Financialisation, the brewing industry and the changing role of the pub in Britain and Germany

Abstract

Financialisation has been understood in varying ways from different disciplinary perspectives. Developing a political economy approach concerned with the geographical and institutional variegation of national capitalisms, this thesis aims to provide a more finely grained, geographically sensitive understanding of financialisation which more thoroughly appreciates the constitutive roles of space and place. Taking the dramatic reductions in the number of pubs in Britain and Germany as the entry point, the empirical focus seeks to explain the roles of financialisation in the pubs business at both national and sub-national scales. The changing role and closures of pubs will be utilised to explain how the processes of financialisation are reorienting economic interests, transforming corporate forms, enrolling an increasing number and widening set of actors into the global financial system, and impacting the experience of an economically and socially significant sector of the economy. The international comparison serves to explain how while the processes of financialisation maintain certain general characteristics they are unfolding in geographically differentiated and uneven ways shaped by the institutional configurations of variegations of capitalism. Whilst exhibiting core constituents and common underlying tendencies, it will be argued that the spatially and temporally variegated phenomena of financialisation is enacted, mediated and resisted by geographically grounded actors and institutions.