Diversifying finance research: From financialization to sustainability

This paper seeks to overcome the apparent contradictions between global demand for sustainability and the structure of conventional financial discourse by putting forth a strategy for diversifying academic finance. It comprises four sections. We first situate academic finance within the broader spectrum of social sciences and highlight its ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions. Second, we show that these assumptions, taken for granted within the field of finance, are the object of much debate within other fields – as is demonstrated by controversy regarding logical positivism, social ontology and performativity –which brings out the limitations of paradigmatic unity in finance. Third, we characterize diversification in finance with reference to the nested epistemological structure of scientific discourse. We argue that diversification is a process by which (i) finance research is extended to other existing paradigms in social sciences; (ii) new research metaphors are developed within the current paradigm; and (iii) puzzle-solving robustness is achieved. Fourth, I develop a research agenda for the diversification of academic finance. This agenda is broken down into themes, paradigmatic hypotheses, and research questions.