The financialisation debate: From transdisciplinary research program to disciplinary recognition and fragmentation

The paper discusses the historical development of the debate on financialization supported by bibliometric analysis. There are several origins of the concept of financialisation in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s, this consolidates in a transdisciplinary project: an attempt to create a critical conversation across academic disciplines about the impact of finance on the economy and society. This was driven by the team of CRESC by organising workshops and special issues, involving critical business studies, constructivist approaches to the household and heterodox macroeconomics. This created the basis for the success of the concept and, since the global financial crisis, enabled an explosive rise in studies on financialisation. But with success also came a fragmentation of the debate and its disintegration along disciplinary lines. Thus, research on financialization today is published in more prestigious journals, but it has decoupled from the core financialisation debate of the 2000s.