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Presents an overview of the major intellectual debates within the field of political economy. This book covers areas such as: models of capitalism; globalization; the environment; gender; territory and space; regionalism; and development. It is aimed at students of political economy

Abstract'Dark pools' are private, electronic share-trading systems in which participants cannot see each other's buy and sell orders. This article shows that the development of these material 'market devices' was strongly shaped by the structural dependency of their intended clientele (fund-management firms) on the big investment banks, particularly the indirectly monetary mechanism of dependency known in the US as 'soft dollars'. The article's underlying argument is that (a) the sociological analysis of financial markets requires bringing together the focus on materiality of, for example, actor-network theory with an emphasis on structural advantage such as that found in field theory; and (b) that both actor-network and field theory approaches could be strengthened by a stronger focus on mundane but important monetary mechanisms such as 'soft dollars'.

The thesis that economics is "performative" (Callon 1998) has provoked much interest but also some puzzlement and not a little confusion. The purpose of this article is to examine from the viewpoint of performativity one of the most successful areas of modern economics, the theory of options, and in so doing hopefully to clarify some of the issues at stake. To claim that economics is performative is to argue that it does things, rather than simply describing (with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy) an external reality that is not affected by economics. But what does economics do, and what are the effects of it doing what it does?That the theory of options is an appropriate place around which to look for performativity is suggested by two roughly concurrent developments. Since the 1950s, the academic study of finance has been transformed from a low-status, primarily descriptive activity to a high-status, analytical, mathematical, Nobel-prize-winning enterprise. At the core of that enterprise is a theoretical account of options dating from the start of the 1970s. Around option theory there has developed a large array of sophisticated mathematical analyses of financial derivatives. (A "derivative" is a contract or security, such as an option, the value of which depends upon the price of another asset or upon the level of an index or interest rate.)