This is a pre-print version of our article. The final, published article temporarily is freely available on the Maney site. Editorial: The politics of financialization Andreas Nölke Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Marcel Heires Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Hans-Jürgen Bieling University Tübingen, Germany Introduction The concept of financialization has been the focal point of a burgeoning research programme that is multidisciplinary in orientation and draws on contributions from heterodox economics, sociology, geography, and critical management studies. It asserts that a profound transformation has taken place in modern capitalism At the core of this research program lays the thesis of an "increasing importance of financial markets, financial motives, financial institutions, and financial elites in the operation of the economy and its governing institutions, both at the national and international levels“ (Epstein 2005: 3). This asserted dominance of finance has led to a profound transformation of modern capitalism with disastrous consequences. Although there are other, more specific attempts to define the concept of financialization, this broad definition by Epstein has the advantage of capturing the growing range of contributions from different disciplines and empirical fields. There is now a seemingly endless list of developments that are associated with financialization, including the ascendancy of shareholder value (Froud et al., 2000; Williams, 2000; Lazonick and O ´Sullivan, 2000), rising levels of public and private debt (Montgomerie, 2006; Aalbers 2008), increasing economic inequality (Epstein und Jayadev, 2005), new strategies and sources of profit in the financial sector (Erturk and Solari, 2007; Crotty, 2008, dos Santos, 2009), growing global imbalances (Stockhammer 2010; Kalinowski, 2011) and an increased fragility of financial markets (Boyer, 2000; Crotty, 2009). While the debate on financialization first originated in the context of changes in corporate governance and the behaviour of companies in the non-financial sectors of the economy with the ascent of “shareholder value”, the 1