The financial activist: shareholding and the inconvenience of collective ownership

With the increasing financialization of the global economy, social movements and activists increasingly target financial actors to enact social change through the framework of shareholder-led corporate governance. Where finance penetrates individual households, activists harness the widespread “collective ownership” of corporations through shareholding to push for social change. Drawing on three instances of shareholder mobilization in relation to a mining corporation, this essay examines how activists engage financial actors, particularly in relation to extractive industries. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in London, interviews with global activists, and analysis of corporate materials, the article draws on Lauren Berlant’s theory of inconvenience to show how activists learn to live with and inconvenience financial systems, while simultaneously working to undo or lessen some of the harms caused by extractive industries. While in the first instance, institutional investors respond to an event and act as traditional activist shareholders, in the second and third, activists work to mediate and inform investors to hold the corporation to account. The article concludes on the financialization of activism, and the limits to undoing inequalities embedded in finance as a terrain of political contestation.