Making sense of financialization

Since the early 2000s, scholars from a variety of disciplines have used the concept of financialization to describe a host of structural changes in the advanced political economies. Studies of financialization interrogate how an increasingly autonomous realm of global finance has altered the underlying logics of the industrial economy and the inner workings of democratic society. This paper evaluates the insights of more than a decade of scholarship on financialization. Three approaches will be discussed: the emergence of a new regime of accumulation, the ascendency of the shareholder value orientation and the financialization of everyday life. It is argued that a deeper understanding of financialization will lead to a better understanding of organized interests, the politics of the welfare state, and processes of institutional change.