We examine the impact of globalization on state structures in the specific instance of the central bank. Following the world-system, world-society and neo-institutional perspectives in sociology, we assume that states are in cultural, political and economic competition with each other, thereby seeking to maintain their position and status, frequently by adopting organizational forms or practices that make them isomorphic with their environment. We predict that countries boost the independence of their central bank from the political power as their exposure to foreign trade, investment, and multilateral lending increases. We also model the cross-national dynamic process of diffusion of central bank independence by examining the impact of cohesive and role-equivalent trade relationships between countries. We test our hypotheses with information on 71 countries between 1990 and 2000, using both event-history modeling and fixed-effects panel-corrected regression. Controlling for domestic variables of a macroeconomic and political nature, we find empirical support for each our predictions. We conclude that globalization pressures have the effect of strengthening certain parts of the state at the expense of others, and raise concerns about the degree of democratic oversight of technocratic institutions. 3 One of the most prominent themes of the globalization literature in the social sciences is the impact that increasing cross-border flows of goods, services, capital, people and information exert on the institution of the modern nation-state. Many scholars have highlighted the ways in which economic and financial globalization undermine the state's capacity to act and regulate. Thus, in Sovereignty at Bay, the political economist Raymond Vernon (1971:249, 265-270, 284) noticed that the spread of multinational corporations creates "destructive political tensions," and that there is a "need to reestablish balance" between political and economic institutions. More recently, the historian Paul Kennedy (1993:53-64, 122-134) asserted that governments are losing control in the wake of globalization. Other scholars have argued that globalization challenges the state's autonomy and capacity for independent decision-making, raising "questions about the meaning of sovereignty in its external sense of a system ordered in terms of mutually exclusive territoriality" (Kobrin

This article moves beyond current controversies on the nature of money by suggesting that a general social process allows different kinds of organizations and networks-from states to banks to local communities-to produce currencies: that is, the articulation of criteria of creditworthiness, or what I call the exercise of moral authority. Bankers specialize in moral authority, but when that authority is contested, challenging groups must articulate alternative criteria of creditworthiness for their currencies to become stable and acceptable. I illustrate these processes with historical material from the postbellum United States, which I use to discuss why the federal government failed to create a stable financial system, and why local bankers engaged in a process of financial innovation that further destabilized money. I conclude with reflections on the shifting structural sources of moral authority, which have made the local level a springboard for destabilizing financial innovations.

Rightwing theorists argue that we owe the current financial crisis to the democratization of credit, or financial inclusion: politics interfered with the market to benefit marginalized actors, only to cause instability and risk. Leftwing theorists focus instead on financialization: namely, the shift of profit-making activities from industry to finance. These views implicitly draw on Schumpeter and Marx. Much like their intellectual progenitors, they emphasize exogenous processes to explain financial change. Here I claim that the connection between financial innovation and financial inclusion is endogenous. I suggest two main typologies of financial innovators: Market Utopians (MUs) and Populist Innovators (PIs). Financial inclusion, I submit, is the byproduct of the quest for power of the latter.

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Does globalization encourage and facilitate the development of generalized trust, or does it, on the contrary, foster mutual suspicion and distrust? This question preoccupied intellectual elites during the early phases of expansion of world markets, and it has become once again relevant in the context of contemporary globalization. This article proposes a sociological redefinition of this question by distinguishing between different aspects of globalization (economic competition and cultural embeddedness in the world polity) and specifying how those aspects affect trust. Using hierarchical models with individual and cross-national data from the World Values Survey and other sources on 41 countries for the 2005-2008 period, the article finds empirical support for the propositions that globalized competition decreases generalized trust in the countries most exposed to it, while competitiveness in prestigious cultural activities (such as scientific production) increases generalized trust.How does globalization affect social trust -the way, that is, that people relate to others they do not know? The history of this question is long and distinguished: in the 15th and 18th centuries, as international trade expanded, intellectual elites worried about how manners and mores would be affected -how, that is, people would interact with others they were previously unacquainted with, when the opportunities for such interactions suddenly seemed more open (Hirschman, 1977(Hirschman, , 1982. Two contradictory accounts emerged from these debates, and to this day continue structuring the analysis of globalization's impact on trust: on the one hand, globalization is understood to be integrative and civilizing, increasing people's mutual dependence on others, and leading to greater social trust; on the other hand, globalization is perceived as destructive and threatening, making people vulnerable to forces beyond their control, and thus affecting social trust negatively (Guillén,