Guest editors' introduction - Financial subjects : culture and materiality.

Abstract

The social identity of professional financiers is a relatively long-standing concern of social scientists. Consider, for example, the ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ of the City of London’s investment banks (Augar 2000; Cain & Hopkins 1986, 1987), and the private banking families that bestrode the ‘capitals of capital’ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe (Cassis 2005). But, across disciplines and over the last two decades or so, a growing literature has come to ascribe analytical significance to the making of financial subjects in the manufacture of an array of professional and popular financial markets. The first of three main themes which the papers in this Special Issue elucidate upon, then, is the often complex ways in which multiple financial subjects are summoned-up and assembled in the cultural and material production of contemporary financial markets.