Towards a Socioanalysis of Money, Finance and Capitalism：Beneath the Surface of the Financial Industry

The current global financial crisis has raised awareness of the impact the world of finance has on the economy and the future of democracy. Following the crisis, this book aims at a deep understanding of the human psycho-social dynamics beneath the surface of the financial industry, its markets and institutions. It seeks to understand why the seemingly rational world of economic behavior, with its calculated models and predictions, at times goes horribly wrong.

This book uses the discipline of socio-analysis to explore the meaning of money, markets and the broad financial world that so strongly affects our daily lives. Socio-analysis contributes to an awareness and understanding of underlying unconscious desires, fantasies and illusions that bring about the irrational inflation of faith and trust in the world of money, finance and capital(ism). The insight that the financial crisis ‘was essentially psychological in origin’ (Robert Shiller) and that the world of finance is broadly shaped if not determined by irrational often unconscious factors is not yet broadly shared. This book appears to be one of the first, if not the first contribution that explicitly focuses on what is beneath the surface of money, finance and capital. It invites the reader to explore the financial world in depth.

The aim of this book is to provide businesses, organizational consultants, students, researchers and interested persons more broadly with a detailed exploration of the psycho-social dynamics of the financial industry as it exists currently within the capitalist system. The contributors to this book come from Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, The Netherlands, UK, and USA. More

Susan Long is an adjunct Professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, where she supervises research students and conducts organisational research. She is currently President of the Psychoanalytic Studies Association of Australasia and is a past President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations and the founding president of Group Relations Australia.

Burkard Sievers is Professor Emeritus of Organization Development in the Schumpeter School of Business and Economics at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany. He is past President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations.

1. Introduction Burkard Sievers and Susan Long Part 1: Money 2. What is the Value of Money? Allan Shafer 3. Greed Susan Long 4. Money as a Fetish: The Financial Market Crisis from a Psychodynamic Perspective Claudia Nagel 5. Inside the Minds of the Money Minders: Deciphering Reflections on Money, Behaviour and Leadership in the Financial Crisis of 2007–2010 Alison Gill and Mannie Sher 6. The Attempted Murder of Money and Time: Addressing the Global Systemic Banking Crisis Richard Morgan-Jones Part 2: Finance 7. Towards a Socioanalysis of the Current Financial Crisis Burkard Sievers 8. Sense Making Stories and Evaluative Cultures of Fund Managers: Evidence from Istanbul Emre Tarim 9. Socioanalysis of a Wall Street Failure William M. Czander 10. What Me Worry? Deregulation and its Discontents: Accurate Reality Testing Reveals Flaws to Deregulation Seth Allcorn and Howard F. Stein 11. The Failure of Risk Management in the Financial Industry: The Organization in the Mind of Financial Leaders Byron Wollen 12. Risk as Present Futures: An Elaboration on Risk and Fear Peter Pelzer 13. Trading Opportunities and Risks: Conflicting Methods of Coordination in Investment Banks Jesper Blomberg, Hans Kjellberg and Karin Winroth 14. Roles, Risks and Complexity: An Exploration of the Triangle Institutional Investors, Executive Boards and Supervisory Boards in The Netherlands Erik van de Loo and Angelien Kemna 15. When Profit–Seeking Trumps Safety: The Risks and Opportunities of Liminality in Commercial Aviation in Post-9/11 America Amy L. Fraher 16. Social Dreams of the Financial Crisis W. Gordon Lawrence 17. The Consumer Credit Boom and its Aftermath in Hungary: On the Changing Role of Commercial Banks Sándor Takács 18. Falling Bankers and Falling Banks: A Psychoanalytical Exploration of the Phaethon Motif and the Fall in Financial Careers Hans van den Hooff 19. Melting the Iceberg; Unveiling Financial Frames: Compliance Officers and the Performance of Norms in Contemporary Financial Markets Marc Lenglet Part 3: Capitalism 20. Pathology of the Capitalist Spirit David P. Levine 21. Trust and the Global Financial Crisis Douglas Kirsner 22. The Financial Crisis: Exploring the Dynamics of Imagination and Authority in a Post-Industrial World Larry Hirschhorn 23. Profit as Organizing Meaning: The Financial Industry and the Dynamic Theory of Multiple Function Ian S. Miller 24. Anti-Oedipal Dynamics in the Sub-Prime Loan Debacle: The Case of a Study by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank Howard S. Schwartz 25. Capitalist Imperatives and the Democratic Capacities’ Constraint: An Examination of the Interface of Modern Capitalist Markets with the World’s Largest Worker-Owned Corporation; The Mondragon Corporation of Spain Laura Yu 26. Market Masculinities and Electronic Trading Matthias Klaes, Geoff Lightfoot and Simon Lilley Part 4: Conclusion 27. Money, Finances and Capitalism: Issues in Organizational Life for Now and the Future Susan Long and Burkard Sievers More