Special Issue – Social Finance, Impact Investing, and the Financialization of the Public Interest (ed. Eve Chiapello & Lisa Knoll)
This HSR Special Issue compiles social science research on a relatively new socio-economic phenomenon: Social Finance and Impact Investing. Its promise is to lure private investment and/ or philanthropic capital into the sphere of social welfare. To do so, social wellbeing and social impact become subjects of financialization, entrepreneurialization, and quantification. The venture capital framework and financial principles of due diligence enter the world of the social sector – be it through new impact rating schemes, social responsibility documentation, or innovative welfare state funding schemes such as Social Impact Bonds. This Special Issue brings together empirical research on different cases (public-private development finance, social impact and venture investors, impact rating schemes, social impact bonds, and welfare state reforms) from diverse places (South Africa, Kenya, Italy, the US, the UK, and France).
Forum - Challenges for Big Data Analysis. Data Quality and Data Analysis of Analogous and Digital Mass Data (ed. Lilli Braunisch, Malte Schweia, Peter Graeff & Nina Baur)
While big data are one of the oldest social-science data types, their use in research practice has resurged in recent decades due to IT innovations and the emergence of Web 2.0. However, research practice and the methodological discourse on big data fall apart within the scientific community: 1) Social science methodology focusses primarily on data quality. The debate in social science communities is almost 150 years old and has revealed the specific strengths and weaknesses of both big data and research-elicited data and also resulted in recommendations on how to handle each data type. 2) Computational social sciences primarily focus on data analysis, especially on new analysis techniques and algorithms for evaluating big data. Both research lines are hardly connected, and both have mutual blind spots. This HSR Forum therefore aims at overcoming this divide. It brings up the discussion of how these research lines can complement each other and can be improved by using the findings of each other.
SPECIAL ISSUE
Eve Chiapello & Lisa Knoll Social Finance and Impact Investing. Governing Welfare in the Era of Financialization. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.7-30
Emily Barman Many a Slip: The Challenge of Impact as Boundary Object in Social Finance. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.31-52
Antoine Ducastel & Ward Anseeuw Impact Investing in South Africa: Investing in Empowerment, Empowering Investors. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.53-73
Serena Natile Digital Finance Inclusion and the Mobile Money “Social” Enterprise: A Socio-Legal Critique of M-Pesa in Kenya. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.74-94
Jacob Hellman Feeling Good and Financing Impact: Affective Judgments as a Tool for Social Investing. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.95-116
Théo Bourgeron Constructing the Double Circulation of Capital and “Social Impact.” An Ethnographic Study of a French Impact Investment Fund. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.117-139
Davide Caselli Did You Say “Social Impact”? Welfare Transformations, Networks of Expertise, and the Financialization of Italian Welfare. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.140-160
Leslie Huckfield The Mythology of the Social Impact Bond. A Critical Assessment from a Concerned Observer. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.161-183
Manuel Wirth Nudging Subjects at Risk: Social Impact Bonds between Financialization and Compassion. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.184-205
FORUMNina Baur, Peter Graeff, Lilli Braunisch & Malte Schweia The Quality of Big Data. Development, Problems, and Possibilities of Use of Process-Generated Data in the Digital Age. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.209-243
Peter Graeff & Nina Baur Digital Data, Administrative Data, and Survey Compared: Updating the Classical Toolbox for Assessing Data Quality of Big Data, Exemplified by the Generation of Corruption Data. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.244-269
Gertraud Koch & Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda Source Criticism of Data Platform Logics on the Internet. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.270-287
Martin Weichbold, Alexander Seymer, Wolfgang Aschauer & Thomas Herdin Potential and Limits of Automated Classification of Big Data – A Case Study. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.288-313
Rainer Diaz-Bone, Kenneth Horvath & Valeska Cappel Social Research in Times of Big Data. The Challenges of New Data Worlds and the Need for a Sociology of Social Research. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.314-341
Michael Weinhardt Ethical Issues in the Use of Big Data for Social Research. doi: 10.12759/hsr.45.2020.3.342-368