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Financialization as Welfare pp 101–128Cite as

Financialization as Welfare

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Abstract

In this chapter, Golka provides an important analysis of impact investing proponents’ discourse by showing how they attempt to render for-profit investments as indispensable for questions of social welfare. Using the collective action frames perspective, Golka shows how an “under-investment” and an “impact” narrative are used to position impact investments as the solution to a number of social problems. However, Golka also analyzes the social problems proponents do not talk about and finds that issues relating to inequalities of wealth and income that pose a threat to investors’ profit-making abilities are consistently ignored in proponents’ discourse. By contrast, the financialization as welfare frame is highly attentive to British social welfare reform discourse, from where many of its concepts are borrowed.

This new approach is built on a number of shared beliefs: that, in some cases, investment can be more effective than donations in helping the poor; that social motivations harnessed to financial ones can sometimes do good more effectively; and that in many situations there is no inevitable trade-off between financial and social return. (14_G8NAB_Invisible, p. 4)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Source: Speech by David Cameron at the launch of the G-8 Social Impact Investment Task Force on June 6th 2013, gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-at-the-social-impact-investment-conference/ accessed September 12th 2017.

  2. 2.

    Indeed, the term community as a reference to poor geographic neighborhoods, particularly those with high levels of immigrated or ethnical minority inhabitants, was introduced with New Labour’s discourse on social inclusion (Worley 2005).

  3. 3.

    These organizations are defined as “the Embedded Model” that essentially denotes the social venture category that includes charitable and profit-distributing organizations (14_UKNAB_Building, p. 5).

  4. 4.

    Again, in Chap. 7 I will show how combating this “silo-ed” funding was not only a core priority of Treasury-based modernizers, but also one of the two key issues in which other government departments saw a high legitimacy of Treasury-led interventions.

  5. 5.

    The first British impact investor, Bridges Ventures, started by advancing venture capital principles in community enterprise, where previously lending dominated (see Chap. 7).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sociology of Markets, Organizations and Governance, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Thüringen, Germany

    Philipp Golka

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Golka, P. (2019). Financialization as Welfare. In: Financialization as Welfare. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06100-5_6

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