The crisis of 2008 was a watershed event for the study of finance and society. There was the boom in financial markets that came to a head with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and there was the boom in financial scholarship that followed in its wake. But what comes after this second boom? After more than a decade of rapid expansion under the shadow of 2008, what comes next for the new finance studies? What are the emerging debates that matter most? Where lies the need for further theorisation and for new empirical work? In this editorial, these questions are pursued under three broad headings, each corresponding to an overarching imperative: first, the need to keep a vigilant watch on the core institutions and logics of finance; second, the need to continue expanding and deepening the field; and third, the need to persist with difficult lines of questioning.

‘Dark pools’ are private, electronic share-trading systems in which participants cannot see each other's buy and sell orders. This article shows that the development of these material ‘market devices’ was strongly shaped by the structural dependency of their intended clientele (fund-management firms) on the big investment banks, particularly the indirectly monetary mechanism of dependency known in the US as ‘soft dollars’. The article's underlying argument is that (a) the sociological analysis of financial markets requires bringing together the focus on materiality of, for example, actor-network theory with an emphasis on structural advantage such as that found in field theory; and (b) that both actor-network and field theory approaches could be strengthened by a stronger focus on mundane but important monetary mechanisms such as ‘soft dollars’.

The financial crisis of 2007-8 sparked a variety of responses from elites and popular movements across the world. Its legacy also continues to shape capitalist societies through ongoing processes of regulatory reform, state restructuring, and financial innovation. While these processes are open-ended, they are increasingly subject to critical attention from a range of commentators. The usual suspects are out in force – academics, politicians, and pundits – but they are now joined by a wider array of theorists and activists, playwrights, novelists and artists. The financialisation of capitalism, it seems, has finally been met with a blooming of the financial imagination. Finance and Society will provide a space for the further development of this imagination, generating new insights into how money and finance organise social life.