If any organization ought to be immune to the forces of financialization, it is a publicly funded university in corporatist Europe. Shielded from the intrusion by financial metrics, values and professionals through a strong historically rooted tradition of selfmanagement by powerful professional guilds, continental universities should largely have avoided the marketization and managerialization of Anglophone universities. Not so, this case study of a Dutch public university suggests. From 1995 onwards, a shift in real estate management-devolving responsibilities from the Dutch state to universitiesserved as a Trojan horse for financialization, triggering changes in organizational culture and a power shift from teaching and research professionals to accountants, real-estate developers, financiers and their ilk. This case suggests that the power of finance is such that no societal domain is immune. The paper ends with a call for more non-metropolitan case studies of financialization and argues that the only hope for salvation is a more self-conscious defense of traditional academic values by the guardians of higher learning themselves.
The rise of Fintech challenges established financial centres and incumbent financial institutions to rethink their strategies to remain obligatory passage points in the age of digitizing finance. To appreciate these changes, it is important to maintain theoretical interchange between developments in financial geography and economic geography, its parent discipline. In this paper, we argue that the ways in which evolutionary economic geography impacts strategic coupling in global financial networks are crucial to grasp tomorrow’s geographies of Fintech. Through an in-depth examination of Brussels, we analyse the potential of Fintech opening a window of locational opportunity in financial services. Belgium has put together a strategy to seize this window by leveraging its politically neutral image and Brussels’ existing niche in financial collaboration and infrastructural plumbing. The latter status is exemplified by the presence of global players SWIFT and Euroclear. We analyse how Belgian entrepreneurs and politicians assess Brussels’ locational resources, and strategically couple big financial institutions with small tech startups in order to cultivate a Fintech ecosystem in the service of incumbent finance, constituting a Fin-Tech-State triangle. As such, we document and analyse how the coalescence of finance and technology offers new opportunities for second-tier financial centres, while highlighting the difficulties in reaping these in practice.
The global financial crisis is complex and uneven. This paper focuses on the propagation and mediation of the crisis via a case study of the city of Pforzheim, in southwest Germany. In 2004 the municipality signed a number of derivative contracts with Deutsche Bank, aiming to limit interest payments. However, since the early days of the crisis these contracts have produced heavy losses. Attempts to restructure them (involving the world's largest derivatives dealer JPMorgan Chase) compounded losses. This study explores the making, unfolding, interpretation, negotiation and contestation of this crisis, enabling wider critical analysis of state–finance relations across the bounded spaces of local government, through transnational firms and intersecting varieties (and scales) of capitalism.
The literature on global and world cities points towards a growing concentration of advanced producer services (APS) firms in a restricted number of cities, who execute strategic command and control functions over globalised capitalism. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how APS are located within such cities. We argue that APS locations within cities are related to two partly independent processes: localisation economies and centralisation dynamics, which result in patterns of concentration and centrality superimposed on socio-historical constructions of urban space. Utilising data from a national company register, we analyse the local insertion of APS firms in the Brussels' metropolitan area in light of these two processes. The outcome reveals that only some of Brussels' APS firms are concentrated and central, which we suggest to be the most strategic and internationalised APS functions.
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