The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization

Understanding Financialization in a Rapidly Changing World

The recent growth of finance touches far more than banks and trading floors. It shapes housing, health care, education, pensions, development policy, and everyday household decisions. The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization brings together a wide range of scholars to map how finance has become embedded in political, cultural, technological, and social life.

Edited by Philip Mader, Daniel Mertens, and Natascha van der Zwan, this volume offers the first comprehensive survey of financialization studies. It connects finance with changes in politics, technology, culture, society, and the economy, and it traces the field’s evolution from describing financialization to explaining its driving forces, mechanisms, and boundaries.

What the Handbook Covers

The book is organised into four main parts, each addressing a different dimension of financialization research:

• Finance and Financialization: Taking Stock — foundational debates on value, money, the state, corporate governance, and the financialization of everyday life.
• Approaches to Studying Financialization — perspectives from anthropology, feminist and gender studies, heterodox economics, history, and socio-technical analysis.
• Structures, Spaces and Sites of Financialization — demand regimes, emerging economies, real estate, environmental frontiers, and offshore finance.
• Actors, Agency and Politics of Financialization — central banks, institutional investors, securities exchanges, microcredit, social policy, labor, culture, and democracy.

Why This Handbook Matters

Rather than treating finance as a separate sector, the contributors show how financial logics reshape social relations, state power, inequality, and even the natural environment. The book’s global and pluri-disciplinary approach makes it useful for researchers and students in economics, political science, sociology, geography, anthropology, and related fields who want to understand the changing face of finance.

With contributions from leading and emerging scholars, the volume balances critical analysis with accessible surveys of key debates. It is designed to serve as both an introduction for newcomers and a reference point for specialists tracking the latest developments in financialization research.