Search results

The goal of this chapter is to discuss the foundations of ‘modern finance’, its paradigm and conceptual framework, its methods and tools, its practices and results, its governance and regulation.

The first part presents the characteristics of ‘modern finance’ and its negative effects. The second part analyses the efforts made to remedy those effects and argue about the need for a real reform.

Several aspects are pointed, for example an unreasonable ‘normality’, incentives that encourage excess, the spread of subprime crisis, etc. The contemporary finance is a ‘giant with clay feet’.

We need to proceed with a dual reembeddedness of finance in the economy and economy in society.

This paper furthers the analysis of patterns regulating capitalist accumulation based on a historical anthropology of economic activities revolving around and within the Mauritian Export Processing Zone (EPZ).

This paper uses fieldwork in Mauritius to interrogate and critique two important concepts in contemporary social theory – “embeddedness” and “the informal economy.” These are viewed in the wider frame of social anthropology’s engagement with (neoliberal) capitalism.

A process-oriented revision of Polanyi’s work on embeddedness and the “double movement” is proposed to help us situate EPZs within ongoing power struggles found throughout the history of capitalism. This helps us to challenge the notion of economic informality as supplied by Hart and others.

Scholars and policymakers have tended to see economic informality as a force from below, able to disrupt the legal-rational nature of capitalism as practiced from on high. Similarly, there is a view that a precapitalist embeddedness, a “human economy,” has many good things to offer. However, this paper shows that the practices of the state and multinational capitalism, in EPZs and elsewhere, exactly match the practices that are envisioned as the cure to the pitfalls of capitalism.

Setting aside the formal-informal distinction in favor of a process-oriented analysis of embeddedness allows us better to understand the shifting struggles among the state, capital, and labor.