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

这项提议建立在我博士期间进行的研究基础上。我的兴趣在于研究金融参与者、工具和模型是如何进入社会政策领域的。实证重点是社会影响投资，这是一种投资于社会方案的形式，目的是在追求财务回报的同时追求社会(和环境)影响，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，这不是简单地将现有的金融技术应用于非金融领域，而是产生了一套自己的动态。研究从支撑这些动态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思、创造和核算的。它着眼于金融在吞噬这一领域时，如何创造一种混合形式的价值：混合(社会-金融)价值。其含义是，这种混合创造了一种屏蔽空间，在这种空间中，社会价值创造通过特定的衡量工具以及特定的社会实践得到保障和衡量。其结果是社会价值指标和衡量框架的爆炸性增长，它们不是为了取代，而是为了支持金融化。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，但前提是必须与特定类型和程度的社会价值创造密切相关(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、减少无家可归等)。因此，在影响力投资方案内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，而另一些时候他们可能会发现自己严格遵循项目资助者的指示。这一见解产生了两个贡献，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确立混合价值作为金融化社会政策部门的基础的经验贡献：社会影响投资。因此，它促进和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，将会计做法视为金融投资的渠道，但也将非金融做法视为创建保护和促进非金融形式价值的保护机制的机会。

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.