From Artisan to Partisan

Abstract

This article confronts the question of what a revitalized financial sector might look like if this were to be reconfigured so as to reproduce first an artisanal-like persona for the financial analyst and craft-like organizational structure for financial businesses, and second if this were to be re-territorialized so that it acted like a partisan rather than, as at present, like a disembedded footloose structure of ‘global finance’. Initially the analysis is pitched at a rather abstract and theoretical level – pulling together artisans, nomads and partisans and tracing their intellectual lineages. But the chapter ends with three very concrete illustrations of actual financial relations in practice that meet some of the criteria for being both artisanal and partisanal.