Asa Maron

Asa Maron is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Sociology at the University of Haifa. His main research interest is the transformations of the welfare state in the context of neoliberal capitalism. His work draws on political and economic sociology to study how welfare state institutions have come to adopt and mobilize market-oriented ideas, logics, and actors. Focusing on ideas and power interrelations, he studies the politics of these changes and their outcomes for state-society relations.

The project

Title: Social Impact Bonds and the (limited) Financialization of the State

"A burgeoning scholarship convincingly argues that the state plays an important role in advancing the process of financialization in contemporary capitalist societies. Recently, sociologists have paid increasing attention to financialization’s obverse effects, particularly those involving financialization of the state. The financialization of the state is depicted as a ubiquitous and potentially limitless process in which state actors adopt financial conventions and techniques and become increasingly committed to the innovative solutions financial capitalism offers for coping with macroeconomic problems (e.g., sovereign-debt). This proposed study aims to explore this presumption by looking at the uneven, hindered, and sometimes contested process of state financialization in the case of “Social Impact Investment” (SII). SII is an international model of financialized state action that offers states new ways to fund and deliver innovative social services, by soliciting private capital investments with the prospect of economic returns. A rapidly growing trend internationally, SII is celebrated by the world’s leading political, financial, and philanthropic organizations, implemented as of 2018 by 24 states. However, in spite of enthusiasm and support by influential advocates, SII implementation diverges from its typical model, leading to different levels of financialization and an overall limited reach. Financialization, the dependent variable of the study, is defined as the growing presence of financial values, techniques, metrics, and conventions in the mundane practices and discourses of bureaucrats and bureaucratic organizations. To understand this implementation gap, this proposed study undertakes a comparative analysis of four carefully selected cases – the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Israel – to examine the social mechanisms and institutional conditions that hinder, contest or limit financialization."

Hosting institution: Sciences-Po

Selective Bibliography

• Maron, Asa and James Williams.  2023. "Limits to the Financialization of the State: Exploring Obstructions to Social Impact Bonds as a Form of Financialized State Activity in the UK, Canada and Israel". New Political Economy, 28(6), 865-880.
• Maron, Asa. 2022. "Public Service, Private Delivery: Service Workers and the Negotiation of Blurred Boundaries in a Neoliberal State". Work, Employment and Society, 36(6), 1060–1077.
• Maron, Asa and Benish, Avishai. 2022. "Power and Conflict in Network Governance: Exclusive and Inclusive Forms of Network Administrative Organizations". Public Management Review 24 (11), 1758–1778.
• Maron, Asa. 2022. "Beyond the Hegemony of Neoliberal Ideas: Ideational Diversity and Policy Variegation in the Neoliberal State". Critical Sociology 48 (7-8), 1345-1360.