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Italian municipalities and the politics of financial derivatives: rethinking the Foucauldian perspective
journal contribution
posted on 2016-09-20, 13:57 authored by Andrea Lagna© The Author(s) 2015.This study examines the use of interest rate swaps by Italian municipalities during the 2000-2014 period. Through a constructive critique of Foucauldian political economy, it argues that local administrators did not enter the swaps market to perform and depoliticize the disciplinary power of financialized discourses. The evidence suggests many more layers of historical complexity underlie the municipalities' actions than a Foucauldian approach can grasp. Local governments used swaps to circumvent the budget constraints imposed by the European Stability and Growth Pact. In this sense, municipalities acted more for political-strategic than for performative and depoliticized purposes. Rethinking the dimensions of performativity and disciplinary power - through an approach that is more sensitive than Foucauldian analysis to historical agency and asymmetrical power relations - is crucial to address the differential and politically shaped contours of financialization across the globe.
Funding
COST Action IS0902 provided financial support to this research (ECOST-STSM-IS0902-060812- 019528).
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
Competition and ChangeVolume
19Issue
4Pages
283 - 300Citation
LAGNA, A., 2015. Italian municipalities and the politics of financial derivatives: rethinking the Foucauldian perspective. Competition and Change, 19(4), pp.283-300.Publisher
Sage (© The Authors)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Competition and Change and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1024529415581969ISSN
1024-5294eISSN
1477-2221Publisher version
Language
- en