Warwick Critical Finance

In this talk, Ruowen Xu examines the organisation process by which Big Data credit scoring models are produced, investigating the analytical work of data scientists who continuously maintain and improve their models to keep the results predictive. Big Data algorithmic technology is having a profound impact on our social, organisational, and public life and it permits large tech companies to perform analytics for consumer credit-risk assessments and to determine credit risk. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a credit score modelling team of a large tech company, Ruowen's research studies the development of an emerging Big Data algorithmic credit-scoring technology alongside the government’s programme for building a social credit system in China. Her findings show that data scientist work is a continuous, repetitive, and a pre-prescribed process of developing and updating models that are complemented with machine learning-generated results, and that the way that data scientist work is organised has a direct impact on the produced model. This research expands the perimeter of how we look at algorithms and, broadly, other data-driven computing devices by looking at the organisational setting through which they are produced. For more information, please visit: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/currentstudents/phd/resources/wcf/upcomingevents/ruowen-xu/

A decade after the 2008 financial crisis, new political economic imaginaries have emerged to make sense of our financialised world. Critical macro-finance is one of the most important of these trends. It has shed light on the infrastructure of contemporary global finance, the links between shadow banking, money markets and monetary policy, and the evolving governance architecture established in the wreckage of the crash. To discuss critical macro-finance, WCF is excited to get into conversation with Daniela Gabor, Professor of Economics and Macro-Finance at UWE Bristol. Daniela is working on the intersections of economics, finance and political economy, researching a variety of areas such as shadow banking activities, especially repo markets, and their implications for monetary theory, central banking, sovereign bond markets and regulatory activities.

If 'globalisation' was the dominating concept of the 1990s and 'neoliberalisation' followed in the 2000s, then 'financialisation' is arguably one of the hottest candidate for succession in the 2010s. Its inflationary use has been debated for some time now, without actually diminishing its appeal in various contexts. In order to think through the stakes attendant to the continued research of financialisation and its multiple operationalisations, we invited two active protagonists in these debates. Ève Chiapello and Pauline Gleadle discussed each other's work and critically assessed the ways in which the study of financialisation continues to shape the current critical debates about global finance and global capitalism more generally.

The talk presented empirical findings on the use of flexitime policies in financial institutions as a way to manage workload fluctuations around month-end. Because financial institutions are dealing in financial transactions, month-end becomes an exceptionally busy and stressful time with all parties clamouring to meet deadlines before the books are closed. Not to mention the deadlines imposed by the banks, the authorisations required by law, and the stringent audits, all of which have tightened since the economic crisis. However, while the use of flexitime may work well for those who can be flexible, i.e. young, ambitious employees, it works less well for those who cannot be flexible, i.e. mothers of young children, raising some important questions about finance sector culture, as well as about gender inequality therein. Speaker: Heather Griffiths is a fourth year PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Her broad research interests are in gender and work, work life balance and feminist theory. Her PhD research looks at flexible working policies within the finance sector, and whether such policies will be supported by finance sector culture, as well as how they impact on gender equality and work life balance both at work and in the home.

The talk presented empirical findings on the use of flexitime policies in financial institutions as a way to manage workload fluctuations around month-end. Because financial institutions are dealing in financial transactions, month-end becomes an exceptionally busy and stressful time with all parties clamouring to meet deadlines before the books are closed. Not to mention the deadlines imposed by the banks, the authorisations required by law, and the stringent audits, all of which have tightened since the economic crisis. However, while the use of flexitime may work well for those who can be flexible, i.e. young, ambitious employees, it works less well for those who cannot be flexible, i.e. mothers of young children, raising some important questions about finance sector culture, as well as about gender inequality therein. Speaker: Heather Griffiths is a fourth year PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Her broad research interests are in gender and work, work life balance and feminist theory. Her PhD research looks at flexible working policies within the finance sector, and whether such policies will be supported by finance sector culture, as well as how they impact on gender equality and work life balance both at work and in the home.

The post-crisis period has seen a growing emphasis on nurturing complex adaptive (financial) networks that have the ability to ‘bounce back’ in stressful situations. What are the political consequences of this impetus? A re-invention of neo-liberalism in disciplinary terms or a proliferation of alternatives to market-centrism? Or something else? Against this backdrop, John Morris and James Brassett discussed the (cultural) production of resilient financial systems and market subjects. The session was chaired by Marco Andreu (Warwick's PAIS Department).

Bill Maurer opened the panel highlighting three recent trends in finance: The shift of investment from traditional markets to non-market based financial arrangements championed by the rise of philanthropic venture capital pushing into all kinds of new areas that were traditionally not expected to yield a return; the remodeling or reorganization of financial infrastructures: payments, clearing services, trading platforms, supply chain management and so on; and the new quality of automaticity enabled by smart contracts, potentially creating tradable shares of everyday objects. What would it mean to engage critically with such developments? Maurer suggested to think about choking points: Where are these processes fragile? Is there a way to 'unplug' finance by politicizing its strategic dependence on energy grids?

Johnna Montgomerie continued by pointing out the way that finance’s opacity, both in terms of its terminology as well as its legal contexts, builds barriers for a critique that need to be addressed. Such ‘expert knowledge’ however is only one dimension of finance’s power. Another is its historical legacy that extends into the present. For instance, the very identity of London today is built around an image of a city of commerce and age-old political privileges of City representatives in Parliament prevail. Building from an awareness of finance’s opacity and its historical legacy, so Montgomerie, it is important for the critical project to start thinking about the intersectionality of contemporary finance and its power to produce the economy in gendered and racialized ways.

Nathaniel Tkacz observed an inversion of the relationship between Political Economy and Media Studies whereby critical issues are gradually migrating from Political Economy terrain - labour conditions, ownership structures, etc. - to Media Studies and recent problematics of a technological mediation of economies. Tkacz illustrated, for instance, how the design of retail monetary applications is inspired by a behavioral economics model that does not expect rational-calculating economic subjects anymore. Rather consumers are approached as irrational subjects, whose preferences need to be constantly mapped through processes of perpetual data feedback. The business of finance is seen to be, at least partly, the design and creation of ‘user experiences’. What do we make of such trends? A critical approach, Tkacz suggests, needs to raise awareness of such relatively new dynamics entering the industry, and build an understanding of what they do. What kind of experiences are designed and to what financial purposes?

Lauren Tooker began by addressing the problematic of developing a reflexive critique of finance. While we might want to move beyond a form of critique that assigns the academic a seemingly objective view on finance from above, it is often hard to take on a more reflexive position, because it forces us to engage with the uncomfortable contradictions and ambiguities in the field. Financial resistance movements can be confronted by problems of gender and race; neoliberal imaginaries sometimes yield surprising democratic politics. To develop a sensitivity to such counter intuitive findings, Tooker suggests moving away from a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ towards more reflexive forms of ‘redemptive critique’. The challenge to build such a situated approach relates to a second challenge highlighted by Tooker - to conceive of ordinary agency. Despite the recent (re-)turn to the everyday in IPE, ordinary agency is often not taken seriously. The challenge is an approach that allows us to think with and alongside people, rather than for them. Finally, Tooker suggested a need to move from the apparent divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ finance to focus on the porous interface between public and private, so as to ask critical political questions of finance.