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

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.