What is "financescape"

n. 1 Figuratively, the financial landscape; financial markets 2 The culture associated with financial markets.

Financescape is one the five aspects of global cultural flows that renowned globalization theorist Arjun Appadurai proposed in his article Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy that he claims can be used to distinguish the various disjunctures or disconnections between economy, culture and politics, within the overall global economy. Appadurai poses that when considering the financescape framework, we must consider how global capital today moves in an increasingly fluid and non-isomorphic manner, thus contributing to an overall unpredictability of all the five aspects of global cultural flows as a whole. The four other aspects Appadurai mentions in his article are ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. Appadurai further states that despite disjunctures having always existed between the flows of people, machinery, money, ideas and images, the world is at a crossroads where this is happening to a larger extent; pointing to the importance of studying the "-scapes". These disjunctures also contribute to the central idea of deterritorialization which Appadurai describes as the main force affecting globalization in the sense that people from different countries and socioeconomic backgrounds are mixing with one another; namely the lower class of some countries integrating in to wealthier societies via the work force. Subsequently, these people reproduce their ethnic culture, but in a deterritorialized context.

The fluidity of capital has been expounded on further by sociologists such as Anthony Giddens who in his 1999 BBC Reith lecture on "Globalization" claims that the advent of electronic money has rendered the transfer of capital and finance around the world subject to an increasingly easy process that posits a major paradigm shift. Giddens suggests that this ease has the potential to destabilize what would be considered prior as stable economies.