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Professional Authority After the Global Financial Crisis -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- List of Figures -- 1 Professional Authority and Anglo-American Finance in Crisis -- Professional Authority in Anglo-American Finance -- The Professionals Examined -- The Explicit Ethical Emphasis -- Understanding the Explicit Ethical Emphasis -- Limits of the Enhanced Ethical Emphasis -- The Data Underlying This Book -- Summary, Contribution, and Audiences -- Notes -- 2 The Dynamism of Authority in Global Governance -- Dynamic Processes of Authority -- Identities and the (Self-)Legitimation of Power -- Discourse, Agency, and Structure -- Exercising Authority in Global Governance -- Authority Beyond the State -- Public and Private Practices -- Professional Authority in Global Financial Governance -- Chapter Summary -- Notes -- 3 The Dynamic Authority of Leading Financial Services Providers -- The Pre-crisis Authority of Financial Services Providers -- Credit Rating Agencies: Expert Identities, Backgrounded Moralities -- Accounting Firms: Expert Identities, Backgrounded Moralities -- Technology, information, and news corporations: Expert Identities, Background Moralities -- Financial Crisis and Contestations of Authority -- The Expert Identities of Credit Rating Agencies in Crisis -- The Expert Identities of Accounting Firms in Crisis -- The Expert Identities of Technology, Information, and News Corporations in Crisis -- Defending Mammon: Re-legitimating Power in the Aftermath of Crisis -- The Enhanced Ethical Emphasis of Leading Accounting Firms -- The Enhanced Ethical Emphasis of Leading Credit Rating Agencies -- The Enhanced Ethical Emphasis of Leading TINCs -- Self-legitimation -- Chapter Summary -- Notes -- 4 The Dynamic Authority of Economists -- The Pre-crisis Authority of Orthodox Economists -- Economese and Expert Identities

This book challenges amoral views of finance as the leading realm in which mammon - wealth and profit - is pursued with little overt regard for morality. The author details an enhanced ethical emphasis by leading Anglo-American professionals in the aftermath of the 2007-8 global financial crisis. Instead of merely stressing expert knowledge, professionals sought to overcome the alleged impossibility of serving "two masters"--Mammon and God - by embracing religious finance, socio-economic inequality, sustainability and other overtly moral issues. Continuities in liberal values and ideas, however, limited the impact of this enhanced ethical emphasis to restoring the professional authority, as well as to more fundamentally reforming of Anglo-American finance following the most severe period of instability since the Great Depression. Providing a nuanced account of post-crisis change and continuity in a crucially important industry, Campbell-Verduyn advances a dynamic, process-based understanding of authority that will appeal to international political economists and sociologists alike

This volume brings scholars of anthropology, economics, Science and Technology Studies, and sociology together with global political economy scholars in assessing the actual implications posed by Bitcoin and blockchains for contemporary global governance. Its interdisciplinary contributions provide academics, policymakers, industry practitioners and the general public with more nuanced understandings of technological change in the changing character of governance within and across the borders of nation-states.

Meeting on the second anniversary of the Paris Agreement signing, the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat founded the Climate Chain Coalition (CCC) in 2017. Backed by a number of multi-stakeholder groups like the Blockchain for Climate Foundation, the Ottawa-based CCC promotes the use of this emergent technology as a pathway to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. What kind of 'cooler' world are blockchain-based climate projects conjuring? This article scrutinizes the shared visions materializing in particular across climate finance experiments, locating them as extensions of existing imaginaries of how financial markets can address planetary concerns. The imaginaries identified underpin these 'cool' technological feats yet provide only incremental improvements to existing modes of market-led climate governance that are far from the scale required to actually conjure a cooler planet.

This commentary identifies a key dilemma in immediate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: the persistent foregrounding of digital technologies as "silver-bullet" solutions to overcoming tensions between surveillance and privacy. It illustrates the pandemic techno-solutionist dilemma by pointing to global efforts to harness blockchain technologies for "squaring the circle" between privacy and surveillance. It then concludes that further investigating the persistence and possible inevitability of this dilemma requires overcoming solitudes both within international political economy and between international political economy and interdisciplines such as surveillance studies.

Meeting on the second anniversary of the Paris Agreement signing in 2017, the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat founded the Climate Chain Coalition (CCC). Backed by a number of multi-stakeholder groups like the Blockchain for Climate Foundation, the Ottawa-based CCC promotes the 'blockchainization' of the Paris Agreement. What kind of 'cooler' world do blockchain-based climate governance projects conjure? This paper scrutinizes the shared visions materializing across climate finance experiments, locating them largely within existing individualistic imaginaries rather than more collectivistic alternatives. It finds the imaginaries of 'cool' technological experimentation to fall short in materializing broader input and more effective output required to overcome the legitimacy crisis facing market-led climate governance.

AbstractThis special section shifts analytical attention onto efforts undertaken by dispersed sets of actors operating in online communities to mobilize a novel internet‐based technology that mysteriously appeared at the height of market volatility in 2008. Applications of blockchain technologies and the challenges presented to longstanding patterns of financial globalization are analysed by a group of scholars with backgrounds in anthropology, political science and sociology. This introductory article first elaborates what blockchain technologies consist of before foreshadowing the insights that the following interdisciplinary investigations yield for comprehending the implications that technological changes pose for global finance specifically and globalization more generally.

This volume brings scholars of anthropology, economics, Science and Technology Studies, and sociology together with global political economy scholars in assessing the actual implications posed by Bitcoin and blockchains for contemporary global governance. Its interdisciplinary contributions provide academics, policymakers, industry practitioners and the general public with more nuanced understandings of technological change in the changing character of governance within and across the borders of nation-states.

This article examines the "technology, information, and news corporations" (TINCs), a group of under-studied non-state actors to enhance understanding of the interplay between forms of private authority in times of crisis. Three interrelated arguments regarding the shifting private authority of leading UK- and US-based TINCs are presented. First, contributions to the period of economic instability that began in 2007 have destabilized the long-standing authority of Anglo-American firms including Bloomberg, Dow Jones, and Thomson Reuters. Second, through their involvement in two overtly normative niches of global finance, environmental and Islamic finance, these private actors have responded to contestations of their authority with an enhanced stress on moral authority since 2007. Third, a mere tinkering around with pre-crisis technical knowledge and a persistent reliance on liberal market values is likely to perpetuate rather than resolve the unstable authority of the leading TINCs. Based on an original analysis of primary documents and interviews undertaken with industry participants, this article contributes to existing literature analyzing the changing nature of private authority by revealing limits to shifts and combinations between its moral and technical forms.

How can we make sense of tensions and contradictions in digitally mediated practices of anonymity and identification? This article calls for foregrounding computer protocols as key sites for locating how agency amongst increasingly complex sets of relations between human and non-human actors is impacting contemporary (in)security. We distinguish agency within and between contemporary finance/security infrastructures by tracing the development, application and updating of a particular set of computer protocols – blockchains. Locating agency at the site of these and other computer protocols, we argue, exposes security politics that have largely remained overlooked in the ongoing engagement of critical security studies with science and technology studies. Widening engagements with security devices, this article also broadens the interdisciplinary engagements of critical security studies with new media and software studies.