Financialization and the stewardship of workers' capital in Australia

Financialization is a term used in academic discourse to criticize and describe the influence of financial markets (and marketization) in the political economy. As van der Zwan (2014: 99) puts it, "Studies of financialization interrogate how an increasingly autonomous realm of global finance has altered the underlying logics of the industrial economy and the inner workings of democratic society." As such, financialization has come to be associated with the "shareholder value" or agency model of corporate governance, the growing dominance of capital markets, the increasing political and economic power of a particular class grouping (the rentier class), and the explosion of financial trading with a myriad of new financial instruments, or, for Krippner (2005: 14), a "pattern of accumulation in which profit making occurs increasingly through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production."