Call for Papers: Intersections of finance and society 2017

In the wake of the global financial crisis, the various political responses it has triggered, and the emergence of new forms of fiscal and monetary policy, the need for a more sophisticated encounter between economic theory and the social sciences has become pressing. The growth of new forms of money and finance is increasingly recognised as one of the defining developments of our time, and it is beginning to yield innovative research across the humanities and social sciences.

Following on from the success of our inaugural conference last year, this two-day event aims to foster the further development of dialogue between the diverse camps that make up the new field of ‘finance and society’ studies. In particular, it seeks to identify new synergies between heterodox political economy and various sociological, historical, and philosophical perspectives on the intersections of finance and society.

Confirmed keynotes

• Melinda Cooper (University of Sydney), ‘Anti-austerity on the far right’
• Joseph Vogl (Humboldt University of Berlin), ‘The ascendancy of finance’

Submissions are invited in two formats

• Papers; abstract of up to 300 words
• Panels; panel proposal plus paper abstracts

Please submit abstracts and proposals by 1 August 2017 to Martijn Konings and Amin Samman at the following address: intersectionsfinancesociety@gmail.com

Finance and Society are encouraging paper submissions from conference participants. If you would like to discuss this further then please contact one of the journal editors. The full programme for last year’s event is available from the 2016 conference website.

We all love a good protest, but eschewing confrontation can give activists a greater say in corporate policies

Here’s perhaps the most intriguing observation I came upon in my five years of fieldwork on responsible investment. Sitting in an elegant whitewashed office in New York, curated African art on the walls, a white-haired financier explained to me why he took to responsible investment. “In the 1960’s,” he explained, “if you wanted to communicate with Bank of America, one way was to stand outside the corporate headquarters and throw a rock at the building.” By contrast, nowadays corporations such as Wal-Mart sit down with responsible investors to discuss their labor, environmental or governance policies.

Movements, the gentleman seemed to imply, could now leverage capitalism’s own mechanisms to reshape the system. Too good to be true?

A symposium in the upcoming Academy of Management in Boston explores precisely this issue. That is, the non-confrontational tactics that movements deploy to reshape the corporate agenda. It is organized by Fabrizio Ferraro, Brayden King and myself. And it will benefit from the comments of Huggy Rao (author of Market Rebels).

Here’s the session description from the official conference site:

Social movements have recently focused their activity on direct influence over corporations by targeting consumers and investors. Most studies of this trend have emphasized confrontational means such as protests and boycotts. But confrontation is not the only way to exert influence. The proposed symposium explores alternative tactics movements deploy. One is shaping the public discourse, such as shifting management attention towards more sustainable technologies. Another is shareholder engagement, which provides opportunities for activists to express their voice. A “big tent” approach could also be deployed to gain legitimacy for the emerging field of responsible investing. And last, corporations are also becoming active agents in supporting boycotts of competing firms, thus borrowing from the repertoire of movements.

And the list of presenters:

Influence of Non-confrontational SMO Tactics on Technology Adoption in the Energy Sector
Presenter: Shon R Hiatt; Harvard Business School;

Bringing Voice Back in the Market: A theory of shareholder engagement
Presenter: Fabrizio Ferraro; IESE Business School and Daniel Beunza; London School of Economics;

Tactical Mimesis in Private Politics: Companies’ appropriation of a contentious social movement
Presenter: Mary-Hunter McDonnell; Northwestern U.;

The Big Tent: Enacting demand for responsible investment
Presenter: Daniel Beunza; London School of Economics and Fabrizio Ferraro; IESE Business School;

The Impact of a Corporate Culture of Sustainability on Corporate Behavior and Performance
Presenter: Ioannis Ioannou; London Business School;

And the details:

Program Session #: 1789 | Submission: 13927 | Sponsor(s): (OMT, SIM, BPS)
Scheduled: Tuesday, Aug 7 2012 3:00PM – 4:30PM at Sheraton Boston Hotel in Republic A

Politics & Politics in Financial Markets…

One of the most delicate questions that SSF is going to face is how to talk about political action taken by the state (bailout (D) / workout (R)) while distinguishing this from the broader definition of politics inherited from 1970’s social science. In the latter, politics is not carried out within a certain set of institutions, but is an intricate part of all human action, it is impregnated in the practices of everyday life.

There are two kinds of politics in financial markets: Those that occur as tools and technological infrastructures are built, and those that are enacted through government agents and public policy.  The crisis makes it imperative that we be able to speak about both of these fluently, to render each relevant and yet distinct.

Here is an example:  Interestingly enough it seems as though it is Republicans who are blocking the bail out plan.  Although Democrats hold the house and can pass any resolution without the support of Republicans, there is a general reluctance to pursue a partisan plan.  (See this Bloomberg’s clip for some of the issue at play, where the interviewer, Kathleen Hays insists to House Representative Blunt (R, Missouri) that the delay is like playing with fire.)

Here’s one where the Janet Tavakoli claims that ‘finance is the political boogeyman’.  Notice the endless overtones to non-democratic political systems: communism, totalitarianism, socialism…?

Other politics, other political questions (a reply to Yuval)

Before we delve any further into this exchange, I think it is important to make our question explicit: The question I had originally raised was not about whether our work on finance is or is not political .  As Yuval points out, micro-scholarship movements such as ethnomethodology (literally the methods of the people) were inherently political. By extending the definition of what should be considered political to every day practices, 1960’s micro-scholarship sought to remove politics from big (state) institutions and re-conceive of it as a distributed property happening everywhere (the personal is political). These statements were simultaneously descriptive (shifting the object of study) and performative (intended to be a persuasive argument for the greater inclusion of more groups into formal political processes).

Laboratory studies like trading floor studies adopted the ethnomethodological position to politicize esoteric spaces: scientists and traders are people doing situated and contingent work: their work involves messy politicking. The charge of elitism towards lab studies and trading floor studies is really quite misplaced, for this work puts expert and non-expert groups on par. These studies make it possible to treat a group of say, laboring migrants, with the same analytic tools as Nobel prize winning bio-chemists. So why don’t we talk more with scholars of laboring migrants? Because ironically, many scholars of non-elite groups do not appreciate the equalizing effects of a micro-politics for everyone when pushed to its logical conclusion. When everyone is symmetrically engaged in meaningful practice and politics the traditional basis for critique drops out the bottom.

Exploring the similarities of how the trader uses the spread plot just as migrants might use cell phones to creatively assemble new forms of opportunity is distinctly distasteful to many of our colleagues. When talking about how these groups relate to one another in the world, they shift gears, preferring to talk abstractly about how ‘our’ traders are participants in a global capitalism that suppresses ‘their’ laboring migrants. And they sincerely wonder why we don’t do the same. I have to say, although I don’t find that form of argument particularly useful, I increasingly have sympathy for the question – for the desire to understand how the micro-activities of some groups seem to spill out as a force onto those of others. Not just how, say, one scientific group trounces another in the race to sequence the genome, but how genomic research might produce a forms of commercially developed HIV treatment whose application are unaffordable for the vast majority of people.

That micro-studies are political – because they certainly are – no longer seems to be enough. The question is: To what extent are these studies up to the task of answering other types of questions. Are we able to open up our finance oriented research program to include global questions of inequality and disparity in global resource provisioning and allocation? Are we able to show how these are not the problems of imperfect (financial) markets but to precisely trace how these are the very properties of extant market systems? Instead of ideologically condemning market systems as, on the one hand, impossible fictions, or, on the other, naked exercises of power, the idea is to ask a micro-empirical question about how these systems have been developed technically to produce the specific geo-political situations we know today. 

It seems to me there are other politics and other political questions to the ones that have been tackled.  I definitely do think our methodological approaches are elastic enough to examine a broader range of questions. But this will require active ‘translation’ and an adaptation to new data, and new kinds of research sites. These are not problems that can be inductively solved base on the research that has already been done…

Thanks for engaging in this conversation, Yuval.