A new form of digital economic circulation has emerged, wherein ideas, knowledge, labour and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between geographically distributed but connected and interactive online communities. Such circulation is apparent across a number of digital economic ecologies, including social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and other manifestations of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Prevailing accounts deploy concepts such as ‘co-production’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ to explain digital economic circulation as networked exchange relations characterised by their disintermediated, collaborative and democratising qualities. Building from the neologism of platform capitalism, we place ‘the platform’ – understood as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalisation – at the centre of the critical analysis of digital economic circulation. To create multi-sided markets and coordinate network effects, platforms enrol users through a participatory economic culture and mobilise code and data analytics to compose immanent infrastructures. Platform intermediation is also nested in the ex-post construction of a replicable business model. Prioritising rapid up-scaling and extracting revenues from circulations and associated data trails, the model performs the structure of venture capital investment which capitalises on the potential of platforms to realise monopoly rents.

The paper develops a sympathetic critique of the concept of financialization. This concept has been developed to account for the empowering of financial markets and their influence over the unfolding of economy, polity and society. Processes of financialization are claimed to manifest at a number of scales, ranging from higher levels of instability within the economy as a whole, through pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets, to the equity effects of the financial system on individuals and households.. In seeking to explain the change within contemporary society financialization has to date been relatively underplayed, particularly when compared to similar and related concepts such as neoliberalization. While the concept of financialization has the potential to unite researchers across cognate social science fields, thereby building critical mass and recognition within social studies of money and finance, we argue that to date research has been insufficiently attentive to the role of space and place, both in terms of its processes and its effects. The paper explores a number of possibly fruitful directions for work on financialization to pursue, focusing in particular on the concepts of the financial ecology and financial citizenship.

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In this paper we explore the relationship between knowledge, trust, and space in the production and consumption of retail financial services as part of a wider enquiry into processes of financial exclusion. (1) The analysis in this paper is influenced by two metaphors that have recently been the subject of considerable critical attention within the social science literature. The first metaphor is that of the network. From the work of Castells (2001), and that of actor-network theorists such as Latour, Callon, and others (Callon, 1988; Law and Hassard, 1999), the metaphor of the network is now widely used within economically oriented research to give a sense of the relative connectedness of individuals, institutions, and places to broader social processes (for example,