Draw Breath

I’ve been asked to give a ten minute talk (as one of a panel of three) in QUB’s School of Sociology tomorrow on the Global Financial Crisis. What can you cover in ten minutes? Not much, I’d say, but my brief is to include something about how we study societies. So I’ll make two points:

1. This crisis is in no small part down to the shareholder value paradigm and, on a broader level, the manner in which law and economics bods have described the corporate economy and company law – a weird mixture of normative and political rhetoric masquerading as science. So I’ll say something about how those of us at the more sociological end of the discipline need to think seriously about what it actually means to think of the corporation in society. Ian Lee’s latest is a good example of what we need to do in terms of theorising the corporation, though I think we could draw even more on the interesting work that’s ongoing on the origins of corporations, when their internal workings were set down.

2. We need to say goodbye to our lovely bank-driven economies. The regulatory flaws with the liquidity system were myriad, but the most important thing is rather simple: it’s hard to see a point when a significant wholesale banking market will reappear. Trust has completely disappeared from the system. So, we’re going to end up somewhere between a return to the much-vaunted  Captain Mainwaring banking and an entirely new state underpinning of some banking transactions. Either way, we’re likely going to have to save up for a lot more stuff from now on (and pay more for it). The credit culture is dead. Describing this new world will involve us, for one thing, getting to grips on the social impact of financialisation a lot more, I think, than we have.

I’ll sneak a third point in too. Major crises, as the Régulation School point out, have led to the rise of new forms of accumulation in capitalism. Assuming this is a major crisis by their terms, there’s no reason for thinking any different. Perhaps the worst aspect of the last mini-crisis from the point of view of the populace at large was that we transferred vast pension savings into financial markets. Anybody on the left who is pleased to see a crisis for capitalism ought not to expect a happy ending…