Rethinking the Market » Activities and Outputs (tag [book chapter])

Chapter published in 'What Went Wrong with Britain? An Audit of Tory Failure'

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 11:09:06 GMT

In August 2025, a book was published called What Went Wrong with Britain? An Audit of Tory Failure, edited by Steven Kettell, Peter Kerr and Daniela Tepe. It attempts to chart the legacy that was left by the Conservative Government which was voted out of office in 2024, fourteen years after David Cameron had first formed his coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Five prime ministers and multiple convulsions later, much of the social, economic and institutional fabric of the UK looked to be on distinctly wobbly foundations, creating a notably poisoned chalice for the incoming Labour government and nurturing further discontent of the sort on which hard-right populist nationalism thrives. My chapter is called, 'Talking the Country Up, Talking the Country Down: Modern Conservatism's Politics of Division'. It focuses on how the Johnson-Truss-Sunak governments came to rely ultimately on a mood music that dismissed any suggestion that the UK was anything other than the most successful country on the planet and the greatest place in which to be born. It charts the bluffing, the preposterous claims, the active dissimulation and the outright lies that became integral to the mode of governance that guided the country through the twin upheavals of Brexit and Covid. Britain was left noticeably worse off on almost any measure than it had been in 2010, but the Conservative Party increasingly denied people the right to say those thoughts out loud.

Chapter published in 'The Social Foundations of Global Finance: The Political Economy of Timothy J. Sinclair'

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 10:50:00 GMT

In August 2025, a book was published called The Social Foundations of Finance, which was a collection of essays written in honour of my former Warwick colleague, Tim Sinclair. Very sadly, Tim died suddenly in 2022, leaving a vast hole most obviously in his immediate family life, but also very clearly in our department and in international political economy scholarship on the dynamics of global finance. This book has been edited by two further Warwick colleagues, Chris Clarke and Ben Clift, in an attempt to show how Tim's work has sparked multiple research agendas through which finance is repositioned as an intensely human practice. My essay tries to flesh out the implications of Tim's approach for understanding the fallibility of the human systems through which financial pricing takes place and the financial economy more generally is reproduced. It attempts to cast new light on dynamics of financial crises by emphasising how the models that are used to guide day-to-day practice within financial firms are themselves riddled with the ontological and the epistemic effects of human fallibility. Late in his life Tim and I would discuss the implications of what a research agenda cast in this image might look like, but sadly we did not get a chance to pursue it together. My essay is entitled, 'Of Markets and Models: The Extended Realm of the Mundane in the Social Foundations of Finance Approach'.

Chapter in Bob Jessop and Karim Knio's Book, The Pedagogy of Economic, Political and Social Crises

Sat, 22 Sep 2018 14:12:19 GMT

Title: 'Vision and Ideology in Economic Theory: The Post-Crisis Persistence of Mainstream General Equilibrium Macroeconomics', in Bob Jessop and Karim Knio (eds) (2018) The Pedagogy of Economic, Political and Social Crises: Dynamics, Construals and Lessons, London: Routledge, pp. 105-120.

Extract from text: The problem facing mainstream macroeconomics is that competitive pricing dynamics are now treated as the norm on both sides of the Schumpeterian divide between vision and ideology. It is the assumption of competitive pricing dynamics that makes DSGE models thinkable in the first instance; it is their methodological condition of possibility. Yet this same assumption now routinely informs policy recommendations from DSGE modellers on how best to manage economic relations. What might originally have been merely a set of tools to guide attempts to make sense of the world in abstract terms have since become increasingly difficult to disentangle from the assertion that competitive pricing is essential to the efficient allocation of scarce resources in the modern economy. Initially, the assumption of continuous market-clearing dynamics was just a means of making the mathematics of a purely hypothetical general equilibrium model operable. Increasingly, however, this same assumption is invoked to justify remaking economic institutions and attitudes so that the world operates just like the model.

Foreword to Robbie Shilliam's Race and the Undeserving Poor

Sun, 08 Jul 2018 14:56:50 GMT

Title: 'Foreword', in Robbie Shilliam (2018) Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit, Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing.

Extract from text: The great merit to be found in Robbie Shilliam's book is just how clearly his voice comes across. He explores the lineage of repeated political attempts in Britain from the eighteenth century onwards to bracket off 'the deserving poor' from the broader category of 'the poor' in general. Some marker of difference must be called upon to distinguish those who do from those who do not merit political sympathy for their plight and state support to lessen their day-to-day grind of making ends meet. Shilliam shows that, often, the simple characteristic of what you look like was enough for a person of colour to be relegated from the deserving category. At other times, behaivoural traits became the means of differentiation, but assumptions relating to the propensity to display proscribed behaviour have been so frequently racialised that this symbol of exclusion has also been reduced to the issue of skin colour. Race and the Undeserving Poor demonstrates how practices of British working-class respectability have historically been inscribed with underlying images of whiteness.

Introduction to the Reprinted Edition of Susan Strange's Casino Capitalism

Wed, 23 Aug 2017 15:43:25 GMT

Title: ‘Introduction’, in Susan Strange (2016 [1986]) Casino Capitalism, reprinted edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp.vii-xviii.

Extract from text: For anyone who is returning to [Casino Capitalism] for the first time in a number of years, it is a delight to be reacquainted with the nuance of a historical perspective that emphasises the significance of decisions that could have been taken but were not, just as much as the decisions that were actually taken (pp.47-58). History thus comes alive as a highly politicised lens in Strange’s hands through the analysis of alternatives that were available but were overlooked simply because they did not fit the prevailing political mentality. For anyone coming to this work for the first time, there will consequently by many moments of revelation. Even though a self-consciously theoretical voice was so often written out of Strange’s work, younger generations of IPE scholars will find on repeated occasions that her texts speak to them in a language that helps to confirm their own subsequent theoretical choices. Strange’s ‘amateur history’ thus pre-empts a good deal of IPE’s future, in its concern for both the way in which the financial system was becoming a repository for political power and for how this made more and more people susceptible in their everyday lives to the whims of financial market pricing dynamics.

Book Chapter Published in Hay and Payne's Civic Capitalism

Tue, 17 Mar 2015 18:38:28 GMT

'What Has to be Civilized?', in Colin Hay and Anthony Payne (eds) (2015) Civic Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 109-116.

Pre-print version available here.