believe there are such implications (not just of Zelizerian relational work, but of micro-sociological approaches in general). To give one example, in Argentina, households have for decades struggled with decisions over whether and how to use pesos and dollars, with potentially profound instability effects at the macro level. The workshop will seek to systematically explore how the micro-sociology of money and finance can enrich current approaches in political economy. It will serve to write a first theorization on this topic that can introduce the special issue.