In July 2023, former ISRF Political Economy Fellow Dave Elder-Vass was awarded the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize for his book Inventing Value: The Social Construction of Monetary Worth.
We are delighted to share the news that former ISRF Fellow Dave Elder-Vass has been awarded the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize for the year 2023.
The Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize is awarded annually for a book that constitutes, motivates or exemplifies the best and/or most innovative new writing in or about the tradition of critical realism, including the philosophy of metaReality, in the previous year.
This year’s Cheryl Frank Prize Committee unanimously agreed that the prize for a book published in 2022 be awarded to Dave Elder-Vass – Honorary Fellow in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University – for his book Inventing Value: The Social Construction of Monetary Worth by Dave Elder-Vass.
Elder-Vass’s book critically examines the nature of financial assets. The book argues that both mainstream and Marxist theories misunderstand the nature of value which is socially constructed by powerful value brokers and norm circles. Discourse, narratives, and beliefs, combined with social structures, are thus essential to the valuation of financial assets. This is an innovative perspective on the financial sector, skillfully and knowledgeably crafted from a critical realist perspective. The book also stands out for its clarity of argument, the breadth and depth of interdisciplinary knowledge and its engaging style.
Cheryl Frank Prize Committee 2023
Dave’s ISRF Political Economy Research Fellowship project – Constructing Financial Value – was concerned with the construction of value in the finance sector.
In November 2022, the ISRF hosted an online book launch for Inventing Value: The Social Construction of Monetary Worth, featuring responses to the book from Angela Martinez Dy (Loughborough University London) and Jamie Morgan (Leeds Beckett University). At the launch, ISRF Director of Research Christopher Newfield noted:
It often seems that there is little that regular people can do to get some control over venture capital and finance and product directions and the economic policy that seems mostly to make everyday economic life harder rather than easier for most of us. largely on making things harder rather than easier for regular people. We are stuck wagging our fingers from the bleachers. But Dave Elder-Vass’s book gives us excellent conceptual tools for organizing this mess, and perhaps even for redesigning it into a different set of economic mechanisms. The book is a valuable overview of economic thought, and and his writing is extremely direct and clear and a genuine pleasure to read.
Christopher Newfield, ISRF Director of Research
