Financializing the Common Good: How do Temporalities Shape Financial Materiality in Socially Sustainable Investing?

• In Event: Governance, Markets, and Innovation

Abstract

This paper examines the notional work through which social values are rendered commensurable with financial modes of valuation in the field of socially sustainable investing (SSI). It conceptualizes SSI as a field constituted by the explicit interweaving of two potentially incommensurable orders of worth: a civic order oriented toward the common good and a financialized market order oriented toward monetary returns. The paper argues that the institutionalization and operation of SSI depend on sustained commensuration work that aligns these distinct principles of valuation.
Empirically, the study focuses on the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), a key institutional actor in the global SSI field. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of PRI reports, policy papers, and technical guidelines, it examines how the organization formulates and communicates imaginaries and conventions that render sustainable investment as compatible with conventional financial reasoning. The analysis shows that the PRI systematically reframes environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns as financially material factors affecting long-term risk exposure and value creation. Through this reframing, extra-financial factors are translated into the language of financial calculation.
The paper demonstrates that two foundational financial notions – risk and value creation – serve as conceptual anchors in this commensuration process. A crucial element of this commensuration work is the mobilization of imaginaries of forward-looking and open-ended temporality which prescribe the consideration of long-range probable futures as the defining principle of sustainable investing. By extending temporal horizons and expanding the scale of risk to systemic levels, the PRI integrates ESG considerations into established valuation devices while preserving the primacy of financial criteria. The findings contribute to critical scholarship on financialization by highlighting how the “social” is selectively assimilated into financial valuation regimes. SSI thus emerges not as a displacement of financial logics, but as their rearticulation through the absorption and governance of alternative orders of worth.

Authors

• Rami Kaplan, Tel Aviv University

• Zeev Rosenhek, Open University of Israel