Financialization describes finance’s growing penetration into every domain of life

Evidence

An early, narrow definition of financialization was provided in 2002 in Randy Martin’s Financialization of Daily Life, in which he looks at how finance “insinuates an orientation toward accounting and risk management into all domains of life.” A broader, influential definition of the term came in 2005, when Gerald Epstein posited that financialization refers to “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies.” Between these two scales—micro and macro, personal and institutional—a wide range of scholarship blossomed to analyze this growing development, accelerating in the wake of the 2007–8 financial crash. Financialization is both a broad phenomenon with common characteristics across the political economy and a fluid process that has distinct operations and outcomes in different situations. Scholars have interrogated the financialization of food, housing, fertility, pharmaceuticals, environmental economic transition, medicine, and others. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 97

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the working definition of financialization and its micro/macro duality, which the whole media-instrument analysis depends on.
• XREF: The scholarship lineage (housing, fertility, food) parallels the reader’s grafted trees/infrastructure framing - each domain has a distinct financialization fingerprint. — connects to: Finance has become the primary arbiter of policy and value across daily life — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 32
• QUESTION: Worth asking whether the reader’s own project - tracing one instrument to a specific song feature - is a micro-financialization case Epstein’s macro definition can’t capture.