Securitization connects financial risk management to militarized cultural politics in everyday retail.

Evidence

In this chapter, I suggest that Walmart can also be fruitfully interpreted through the lens of securitization, a term that neatly connects the financial imperative to manage risk, on the one hand, and the concomitant trend towards increased security, surveillance and militarized pre-emptive action, on the other. In spite of its austere retail ecologies and gimmicky brand image, Walmart, I argue, addresses and shapes its shoppers and its workers as savvy risk-takers, mature neoliberal subjects and sophisticated financial actors, all the while applying the methods and practices of financial risk management to its own operations. I also show how Walmart employs and broadcasts a cultural politics of securitization. Not only have they developed cutting-edge technologies for surveillance and (as they call it) “threatresearch” and “exception management,” they also have worked to associate their brand and their stores with the paranoid, nationalist and militarized “risk-free” idealism and cultural politics of post-9/11 America, which cultural critic Henry Giroux (2004) associates with a proto-fascist authoritarianism. This double meaning of securitization, I argue, helps us understand the ways in which financialization is rooted in the spaces and processes of everyday life and popular culture. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 47

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bridges toward deWaard’s cultural-argument reading; the double meaning of ‘securitization’ is the load-bearing concept. — connects to: Securitization couples financial risk management with surveillance and militarized security. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 47; Walmart’s power operates through securitization linking financial risk management to surveillance — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 558; Securitization converts uncertainty into quantifiable, tradeable risk and shapes daily life — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 248 (+4 more)
• SEED: The Walmart-as-securitization case is a concrete essay angle on how finance’s vocabulary colonizes the retail street.

Broader Connections

• Securitization couples financial risk management with surveillance and militarized security. #corroborates (0.92) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 47
• Walmart’s power operates through securitization linking financial risk management to surveillance #expands (0.88) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 558
• Securitization converts uncertainty into quantifiable, tradeable risk and shapes daily life #expands (0.85) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 248
• Securitization logic replicates in cultural intertextuality, diverting power from authors to financialized systems #expands (0.82) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 335
• The War on Terror borrowed securitization logic from finance to manage risk #expands (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 269
• Risk management is a mythological construct for manipulating cultural precariousness #corroborates (0.78) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 234
• Everyday financial instruments function as weapons against cultural production #expands (0.75) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 15