Adam Smith Business School

Professor Afshin Mehrpouya, Edinburgh University

"Market devices of the public - shaping a ‘sustainable market’ through rating""
Wednesday, 19 February 2025. 12:00-13:30
Room 203 Adam Smith Business School

Abstract

Market devices are increasingly used to in the context of regulating public goods and to align social and ecological concerns with firms’ market incentives. This paper examines the intricacies of the construction of the French repairability index as a regulatory market device aiming to reshape the consumer goods market in alignment with circular economy principles. Based on an eight-month participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, we explore the index’s underlying calculative work and how it mediates between the index’s multiple regulatory ambitions, users and targets. Our study introduces the concept of “calculative staging”, revealing how the index designers inscribe and arrange sometimes conflicting epistemic values, “formats and furniture”, and calculative practices in different “stages” of the index to cater to its diverse users of information, targets of interventions, and stakeholders’ perceived needs/expectations. We show how the index is driven by the aspiration to enact a circular form of reactivity in which consumers and manufactures mutually imagine/observe each other through the rating device – both being at the same time users of information and targets for the interventions of this rating device. We show how regulation through market devices turns regulation to a mediation between market actors, their different imagined aspirations, actorhoods, and epistemic values. We reflect upon the implications of these processes for consumer politics, the underlying public goods, and regulation.

Bio

Afshin Mehrpouya is Professor and Chair of Accounting at the University of Edinburgh Business School. He trained as a medical doctor in Iran and also holds an MBA and a PhD in Management. His research is broadly in the genealogy of ideas and the sociology of quantification in transnational governance, with focus on corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) regulation. The empirical fields in which he has explored these concerns include financial regulation, socially responsible investments, access to medicines, sovereign wealth funds, and the Chinese social credit systems. Afshin is a member of the editorial board of Accounting, Organizations and Society. Prior to joining academia, he worked for many years in design and implementation of environmental, social and governance multi-stakeholder ratings and rankings of firms in healthcare and nutrition.

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First published: 22 January 2025