Leveraging Social Value: Multiple Valuation Logics in the Field of Social Finance

这个建议建立在我博士期间的研究基础上。我的兴趣在于研究金融行为者、工具和模型如何进入社会政策领域。实证重点是社会影响投资，这是一种投资于社会项目的形式，其目的是在追求社会（和环境）影响的同时获得财务回报，并产生创新的金融工具，如社会影响债券（sib）、社会股票或社区债券。我认为，这并不是简单地将现有金融技术应用于非金融领域，而是它产生了自己的一套动力。研究的重点是从支撑它们的估值过程的角度来关注这些动态：即，社会价值是如何被构想、创造和计算的。它着眼于金融如何在吞噬这个领域的同时，创造一种混合形式的价值：混合（社会金融）价值。这意味着，这种混合创造了一个屏蔽空间，在这里，社会价值创造得到了保障，并通过特定的度量工具和特定的社会实践来衡量。其结果是社会价值指标和衡量框架的爆炸式增长，它们不是用来取代金融化，而是用来支持金融化的。通过追求混合价值创造，资本积累确实可以在非金融领域取得进展，但只有在与特定类型和程度的社会价值创造（例如减少囚犯再犯罪、增加就业、提高教育程度、改善健康状况、减少无家可归者等）同时并存并保持密切关系的情况下。因此，在影响投资方案中运作的社会企业家可以在不同程度上追求社会价值的增加：有时他们完全不受金融行为者的阻碍，有时他们需要与后者谈判，而有时他们可能会发现自己严格遵循项目资助者的指示。这一见解产生的双重贡献是，一个是关于金融化过程背后的一些机制的理论贡献，另一个是关于通过参与估值工作，创造和建立混合价值，作为金融化社会政策部门（社会影响投资）的基础的实证贡献。因此，它有助于并扩展了关于社会政策部门金融化的文献，并提出了一个原始框架，将会计实践视为金融投资的渠道，同时也是非金融实践创造保护和培育非金融形式价值的屏蔽机制的机会。

The proposal builds on research conducted during my PhD. My interests lie in investigating how financial actors, instruments, and models advance into the field of social policy. The empirical focus is social impact investment, a form of investing in social programmes with the intent of pursuing social (and environmental) impact alongside financial return and yielding innovative financial instruments such as social impact bonds (SIBs), social stocks, or community bonds. I argue that instead of this being a case of simply applying existing financial technologies upon non-financial areas, it generates its own set of dynamics.The research focuses on these dynamics from the perspective of the valuation processes underpinning them: i.e., how social value is conceived, created, and accounted for. It looks at how finance, as it engulfs this field, creates a hybridised form of value: blended (socio-financial) value. The implication is that this hybridisation comes to create space of shielding where social value creation is safeguarded and measured through specific metric tools but also specific social practices. The result is an explosion in social value metrics and measurement frameworks which come not to replace, but to support financialisation. Through the pursuit of blended value creation, capital accumulation can indeed advance in non-financial domains, but only whilst being concomitant and in an intimate relation with particular types and degrees of social value creation (e.g. reduction in prisoner re-offending, increased employment, improved educational attainment, improved health outcomes, reduction in homelessness, etc.). Social entrepreneurs operating within impact investment programmes can thus pursue the augmentation of social value to various degrees: sometimes they are completely unimpeded by financial actors, at times they need to negotiate with the latter, whilst other times they might find themselves following strictly the instructions of the project funders. The twin contributions that result from this insight are a theoretical one about some of the mechanisms underlying the process of financialisation, and an empirical one about the creation and establishment, through engaging in valuation work, of blended value as a foundation for a financialised social policy sector: social impact investment. It thus contributes to and expands the literature on the financialisation of the social policy sector and advances an original framework for looking at accounting practices as channels of financial investment but also as opportunities for non-financial practices to create shielding mechanisms for protecting and fostering non-financial forms of value.