Financial frontiers: borders, conversions, enclosures

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on fieldwork carried out with professionals working in mergers and acquisitions, venture capital and private equity cross-border transactions in Shanghai, this article proposes to study how the financial industry is co-constituted with power relations outside of it. In these transactions, financial professionals combine standardized valuation and investment methods with imaginaries of states, economies and cultural and national identity, differentiated in terms of borders. These imaginaries propose various moral and political meanings about where money should go and what should be the role of the financial industry in the process. These are practices of ‘conversion’, where professionals maintain these different moral and political meanings as incommensurable but make them interdependent by bringing them together in exchanges of shares for money. This contributes to enclosures, where the meaning of the objects exchanged, for instance companies working in environmental protection and health, can only be articulated in terms of the power relations that the financial industry brings together in the transactions. Studying how financial imaginaries about value, investors and markets are co-constituted with other power relations contributes to understanding the roles of the financial industry in the production of global hierarchies.