Thread by @PGolka

Just as twitter crumbles, I'm beyond happy that my 1st PhD paper just got published @EconSocJournal, studying emergence of impact investing in UK.

Main argument: financial agency involves creating social conditions for the exercise of financial power 1/11
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Creating new financial assets is key to the expansion of financialized capitalism. #Assetization enables rent extraction and thus creates economic winners and losers. Losers include gov de-risking, or non financial firms. Why do they participate nevertheless? 2/11

Clearly power is key here, but for assets in their ideational stage & requiring de-risking to be enacted, it's difficult to assume ex-ante unilateral power differences.
My argument: financial actors first need to make #assetization alluring to heterogeneous audiences. 3/11

I draw on social movement scholarship to identify two factors that make assetization alluring:
1) Discursively, assetization needs a coherent collective action frame.
2) Relationally, this frame needs credibility and salience in the eyes of the to-be-allured. 4/11

But financial actors are not movements: assetization extracts resources, which constantly threatens its credibility and salience. To succeed, financial actors thus need to create collective ignorance (c.f. @LinseyMcgoey) over the extractive nature of assetization. 5/11

Social impact investing in the UK includes two main assets: Social Impact Bonds and Social Venture Capital.
To make both assets attractive, #impinv proponents developed a highly nuanced collective action frame, tailored to each asset. 6/11

Without going too much into detail here, proponents drew heavily on #Labour and #Conservative social policy discourse to mobilize support from government as well as Third Sector incumbents. Despite similarities, the framing is heavily tailored towards the respective assets. 7/11

But allure is relational, which explains why #impinv proponents' success was rather limited.
In the early 2000s, proponents already held key sources of instrumental power (policy access & party donations), but the government did not follow through on their key demands. 8/11

This changed around 06 when they began forging alliances with the third sector. Until around 2012, third sector incumbents became vocal supporters of the impact investing idea, increasing credibility and salience. Now Cameron gov swamped the market with subsidies/de-risking. 9/11

But around 2015 it became clear that financial return expectations had been too high, making #impinv unaffordable to charities & #socent. With resistance from third sector, impact investing lost credibility, facilitating abandonment of related policy by Theresa May. 10/11

Assetization needs allure, i.e. credibility & salience. This requires third-party support, a nuanced & up-to-date fame, and ignorance over its extractive nature.
Allure is an important precondition for the exercise of financial power. Creating it is key to financial agency. /N

Huge thanks to editors @EconSocJournal, four anonymous reviewers & my interviewees. For feedback, I'm indebted to @keanbirch, @Ech1651, @sahildutta, @BobblesHJ, Tobias Klinge, @KnollSoz, @avanderheide22, @NataschaZwan, @WarwickCFG & many others.

Of possible interest to: @baphil, @BJMbraun, @TheoBourgeron, @dralecfraser, @ElderVass, @_paullangley, @provokedeconomy, @EmilyRosenman, @JayWiggan, @toteraltermann, @Brandl_Barbara, @jessie_sklair, @tobyjlowe, @CommonCapitaI, @huckfield