FINANCIAL DEREGULATION AND ECONOMIC ANOMIE
| Published date | 01 April 1994 |
| Pages | 340-349 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb024821 |
| Date | 01 April 1994 |
| Author | CHRISTOPHER STANLEY |
| Subject Matter | Accounting & finance |
FINANCIAL DEREGULATION AND ECONOMIC ANOMIE
Received: 17th May, 1994
CHRISTOPHER STANLEY
CHRISTOPHER STANLEY
IS
LECTURER IN LAW AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
KENT, CANTERBURY. HE IS ALSO A QUALIFIED
BARRISTER. HE HAS PUBLISHED IN THE AREA
OF
THE REGULATION OF FINANCIAL SERVICES,
ELITE DEVIANCE AND CORPORATE THEORY
WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE
PROCESSES OF POSTMODERNISATION IN
CONTEMPORARY URBAN CULTURE. HE IS THE
AUTHOR OF OUT WITH THE LAW: URBAN
(DE)REGULATION AND (DIS)ORDER'.
ABSTRACT
This paper pursues the thesis which the
author
has previously developed
under
the
title
'The Legitimation
of
Deviance
in the
Financial Markets'. This thesis suggests
alternative forms of analysing the rela-
tionship
between government
and capital
markets
with
reference
to deviant activity.
It
is suggested
that the
processes
of political
and
economic deregulation
have involved
an
enhancement
in the
complexity
in the
structure
of power
relations
and in a
moral
and
ethical indetermination
in
the
propa-
gation and promulgation of
norms
and
behaviour. This paper
develops
the origi-
nal
thesis regarding the appropriateness
of
the
application
of
the sociological concept
of anomie in understanding the
config-
uration between internal and external
deviant
motivation.
INTRODUCTION
The advent of a Conservative
administration in 1979 heralded a
sea-change in economic and political
organisation in the UK. It was a
change matched in the US with the
inauguration of the Reagan-Bush
administration and then took root in
other Western and, later, Eastern
European states. It is continuing to
this day and has altered the ways in
which economic and political rela-
tions are conceived, and, by implica-
tion, social and cultural relations
also.
If economics is the determining
force in the organisation of everyday
life,
then the 'eighties heralded a
period of voodoo economics or
'economics with mirrors', because it
was far more dependent upon
images, imagery and imaginary
money. It was economics reflected
(or not reflected) in the glass-skinned
buildings erected in the financial
centres of the world: New York,
London and Hong Kong. It was an
era of panic money, coke-blip
340
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