Constructing the Double Circulation of Capital and "Social Impact": An Ethnographic Study of a French Impact Investment Fund

Elaborating on a three-month ethnography of an impact investing fund called Impact Equity, this article aims to understand the mechanisms at work in the emergence of the impact investing sector. After presenting the case of Impact Equity (section 1), the article details the norms and devices through which impact investing is constructed in everyday financial work (sections 2 and 3) and investigates how impact investors mobilise moral beliefs and strategic motivations to navigate competing definitions of “social impact” (section 4). In doing so, this article outlines how the construction of the sector has involved the creation of channels enabling capital and “social impact” to circulate between institutional investors, impact investment funds, and “impactful businesses,” and it highlights the historical tensions that this process has involved

In the name of transparency:Organizing European pharmaceutical markets through struggles over transparency devices

The controversies surrounding the heavily redacted contracts between the European Commission and Covid-19 vaccine producers have highlighted ‘transparency’ as a hotly debated concept in the pharmaceutical market. We combine research on transparency with literature on the organization of markets to investigate how such struggles over competing visions of transparency end up shaping markets and their politics. Focusing on the case of the European pharmaceutical market, we demonstrate how market transparency was implemented through devices that enacted specific visions of transparency and produced distinct market organizations over time: transparency for states (until about 1990), transparency for corporations (ca. 1990 to 2010) and transparency for state coalitions (since 2010). We discuss how the specific instrumentations and materializations of such visions of transparency play a crucial role in market politics. This debate also highlights why engaging in controversies over transparency has become increasingly important for those contesting the market status quo – in pharmaceutical markets and beyond.European Commission Horizon 2020European Research CouncilLeverhulme TrustAhead of print to check citing and date details in 6

Constructing legitimacy: an ethnography of the struggle for financial capital in two Paris-based private equity funds

This dissertation uses an original qualitative empirical material (two ethnographic observations of private equity funds and 44 interviews with managers of these funds) to investigate how fund managers construct their legitimacy to manage capital. Focusing on the struggle for capital in the private equity sector, it shows how fund managers use symbols to assert their legitimacy on different stages and details the symbolic hierarchies of the private equity sector: it emphasises how this legitimacy struggle is embodied in the body of fund managers and the geographical organisation of their funds (1); it looks at how fund managers accumulate local symbols, such as diplomas, experiences in prestigious institutions or ‘track-record’ of past operations (2); it underlines how fund managers turn potential investment operations into ‘good investment opportunities’ by accumulating symbols of legitimacy coming from bureaucratic internal and external procedures (such as formal decisions by internal committees or reports by auditors and consultants) (3). In doing so, this dissertation shows the cultural dimension of the channels through which capital circulates in the private equity sector

Optimising ‘cash flows’:Converting corporate finance to hard currency

Following recent works that have underlined the increasing search for liquidity in economic exchange, this article studies how illiquid forms of money are converted into liquid forms by corporate finance actors. In the name of ‘shareholder value’, the various forms of value generated by companies (such as ‘trade credit’) tend to be increasingly transformed into liquid forms of money that are easily distributable to shareholders (‘cash flows’). Describing this phenomenon as an example of what anthropologists of money call ‘conversion’, this paper highlights how such a conversion process was necessary for the historical development of ‘shareholder value’ policies in corporate finance. Considering documentary sources and interviews with consultants, auditors, and private equity fund managers involved in ‘cash flow’ optimisation practices, this paper details this conversion phenomenon and shows how it has relied on the historical elaboration of specific metrological, technical, legal, and moral norms

Democratic research: Setting up a research commons for a qualitative, comparative, longitudinal interview study during the COVID-19 pandemic

The sudden and dramatic advent of the COVID-19 pandemic led to urgent demands for timely, relevant, yet rigorous research. This paper discusses the origin, design, and execution of the SolPan research commons, a large-scale, international, comparative, qualitative research project that sought to respond to the need for knowledge among researchers and policymakers in times of crisis. The form of organization as a research commons is characterized by an underlying solidaristic attitude of its members and its intrinsic organizational features in which research data and knowledge in the study is shared and jointly owned. As such, the project is peer-governed, rooted in (idealist) social values of academia, and aims at providing tools and benefits for its members. In this paper, we discuss challenges and solutions for qualitative studies that seek to operate as research commons

La finance autoritaire. Vers la fin du néolibéralisme

A partir du cas anglais, une analyse de la montée en puissance du libertarianisme via les régimes autoritaires depuis 2010. En étudiant les sources de financement des élections, les auteurs dévoilent l'action organisée d'une partie du patronat financier qui souhaite garder le contrôle sur les démocraties occidentales et les ressources de la planète pour assurer la libre circulation des capitaux

(De-)assetizing pharmaceutical patents:Patent contestations behind a blockbuster drug

Recent debates in public health and social sciences have shown how biofinancialization has been fuelled by patents’ transformation into ‘patent-as-assets’. This paper traces the historical construction of one such patent-as-asset bundle: the multi-billion worth architecture of patents behind the hepatitis C blockbuster drug sofosbuvir. Following this process from the late 1980s to present times, we highlight the ontological entanglements of pharmaceutical patents and the scientific, legal, commercial and political contestations that result from the focal firms’ assetization projects. By shining a light on these entanglements, our paper points to the extraordinary historical conditions required for the assetization of drug patents as well as to their vulnerability to contestations. In particular, we highlight new forms of patent activism that threaten the ‘asset condition’ of high-priced pharmaceuticals.European Commission Horizon 202

Introduction

International audience"This book explores the renewal of forms of capital accumulation and the institutions that shape it. It focuses on three main sources of accumulation: the extraction of profit through labor and the commodification of nature, financial speculation and the ways in which profit is converted into wealth. It thus offers a new understanding of the economic and political logics of capital accumulation within capitalism in the 21st century. It shows the recomposition of the sources of profit, from the traditional mechanisms of labor exploitation to the contemporary logics of speculation and dispossession. Bringing together the work of scholars who study the social fabric of capitalist accumulation, Accumulating Capital Today goes beyond disciplinary frontiers to describe how capital is accumulating in a world threatened by social and environmental collapse. This book heralds the emergence of "accumulation studies" and will be of interest to researchers in sociology, anthropology, politics, political economy, geography and economics"