The Financial Valuation of Social Values

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will be led by Zeev Rosenhek and will focus on his ongoing research into the financialization of social values within the field of socially sustainable investment. Through this discussion, he will examine how social concerns are translated and incorporated into contemporary regimes of financial valuation

"This research examines the notional work through which social values are rendered commensurable with financial modes of valuation in the field of socially sustainable investing (SSI). The analysis shows that environmental, social, and governance concerns are reframed as financially material factors affecting risk exposure and value creation. A crucial component of this commensuration work is the mobilization of imaginaries of forward-looking, open-ended temporality, which prescribe the consideration of long-range probable futures. Through this temporal reframing, extra-financial factors are translated into the language of financial calculation. The findings contribute to critical scholarship on financialization by highlighting how the “social” is selectively incorporated into financial valuation regimes. SSI thus emerges not as a displacement of financial logics, but as their rearticulation through the absorption and governance of alternative orders of worth."

Zeev Rosenhek is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at Open University of Israel. His main research interests lie in political economy and economic sociology, with a particular focus on processes of institutional change in state–economy relations. He has conducted extensive research on the political economy of the welfare state, labour migration, and the politics surrounding the institutionalisation of the neoliberal regime in Israel.