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.

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 Universitat Wuppertal, Germany. He is past President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations.