{"title":"Building walls to tame time: Enclaves and the enduring power of failure","authors":"J. Sumich","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2022.2102743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2022.2102743","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper, I explore the ways in which the construction of enclaves became central to utopian attempts of social engineering and how their legacies shape contemporary society despite the failures of these projects. By focusing on the role of enclaving, in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, I demonstrate how it derives its power as a walled remnant of the resuscitation of past utopian goals and simultaneously, by being presented as a solution to current festering urban problems, often themselves the result of previous attempts of enclaving. Rather than solely acting as an outgrowth of the most exclusionary aspects of contemporary capitalism, I argue that enclaving is a highly malleable strategy of enacting power despite its enduring failure.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78693664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Recentering central banks: Theorizing state-economy boundaries as central bank effects","authors":"N. Coombs, M. Thiemann","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2022.2118450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2022.2118450","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This special issue argues that to make sense of the increased prominence of central banks after the 2008 financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic requires interrogating the sources of and limits to their governmental power. In a time in which the ‘big state’ has returned alongside new forms of financial speculation, the theoretical claim advanced by this introductory paper is that the state ‘effect’ is in crucial respects conditioned by the economic governance arrangements set in place by central banks. We show that at the same time as promoting entanglements between states and markets, central banks attempt to draw new boundaries between state and economy, lending an unstable and sometimes contradictory character to their interventions. Providing the outlines of a new historical sociology of central banking which introduces the papers in the special issue, we explore the double movement that has underpinned the evolution of central banking since early modernity and holds clues for unravelling the paradoxes of the present.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77692920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Independence without purpose? Macroprudential regulation at the Bundesbank","authors":"Edin Ibrocevic","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2022.2117339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2022.2117339","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract It is commonly assumed that state agencies legitimize themselves via outputs. This paper shows that in situations of organizational crisis, state agencies may adopt new policy areas symbolically to compensate for lost legitimacy. Drawing on an ethnography within the Bundesbank, internal documents, and insider interviews, I trace how the German Bundesbank adopted financial stability as a policy area to compensate for the loss of monetary policy and banking supervision in the early 2000s. By focusing on the relationship between internal organizational struggles over the Bundesbank’s identity and the boundary work it has to conduct to establish its new role, I show that the Bundesbank failed to shift the state-economy boundary post-crisis in its effort to regain its position as autonomous purveyor of macroeconomic governance.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88393902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Growth at risk: Boundary walkers, stylized facts and the legitimacy of countercyclical interventions","authors":"M. Thiemann","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2022.2117341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2022.2117341","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Post-crisis, central banks were encouraged to intervene against the cyclical build up of systemic risks in the financial system, a mandate which contravened previous conceptions of the state-economy boundary. This paper traces how central bank economists forged an analytical apparatus that could guide and legitimize such central bank interventions, detailing how their work involved forging new connections between actors within the boundary zone between the academic and the bureaucratic fields. Acting as ‘economists in the wild’, I show how these actors were able to establish ‘stylized facts’ about the boom-and-bust cycles of financial markets. Holding a foot both within the academic and the bureaucratic fields, such boundary walkers skilfully leveraged central bank resources to enrol allies in the field of academic economics to decisively shift the discursive representation of finance as cyclical, in turn legitimating ambitious central bank interventions into the functioning of the economy.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84743279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Narrating imagined crises: How central bank storytelling exerts infrastructural power","authors":"N. Coombs","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2022.2117313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2022.2117313","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While a rich literature has examined how central banks mobilize narratives to enrol publics in monetary policymaking, the effects of the narratives deployed in banking supervision remain neglected. Drawing on 21 expert interviews, this paper fills that lacuna through a study of stress testing, a technique that became a fixture of international banking supervision after the 2008 crisis and which the Bank of England is using to align the risk management of the United Kingdom’s banks with its sense-making about emerging financial stability risks. I theorize the entanglements of the Bank’s financial stability narratives with binding supervisory requirements as giving rise to a new form of ‘infrastructural power’. This perspective explains why some financial sector actors see their decision-making autonomy being sapped away by the Bank’s stress tests even though they work through banks’ own risk sensitive calculative infrastructures. The paper’s findings also point to how the infrastructural affordances of central banks’ forward-looking narratives are pushing the temporal frontier of the state-economy boundary further into the future than has traditionally been considered an appropriate operational domain.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87612508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dependence on independence: Central bank lawyers and the (un)making of the European economy","authors":"Stephanie L. Mudge, A. Vauchez","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2022.2121068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2022.2121068","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We analyse the trajectory of independence in the formation of the European Central Bank (ECB), conceptualized as a boundary organization that, by delineating the European economy, contributes to a supranational state effect. Success in the effort, however, requires the ECB to constantly assert a separate and special status, despite its embeddedness in multiple fields. Focusing on the European Monetary Institute, the ECB’s predecessor, we trace how historically obscure bank-based legal experts enabled the ECB’s assertion of separateness by reworking independence into a newly multivalent category that could be wielded in authority struggles with national central banks and European institutions. The ECB’s dependence on independence, we argue, renders it uniquely vulnerable to the repoliticization of central banking.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78454810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Uncomfortable knowledge in central banking: Economic expertise confronts the visibility dilemma","authors":"Jacqueline Best","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2022.2121066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2022.2121066","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract How do central bankers cope with the uncomfortable fact that there are significant limits to their expertise without losing authority? Drawing on Steve Rayner’s concept of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’, this paper undertakes a historical examination of the early years of Paul Volcker’s role at the head of the Federal Reserve, and then traces the ways in which the uncomfortable fact of ignorance has been dealt with in the years since then: from the reflexive and experimental approach of the 1980s, through the dismissal and displacement of the Great Moderation, to the exceptionalism and new experimentalism of the post-2008 era. In each of these eras, I argue that central banks face a visibility dilemma: their expertise must be visible enough to demonstrate their mastery but not so conspicuous that the often ad hoc and uncertain nature of their craft generates political push-back about their role and authority.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84488966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Two Dimensions of Critique and the Failure of Metacritique : The 2022 Presidential Election in South Korea and the End of the ‘87 Regime’","authors":"Eunjoo Cho","doi":"10.18207/criso.2022..135.120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18207/criso.2022..135.120","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86122699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Strategic Change in Political Reform in Korea","authors":"Kwanhu Lee","doi":"10.18207/criso.2022..135.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18207/criso.2022..135.12","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75165850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"War in Ukraine and Challenge for East Asian Geopolitics","authors":"Seung-wook Baek","doi":"10.18207/criso.2022..135.198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18207/criso.2022..135.198","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86965519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}