During 'normal' times, central bankers like to project an image of boring integrity and impeccable professionalism, committed to keeping the national economy stable while remaining staunchly independent from special interests. During the decade following the Global Financial Crisis, however, when central banks had recourse to 'exceptional' measures like large-scale asset purchases, that image was often hard to maintain. The COVID-19 pandemic took those difficulties to an entirely new level. To stop the economy from sinking into a severe recession, central banks across the world were called upon to orchestrate a dramatic extension of the financial safety net. The same central bankers who pride themselves on being immune to politicians' preferences were now taking their orders directly from governments. As the pandemic era came to an end, central banks tried to restore the status quo-a task that became all the more pressing as inflation surged. However, many have struggled with this transition. Experiences vary across countries and regions, of course. The European Central Bank is quarantined, by design, from national political influence and public opinion. Challenges to central bank independence have been particularly prominent in the US, where both the left and the right seek a politicisation

This research investigates how young households (aged 25–34) in Sydney and Perth are adapting their spending and saving behaviours and living arrangements in order to be able to buy a home.Increased house prices and cost of living have worsened the challenge of home ownership, with households—particularly low-income ones—unable to keep pace with market increases through their saving and budgeting strategies, which included minimising discretionary spending and actively managing finances such as by paying ahead on utility bills, eating basic foods and avoiding spending altogether.The research indicates a diminished ability to save for a deposit through employment alone, with around 40 per cent of research survey participants expecting family assistance, whether direct finance or in-kind, to help them purchase. The ability to access such family support was found to be the single biggest factor in supporting being able to buy a home. In Sydney, familial support was an essential component of being able to buy a home in all cases, while in Perth it was still possible for some to buy without assistance, however many still benefited from direct and indirect help.Government assistance policies need to a focus on long term risks and uncertainties generated through rising house prices, rising interest rates and an uncertain labour market. Housing policy will also need to recognise the often precarious life courses people experience, including recognising other tenures (such as renting) as legitimate long term housing outcomes. Housing policy needs to account for both existing and emergent generations of households who will never attain home ownership and address the structural wealth inequalities that being locked out of ownership generates.

This paper explores how women bar workers manage violence at work. Women bar workers in our study described that the capacity to recognize, intervene, and defuse potentially violent situations was a pragmatic response to the problem of men's violence in the night-time economy. We analyze the gendered norms and expectations at play in how violence in bar work is managed by staff and locate this as a form of "femininity work" extending from the modes of attentive, emotionally-attuned femininity that labor feminist labor studies theorists have described. In a context where hospitality labor already makes complex and often unexamined demands on young workers, the positioning of women bar staff as being more adept at managing violent situations suggests a particularly important demand made of women bar workers, central for understanding the enduring gendered power relations in contemporary interactive service labor.

This article engages with the question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic can be understood as an event that is moving us towards a new era. Highlighting the paradox that this question has emerged in the context of the stoppages and shutdowns associated with the pandemic, we suggest that any assessment of social change and the futures such change might unfold must be situated on the terrain formatted by the temporal logics of capitalism. At our current juncture this requires that sociology as a discipline understand these logics as asset rather than commodity based. Drawing on state responses to the pandemic in Australia, we show how mundane payments play a critical role in these logics, operating as differentiating technologies of time. We suggest that for sociology to build a sociology of futures that is relevant for the 21st century, it must come to terms with the time machine of the asset economy.

This paper argues that asset ownership is becoming more important than employment as a determinant of class position. The introduction considers this claim with respect to Piketty's contribution, arguing that the latter is too focused on the growth of wealth at the very top. The first section draws on the work of Hyman Minsky to outline the logic of assets. We differentiate our approach from competing perspectives that tend to overemphasize the orthodox image of the market and in particular the idea that liquidity is an inherent aspect of financialization. Such perspectives neglect that participation in the asset economy often involves (and regularly necessitates) making highly illiquid investments. The subsequent section advances a new analytic of class and inequality, and the last section develops this further in a more philosophical register to consider how the temporal logic of the asset economy is shaping new life-times. The conclusion reflects on the political implications and prospects of the asset economy.

While Minsky’s work is often identified with the critique of financial speculation, this paper argues that there is a different side to his work. We argue that Minsky can be read as offering a post-foundational perspective on political economy that recognizes the speculative dimension of all economic activity. This post-foundational reading allows for an understanding of neoliberal policymaking in terms of the provision of liquidity to too-big-to-fail constituencies. The article discusses how some segments of Western societies have been able to participate in the inflationary logic of this too-big-to-fail dynamic, whereas others are locked out and face increasingly tight liquidity constraints. This differential access to liquidity is an increasingly central aspect of the stratifying rationality of contemporary capitalism. By connecting Minsky’s insights into the temporal logic of capital to key issues in social theory, the article presents a new theorization of (il)liquid life that advances on extant accounts.

As part of this special issue on Wealth, Australian Feminist Studies Co-Editor Lisa Adkins met with Celine Bessiere and Sibylle Gollac to discuss their book, The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality (2023). Published by Harvard University Press and translated by Juliette Rogers, The Gender of Capital was first published in French as Le Genre du Capital: Comment la Famille Reproduit les Inegalites (2020, La Decouverte).

This forum has come about through a series of conversations and discussions over a period of time in 2021-2022.Our ambition was to bring together scholars from different disciplines and perspectives, hoping for mutual curiosity and dialogue.We invited the participants to the forum to consider the following question:"How can we understand the complex and often contradictory ways through which sexualities and capital are related to, shaped by, and constitutive of each other?"Due to restrictions and exigencies of the corona situation together with time zone obstacles, the conversation had different modes.The fi rst part of the forum consisted of an online video-recorded conversation between M.E.O'Brien, Nat Raha and Grietje Baars.The conversation was moderated by Liu Xin and Mathias Klitgård.

This paper explores the experiences of queer workers in the service economy with a focus on hospitality labor. Studies of gender, sexuality and service labor approached mainstream service work as a scene of compulsory heterosexuality, while literature on the position of queer workers has tended to approach work in terms of structural inequalities that prevent queer workers from participating in the labor market, and has therefore focused on notions of diversity and inclusion as frameworks for understanding how the heteronormativity of service relationships can be overcome. This paper shifts focus to examine how queer subjectivities are enacted within the disciplinary requirements of service labor, and on the way that workers negotiate and contest their positioning at work. The paper situates the subjectivities and laboring practices of queer workers at the nexus of tensions between heteronormativity and the politics of diversity in service venues, and examines how workers negotiate and contest their positioning at work. We explore the normativities that shape permissible queer embodiment at work and show how biographical experiences specific to queer workers inform their laboring practices. The paper shows that queer workers in mainstream hospitality venues are enrolled into a specific mode of interactive service labor that capitalizes on their queer biographies, requires highly cultivated relational capacities, and repositions work as a site of political intervention.

Why look at wealth now? How is wealth a feminist issue? This introduction to our special issue on Wealth sets out how and why wealth is a feminist issue in the context of twenty-first-century capitalism. In particular, it highlights how the transition from a wage-based society to an asset-based wealth society requires urgent feminist attention, especially to the gendered and racialised dimensions of existing and emerging wealth-based inequalities.

The papers collected in this Special Issue are part of an ongoing series of conversations and workshops that take as their starting point the observation that the current conjuncture has been, and continues to be, deeply shaped by the logic of assets (some of these conversations were held, in person, at the University of Sydney, but they have continued in various online fora throughout the pandemic). From a certain angle, the claim that asset logics are a prominent aspect of our time could be seen as almost banal. These days it’s almost impossible to open a newspaper or social media account without being exposed to a list of news items about various new asset economies – bitcoin, NFTs, and a range of other financial inventions. All these are products of complex, somewhat unfamiliar technological design strategies, and they sit in an economic grey zone: nobody seems to be able to say exactly how they should be classified according to traditional economic categories. They are not simple commodities (in Marxist terms, they don’t seem to have any discernible usevalue separate from their exchange-value), nor are they money in any straightforward sense (with some exceptions, you can’t use them as general means of payment). This means that they have, almost by default, been classified as assets. But this re-classification doesn’t really resolve the mystery surrounding these new economies. After all, we normally think of assets as property titles or investments that are held because they are anticipated to generate returns in the future. With many of these tokens or symbolic chains, it is not at all clear why we should expect them to generate returns in the future. If they are assets, they are very unfamiliar kinds of assets. The conceptual puzzle that these strange assets pose is symptomatic of wider social changes. Their advent has entirely upended the notion, intuitively appealing to so many of us and the cornerstone of orthodox economic theory, that money is a simple measure. We are used to thinking (and orthodox economic theory is premised on the formal elaboration of this intuition) that there exists a world of objects, and that money is a more or less arbitrary, neutral convention that allows us to commensurate these heterogeneous objects. The new asset forms that are receiving so much attention these days undermine this distinction: they make it essentially impossible to separate object and measure, commodity and money. If it was at one point in time possible to imagine that we had an economic world that consisted of stable economic objects on

At the start of the COVID-19 crisis, many commented on its levelling aspect, the fact that no amount of power or wealth offered much protection. As pausing economic activity through lockdowns seeme...

This article is concerned with the recent (2017–2018) basic income experiment in Finland. This experiment attracted global attention, not least because of its break from the conditionalities and sanctions associated with social security payments in workfare states. This article stresses, however, that it is critical to understand how the Finnish basic income experiment was part of a broader programme of government-led reform in Finland. As well as establishing the experiment as a preferred mode of policymaking, this programme contained a range of strategies aimed at restructuring labour supply. The article shows how the basic income experiment should be understood as a behavioural intervention designed to enhance the wellbeing of unemployed populations at a time when wellbeing is emerging as a value-producing capacity.

The focus of this article is a recent round of workfare reform in Finland. Departing from many existing analyses of workfare, it focuses on issues of governance. Drawing on policy documents and interviews with key policy actors, it shows how this reform and attempts at implementation took place along the lines of a specific form of managerial governance, namely strategic governance, involving the enrolment of strategic management into policy making. The article details how this mode of policy making enabled an intensification and depoliticization of workfare policies via the replacement of political concerns with economic imperatives and in so doing contributed to the broader process of economization of the state. While the latter is often located as central to the project of neoliberalism, the practices through which it is instantiated often remain hazy. This article therefore contributes knowledge on how the process of the economization of the political operates in practice.

What becomes of class when residential property prices in major cities around the world accrue more income in a year than the average wage worker? This paper investigates the dynamic of combined wage disinflation and asset price inflation as a key to understanding the growth of inequality in recent decades. Taking the city of Sydney, Australia, as exemplary of a dynamic that has unfolded across the Anglo-American economies, it explains how residential property was constructed as a financial asset and how government policies helped to generate the phenomenal house price inflation and unequal capital gains of recent years. Proceeding in close conversation with Thomas Piketty's work on inequality and recent sociological contributions to the question of class, we argue that employment and wage-based taxonomies of class are no longer adequate for understanding a process of stratification in which capital gains, capital income and intergenerational transfers are preeminent. We conclude the paper by outlining a new asset-based class taxonomy which we intend to specify further in subsequent work.

This special issue aims to shed light on the causes and consequences of several decades of property price inflation. That trend has certainly not gone unnoticed or escaped commentary. Indeed, there is a certain ‘Sydney sensibility’ to the origins of this special issue (where the editors of this special issue live and where the conference on which it was based was held), reflecting the degree to which house prices are a topic of constant commentary and endless media attention. An alarming number of casual social conversations include registration of the fact that even a decent middle-class wage no longer translates into an ability to purchase a home, and that for those who have not been able to square this circle at some point in time, the impossibility of purchasing a home only recedes further, with high rents eating up more and more disposable income. Many overseas academics find themselves a little surprised that so many local students like to live at home ‘because it is convenient’, but they quickly learn that it is code for not being able to afford to live independently. Yet while property prices are a topic of constant discussion in Sydney, and elsewhere in Australia, much of this commentary has remained at the level of watercooler conversation and media reporting, inevitably attracted to the more spectacular manifestation of the phenomenon, as when uninhabitable houses sell for record prices. Such discourses are (understandably) oriented to the idea that property prices are ‘unsustainable’ – that at some point the bubble will have to burst and prices return to real values commensurate with the world of work and wages. Ironically, that conversational style of commentary, which depicts out-of-control property prices as a massive speculative bubble, closely mirrors a great deal of critical commentary on property inflation, which has sought to counter official assertions about the salutary effect of capital gains by pointing to the irrationality of believing in the