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- Blending – Co-financing of projects between official (government and multilateral) agencies and private sector credit organisations.
- Corporate social responsibility – a multidimensional term that encompasses a variety of elements, ranging from values and philosophies to ethical, legal, societal, philanthropic, and environmental issues, business strategies and the relationship between business and society. Concepts of CSR tend to oscillate between views that it is inconsistent with sound business practice and serves to dilute its focus on wealth creation on the one hand and that it is essential for successful business operations as an opportunity for business to look beyond profits on the other.
- CSR self-regulation – at the macro level, it means technical and qualitative standards related to codes of conduct, provided by a self-regulatory organisation, sometimes run by a profession guild. At the micro level, self-regulation means that the corporation is responsible for both the rules and the implementation strategies.
- Demutualization – process of converting (financial) institutions from non-profit, member-owned organizations to for-profit, shareholder owned corporate entities, or, alternatively, the process by which mutual organization or co-operative changes legal form to a joint stock company.
- Disintermediation – removing the middleman or intermediary from any transaction (or from flow of information). In the context of finance, the phenomenon may be investigated in two meanings. First, it can be understood as a decreasing importance of banks (mainly “traditional” ones, focused on deposits-loans operations) among financial intermediaries. Second, disintermediation may be perceived as the withdrawal of funds from intermediary financial institutions, such as banks and savings and loan associations, in order to invest them directly. Thus, in such an approach, the process is considered as more broadly, as it implies a diminishing role of the financial intermediaries. Participants of the market processes and mechanisms give up help and offer of financial entrepreneurs and make attempts to invest or raise funds directly on the financial market.
- Dual bottom line institutions – they pursue other objectives and profits are only a mean to this end, enabling the provision of credit to lower income earning individuals and SMEs with no or little collateral as due to their local activity they are able to reduce the costs associated with assessment of creditworthiness of borrowers.
- Ecomomic partnership agreements – Trade and financing agreements between the European Commission and developing countries.
- Financial exclusion critically refers to the ways in which financial institutions disadvantage, even discriminate against, certain socio-economic groups, drawing attention to how the financial sector structurally shapes and sharpens inequality by systematically favouring those already privileged. Exclusion thus perceived is the fault and responsibility of the financial system, with its conduct further accentuating the disadvantage of the underprivileged groups. This approach to finance contrasts with that currently taken to remedying exclusion by targeting financial inclusion in part through financial literacy campaigns.
- Financial inclusion refers to policies that aim at promoting the participation of the financially excluded (see financial exclusion). These have evolved from seeking to improve accessibility through subsidies and market-making regulations to incentivising banks to create products and services tailored to the needs of the excluded, to the advancement of financial products that include savings and payments services alongside lending, now with the aid of digital technology that allows financial capital to expand demand by ‘de-risking’ individual consumers through constant monitoring.
- Financial literacy is deemed to have become an essential life skill in financialised contemporary capitalist societies that prepares individuals, through expanded demand of credit, savings and insurance products, to take increased responsibility for – and accept growing exposure to – risk in order to secure their well-being, and at the expense of previously prevailing collective forms of provision (see systems of provision). The financial literacy policy agenda thus aims at ensuring suitable Conformity of understandings and meanings (i.e. Construals) of financialisation to the material processes, structures, and relations that guarantee finance’s continued expansion (i.e. Commodification), (see material culture of financialisation and 10Cs).
Internationalization of banking (financial) systems – process of expanding activities by a domestic bank (financial institutions) through expansion on foreign markets or as a process of entering foreign investors into domestic banks (financial institutions).
- Local money – money created and issued within a given local community, fulfilling money functions only within this community.
The material culture of financialisation refers to the ways in which financial relations, structures, processes and agencies are experienced, and reacted to, in economic, political and ideological arenas. Given the distance of most individuals from the trading rooms in financial centres, political decision-making on financial affairs, and the ways in which the media represent finance (other than as consumers of news), how to understand the material cultures of financialisation is both highly contested and in need of careful unpicking of its complexities. What, for example, is a mortgage to an owner-occupier as opposed to a derivative trader (see also financial literacy).
- Private money – unit of value issued by any private company or organization (commercial or non-profit) to act as an alternative to a national (state) currency and fulfill some or all money functions.
- Private-public partnerships, or private finance initiative – The use of private finance and management to manage and finance public investments.
- Shareholder value banks – their primary business focus is maximising shareholder interests, external shareholders gain net-added value in the form of either dividends or a higher share price.
- Stakeholder value banks – they have a broader focus on the interests of a wider group of stakeholders (customer-members in the case of cooperative banks, the regional economy and the society in the case of savings banks), their value added may be distributed to customers ex ante in the pricing of deposits and loans and/or the quality of the services.
- A system of provision refers to the ways in which households gain access to items of everyday life and the term is reflected in everyday language in terms such as housing, energy, education, food, media and even environmental and financial systems. The SoP approach has a number of elements: first is in tracing the structures, relations, processes and agencies involved in provisioning, from production through to consumption (and possibly disposal); second is how these generate social norms of consumption, that is the variable standards of consumption across time, place and socioeconomic groups in terms of what is provided and how; and third, how provisioning is experienced as material culture drawing upon what has been termed the 10Cs (see also variegated vulnerabilities and 10Cs).
- Variegated vulnerabilities refers to the differentiated impacts of financialisation and of the financial crisis, reflecting how systemic trends and their manifestation at the national levels produce variegated outcomes, across households, sectors and countries, depending on the extent to which relevant systems of provision have become increasingly financialised and more prone to reproduction and consolidation of social inequalities, pushing the most vulnerable to the margins of evolving welfare models.
- The 10Cs are part of the system of provision approach to material culture (see material culture of financialisation). They comprise the idea that material culture is Constructed, Construed, Conforming, Commodified, Contextual, Contradictory, Closed, Contested, Collective and Chaotic. Use of the 10Cs is intended to address, for example, the role of financial literacy, how financial exclusion is experienced, what is and what generates a culture of homeownership, and how financialisation has intervened in the material cultures of provision.
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