The effects on work of firm-level financialization

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of financialisation on work in firms, work being considered as a meaningful and collective human activity. For that purpose, we identify the channels through which financialisation affects the practices that determine the design and control of work within firms. Such transmission channels have seldom been scrutinized in the literature which has favoured macro or meso level approaches to financialisation. We argue that the process that leads from finance to work is theoretically and normatively legitimated by the (mainstream economics’) agency theory of the firm, which became the dominant paradigm in management and corporate law in the 1980s. Financialisation contributed to the dissemination of a ‘governance of work by numbers’, i.e., the quantification, intensification, dehumanisation and devaluation of human work. Instituting a governance model in which workers participate in decisions at all levels of the firm may be the more effective way to revert this trend.