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. I first situate academic finance within the broader spectrum of social sciences and highlight its ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions. Second, I 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, I characterize diversification in finance with reference to the nested epistemological structure of scientific discourse. I 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.