Conceptualising ‘financialisation’: governance, organisational behaviour and social interaction in UK housing

This paper interrogates the concept of financialisation and assesses its utility for housing scholarship. It begins by noting the elasticity of the concept and considers some of the criticisms made against its deployment. The main body of the paper, using the UK as an example, puts forward suggestions to operationalise the concept across three scales: structural (to analyse the governance of housing); institutional (to explain formal and informal processes, including the behaviour of housing organisations) and individual (to understand the ways that financialisation is imposed but also resisted within social settings). Amongst the arguments presented is that the concept has most utility for researchers when applied historically, to make explicit how the variegated, situational and adaptive practices that are now in place have their origins in earlier stages of capitalist development. The paper concludes by suggesting that financialisation is most productive when applied alongside, rather than in place of concepts such as neoliberalism and commodification.