From Shadowy Zone to Daily Routine: Finance Culture in Australia

This paper contributes to accounts of the role of finance and financialization in Australia. We examine recent signs of disenchantment with financialization, then show how it is difficult to yoke contemporary instabilities in a dominant, finance-led governmental regime to wider projects for change given the normalization of finance culture in Australia. The paper describes and analyzes this normalization, paying particular attention to the part various media play in Australians’ acquisition of a finance rationality. While we aim to add to historicizations of finance and finance culture that interpret financialization, its various actors, its rationality and its technologies as something other than the natural habitat of people in the 21st century, we do so by looking at the problems counter-inscriptions and arguments currently face in building constituencies for alternative and oppositional finance policies.