The European Union's (EU) sustainable finance framework places private capital and financial markets at the core of the sustainable transition of public corporations and their activities in the real economy. The sustainable finance framework is a market-based solution to the EU's dual observation that (1) an investment gap is encumbering the sustainable transition of the real economy, necessitating the mobilization of private finance, and (2) environmental degradation and climate change are the result of market failures, and this calls for harmonized definitions of sustainable investment. This paper examines the EU's conceptualization of sustainable investment. The paper argues that this conceptualization conflates capital ownership and the allocation of real investments in primary markets with meta-investments in secondary financial markets; it also misrecognizes the corporation as a separate legal entity. Methodologically and conceptually, the EU cannot distinguish financial capital extraction following meta-investments in secondary markets from capital contributions to real corporate investments in primary markets. In the context of sustainable finance, the performative consequence of this conflation is that the EU classifies both types of investment as making contributions of equal value to sustainable change in the real economy. This conflation risks compromising EU sustainability objectives and calls for a recognition of the dichotomy between real and meta-investments in broader discussions on financing the sustainable transition. The dichotomy of real and meta-investments and corporate theory is indispensable for enabling corporate transitions through finance, and their conflation risks creating an illusion of progress in finance's contribution to sustainability.
Capitalism has put fossil energy at the very heart of its mode of accumulation and expansion, with catastrophic consequences for the earth and the lifeworlds of its inhabitants. This paper introduces the concept of fossil governance to describe how the existing architecture and grammar of corporate governance sustains carbon dependencies and deepens the metabolic rift in the carbon cycle. Through an analysis of the licence granted to Equinor to exploit the Rosebank oil field, we illustrate how the content and operation of 'soft' regulatory codes of corporate governance (as distinguished from 'hard' legislation) endorse and enable the accumulation of fossil capital. We argue that without systemic reform, corporate governance will remain an obstacle to downscaling the fossil economy in line with global warming limits, and we consider how the societal governance of companies to restrain and overcome fossil capital may be enabled by democratic economic planning institutions informed by principles of ecological repair, regeneration and justice.
While professional expertise is often the first recourse for diagnosing and treating personal problems, it cannot always satisfactorily solve them. In such instances, lay expertise can often complement professional knowledge and practices. Due to easily accessible digital platforms, it is increasingly common for people to utilize both professional and lay expertise to solve problems. This warrants further examination of how utilizing both professional and lay expertise co-constitute the lived experiences of sufferers. To answer this question, we qualitatively studied a prominent online community dedicated to reflux disease. We found that, in many cases, both professional and lay expertise proved inadequate in alleviating suffering. The nature of the symptoms faced by the sufferers, the subsequent dependence on and failure of professional and lay expertise to satisfactorily solve the problems led sufferers to experience what we call the spiral. The process of spiraling exemplifies how the sufferers engage with diverse forms of expertise and how this in turn shapes their lived experiences. By developing this notion, we contribute to the literature on expertise by showing the combined effects of both professional and lay expertise on the sufferers' lived experience. Our study also highlights the limitations to the complementarity of professional and lay expertise, as well as the potential harms of engaging with lay expertise.
I suggest here the notion of alignment expertise as group-based sets of operations and skills that simultaneously align (1) apparently incompatible worlds, (2) different domains of knowledge, and (3) heterogeneous layers of objects of expertise. The case on which I build the argument is that of market indices. These play a key role in global markets, being illustrative for the data world we live in. Indices are regulatory, epistemic, commercial, and automated objects. These features have to be simultaneously produced and maintained. Based on ethnographic observations in a data analytics firm, I argue that market indices align two very different worlds: the mini-world of econometric formulae and the messy world of computing machines. I identify two operations, grounded in collaborations between software engineers and financial analysts, that perform this alignment: first, a purification operation sorts out price and volume data into "source of truth" and "strange," respectively. Then, a second purification removes excessive, yet "truthful" data. I argue that these operations are anchored in coordinated expert skills of reading and writing in multiple scripts at once.
Blockchain is one of the most consequential innovations since the world wide web. Although blockchain is argued to remove, displace, or redistribute expertise, there is little understanding of the role of expertise in blockchain ecosystems, and more generally the expertise that fuels the development of new technologies by means of open, fluid, and heterogeneous knowledge contributions. An empirical study of the social organization of the Ethereum community, the second largest blockchain ecosystem after Bitcoin, reveals the contrasting tensions involved in setting up a system of decentralized expertise. The alternate community mantras "rough consensus, running code" and "wide consensus, better code?" suggest that the Ethereum community enacts expertise centralization and decentralization practices simultaneously to create a fragile balance between individualized accountabilities and a generalized sense of diffused participation. These practices unfold along a continuum of routine operations punctuated by critical events and are both essential for navigating the uncertainties of decentralized organizations. The study contributes to research on new forms of expertise occasioned by emerging technologies, and in particular to our understanding of blockchain expertise. The study's relational perspective on expertise adds to research on the dynamics of knowledge de/ centralization in online communities.
