Chapter Six
132
Although many financial instruments consist of complicated financial
operations (such as property sharing, crediting or contracting), they are
often conceptually ‘packed’ as if they were commodities or products that
can be easily sold and bought at a market. This is the case with stocks and
derivatives that can be the object of trading on a stock exchange. In
financial management, financial instruments known as ‘derivatives’ are a
good example of this conceptualization. Derivatives can be used for a
number of purposes, including insuring against price movements
(hedging), increasing exposure to price movements for speculation or
getting access to otherwise hard-to-trade assets or markets. Derivates and
stocks can be also traded ‘over-the-counter’, i.e. ‘off-exchange’
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/derivative).
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT IS BUILDING
A CONSTRUCTION
Business organizations are very often compared to constructions that must
be constantly extended, renovated and secured. In this context, managers
become ‘engineers’ and financial operations they are in charge of are
referred to as ‘financial engineering’ and ‘financial modeling’. Businesses
apply the methods of financial engineering to such problems as new
product development, derivative securities valuation, portfolio structuring,
risk management, and scenario simulation (http://www.iaqf.org/financial-
engineering). The bank manager’s efforts to ‘structure’ loans can be also
regarded as a form of financial engineering (Patterson 2011b: 23).
The ultimate goal of a financial manager can be conceptualized as the
construction of a solid ‘financial architecture’ within her/his business
organization. Patterson (2011b: 16) describes this process as “conscious
design of a financial system to allow it to operate efficiently and safely.”
The working of the conceptual metaphor FINANCIAL
MANAGEMENT IS BUILDING A CONSTRUCTION is well visible, not
only at the linguistic, but also at the visual level. As shown in Figure 1,
financial management within a global company can be presented as a well
structured, centralized and hierarchical construction. The example is a
good illustration of the fact that in the case of specialist languages,
conceptual metaphors visualize specific and relevant complexities of
abstract phenomena, solve the problems of description and understanding
(Knudsen 2015).