Global Financial Markets and Global Financial Class

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Patrick Sachweh, since 2/2016
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 251702274

Global Financial Markets and Global Financial ClassThis project is based on an international collaboration and investigates whether professionals in the global financial markets, such as traders or investment bankers, form a global social class. The development of this project has been funded by a DFG grant for the initiation of international collaboration.In contrast to existing research, which regards the processes of globalization and global class formation as driven by transnational organizations and/or migration, we locate the basis for these processes in the communalities produced by the social embeddedness of the market. Following arguments made by the new economic sociology and the social studies of finance, markets are structurally, culturally, cognitively and politically embedded in social networks, calculative and communicative practices and political struggles. From the perspective of Bourdieus field theory, we argue that these forms of embeddedness translate into specific forms of economic, social and cultural capital, and that cultural and cognitive embeddedness produce a common worldview (doxa) and habitus of market actors. For their intrinsic global nature, modern financial markets thereby provide the basis for the formation of a global social class. We will investigate this empirically via narrative interviews of financial professionals and a comparative ethnography of the global financial centres Frankfurt and Sydney. Due to their different national economic backgrounds, these two cities serve as critical cases for investigating the thesis of a global financial class.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Sighard Neckel, until 1/2016