Knitting together Finance and our Daily lives

The most commonly evoked link between our daily lives and finance figuring in the media and political discourses, is related to employment and the organisation of work. Sociology and economics speak of the ‘financialisation of the economy’ to outline these processes. For example, power within companies is increasingly found in the hands of those who hold its capital, meaning banks and especially majority shareholders – read entities such as pension funds – who are not interested in the production side of companies but simply their profitability. Some of them go so far as to distinguish between the real economy and the financial economy, with the first involving production and the second, simple speculation that interferes with ‘genuine’ economic activities. This approach is flawed in that it does not take into account and does not describe the interlacing of finance with productive activities. It gives the impression that there are spheres which should remain entirely impervious to each other within the same economic universe. Yet, the reality in practice is more complex, and clearly, one of the objectives of social research into finance is to show that finance is an object linked to other human activities, and therefore well anchored in reality