Dr Sahil Dutta
Staff details
Sahil Jai Dutta is a lecturer in political economy. His teaching and research focuses on financialisation, money, managerialism, and the political economy of Britain.
His work explores how contemporary society has come to be governed. His published research has addressed this in three areas: monetary governance, corporate governance and neoliberal public sector reform.
Sahil is a founding member of the Warwick Critical Finance Group and an associate member of the Politics of Money Research Network.
Beyond academia, Sahil works with policy-focused research organisations pursuing alternatives to financialisation and has published with the Institute for Public Policy Research, Transnational Institute, Open Democracy and New Socialist. He is on the advisory board of Common Wealth.
Prior to joining Goldsmiths, Sahil worked at Warwick University and did his doctoral research at the University of Sussex.
Teaching and Supervision
- MA Global Political Economy - Convenor
- The Making of Global Capitalism (Second year module)
- Finance and the Global Political Economy (Third year module)
- The Political Economy of the Anthropocene (MA module)
- Finance and Power (MA module)
Research interests
Sahil is currently working on three interdisciplinary research projects:
Modern monetary policymaking: Examining how financial globalisation and the rise of market-based banking has produced new forms of state power in Britain and new possibilities for macroeconomic policymaking.
Financialisation of the firm: This project explores how non-financial company executives in the 1960s pioneered the use of financial markets as an engine for growth. They developed key techniques - high leverage, share-price maximisation and accounting manipulation - that later came to be associated with the shareholder value era.
The rise of New Public Management: This project explores the history of public sector reform in Britain and America and how techniques of systems analysis were taken from Cold War American military planners and redeployed to design, implement and evaluate public sector work, underpinning the rise of audit culture, outsourcing, internal markets and managed competition.
Publications and research outputs
Book
Davies, Will; Dutta, Sahil Jai; Taylor, Nick and Tazzioli, Martina. 2022. Unprecedented? How COVID-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy. London: Goldsmiths Press. ISBN 9781913380120
Article
Dutta, Sahil Jai; Knafo, Samuel and Lovering, Ian Alexander. 2022. Neoliberal failures and the managerial takeover of governance. Review of International Studies, 48(3), pp. 484-502. ISSN 0260-2105
Dutta, Sahil Jai and Knafo, Samuel. 2020. The myth of shareholder primacy. IPPR Progressive Review, 26(4), pp. 328-334. ISSN 2573-2323
Knafo, Samuel and Dutta, Sahil Jai. 2020. The myth of the shareholder revolution and the financialization of the firm. Review of International Political Economy, 27(3), pp. 476-499. ISSN 0969-2290
Dutta, Sahil Jai. 2020. Sovereign Debt Management and the Transformation from Keynesian to Neoliberal Monetary Governance in Britain. New Political Economy, 25(4), pp. 675-690. ISSN 1356-3467
Knafo, Samuel; Dutta, Sahil Jai; Lane, Richard and Wyn-Jones, Steffan. 2019. The Managerial Lineages of Neoliberalism. New Political Economy, 24(2), pp. 235-251. ISSN 1356-3467
Dutta, Sahil Jai; Knafo, Samuel; Lane, Richard and Wyn-Jones, Steffan. 2018. Managers, not markets. IPPR Progressive Review, 25(2), pp. 166-176. ISSN 2573-2323
Dutta, Sahil Jai. 2018. Sovereign debt management and the globalization of finance: recasting the City of London’s ‘Big Bang’. Competition & Change, 22(1), pp. 3-22. ISSN 1024-5294
Knafo, Samuel and Dutta, Sahil Jai. 2016. Patient capital in the age of financialized managerialism. Socio-Economic Review, 14(4), pp. 771-788. ISSN 1475-1461
Report
Thomson, Frances and Dutta, Sahil Jai. 2018. Financialisation: A Primer. Technical Report. Transnational Institute (TNI), Amsterdam.
Further profile content
Goldsmiths Research Centres/Groups
Media engagements
2019:
Weekly Economics Podcast: Public Ownership 2.0
If privatisation has failed, what kind of public ownership should replace it? Dr Sahil Jai Dutta discusses democratic management.
