The Geographies of Industrialised Finance: Probing the Global Production Networks of Asset Management

Abstract

AbstractContemporary finance is highly industrialised in its division of labour and spatial organisation. Using the example of the asset management industry, this article applies the Global Production Network (GPN) framework to the largely disregarded ‘production’ of finance. Whereas acknowledging the GPN's progressive conceptualisation of cross‐boundary relationalities in the organisation of economic globalisation, this article critically engages with three of the concept's core analytical units. First, it challenges the somewhat misleading definition of ‘value’ with regard to speculative financial activities. Second, it argues that the complex, often opaque financial products are outcomes of the increased epistemic nature in the production of finance, which requires a shift in the conceptual and empirical attention of embeddedness towards the defining circuits of knowledge. Third, it contests the neat typology of governance forms by highlighting the proliferation of private contracting in some of the most complex financial GPNs. By probing finance, the article enriches the GPN research portfolio of case studies and interrogates the formulation of some of its core analytical categories. It is further argued that this more holistic approach towards how globalised and financialised finance is organised and coordinated as discussed in this article provides a fruitful alternative to the prevailing neoclassical, econometric understanding in financial studies.