Digital innovations in insurance, ‘InsurTech’, bring together two transformational forces in our contemporary world – risk and digitization. InsurTech has been celebrated and criticized. A literature on the social studies of insurance provides valuable and more nuanced insights into the social, cultural, and technological properties of InsurTech but it tends to analyze these at the firm level. This article brings together themes from assemblage and international political economy theories to integrate analysis of the structure of the global industry and the role of cross-border regulatory arrangements with the firm-level insights of the social studies of insurance literature. The article examines differentiation in the industry structure between stages of the insurance value chain, between incumbent and start-up insurers and Big Tech, and across jurisdictions and regions. It also examines the most globally significant regulatory responses to InsurTech: from the International Association of Insurance Supervisors, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the US National Association of Insurance Commissioners. It shows that the nuance and ethical content that is evident at the firm level in the social studies of insurance literature is interacting with similar nuance and ethical content in global regulatory arrangements.

This article derives four propositions for conceptualizing resistance to the Americanization of finance in advanced economy states. Resistance entails truncation of market-based financial innovations in line with political profit-sharing arrangements between governments, bankers, and other coalitional interests locked in a game of bank bargains. Resistance transpires through two key power structures in the national architecture for economic statecraft: the political executive and the financial supervisory system. Since change does not occur in a vacuum, resistance manifests as political bricolage amid idiosyncratic enabling and constraining factors comprising the broader public policy environment. Lastly, resistive capacity by state bricoleurs is contingent upon leeway for executive power and coherence of the financial supervisory system in relation to the underlying system of representative democracy. Using Canada as an exploratory case, it is shown that federal policymakers effectively truncated the Americanization of Canadian finance through strategic political and regulatory interventions geared toward preserving the incumbent profit-sharing arrangement with its Big Six banks. In line with the growing body of scholarship illuminating neoliberalism as governance through markets rather than a freeing of market forces, the findings suggest that truncation enabled re-regulation of Canadian finance along the grain of financial globalization as opposed to deregulation per se.

Digital credit – short-term microcredit distributed over a digital platform, such as a mobile phone – has become hugely popular in Kenya, with over six million Kenyans having taken out at least one digital loan over the last decade. While there is a small but growing body of literature on the problems associated with digital credit (such as its high costs and contributions to over-indebtedness), far less attention has been paid to the regulatory debates in Kenya or elsewhere. This article charts the rise of digital credit in Kenya and the process of regulating the sector, which culminated in the CBK (Amendment) Act, 2021. Due to its almost exclusive focus on previously unregulated lenders, the Act had limited efficacy: it did not affect most of the digital lending market, which is largely controlled by partnerships between banks and mobile network operators. Using concepts from business power theory, we argue that the shape of the legislation can be attributed to the market-led ideology of the Kenyan government and the structural power of the telecommunications giant Safaricom and its partner banks. This case provides important lessons for other countries, where fintechs in general and digital credit, in particular, are on the rise.

This article introduces a new conceptual framework for examining the transformation of central banks’ activities at the intersection of science and politics. It builds on the results of the contributions gathered in this special section on the scientization of central banking, to which this article also provides an introduction. We start with an analysis of Martin Marcussen’s concept of ‘scientization’, originally formulated to describe the changes within central banks since the 2000s. After highlighting how Marcussen’s concept has raised different interpretations, we broaden our scope to examine how ‘scientization’ is applied in the wider social sciences, extending beyond the study of central banks. This brings to the fore two ideas: scientization as ‘boundary work’ (redrawing the line between ‘science’ and ‘non-science’) happening both in the public-facing (‘frontstage’) and internal (‘backstage’) activities of organizations. Finally, we suggest how these two ideas can be used to reinterpret ‘scientization’ of central banks as the emergence of central banks as ‘boundary organizations’. This reframing allows us to untangle and clarify the phenomena previously conflated under the original concept of scientization, offering a more coherent framework for ongoing research on central banks.

This article investigates the scientization process in central banks, using the Bank of England (BoE) as a case study. Its main goal is to clarify the interactions and tensions among three dimensions of scientization: contributory, policymaking and legitimizing. To do so, we outline an ideal type of contributory scientization in central banks, whereby they become active contributors to science. The article derives empirically observable characteristics for this ideal type, regarding leadership and staff profiles, use of internal resources, composition of external networks, and publication and discursive outputs. The BoE is then contrasted to this ideal type of a central bank thoroughly involved in contributory scientization. The empirical material includes archives and interviews as well as three databases providing quantitative information from the 1970s to 2019. We find that the development of contributory scientization is strategically motivated, often generating tensions with policymaking and legitimizing dimensions. Our findings suggest that scientization in central banks is best understood as a three-dimensional, non-linear process, rather than a steamroller.

This article documents the historical evolution of economic expertise at the Banque de France (BdF), from the late-nineteenth to early-twenty-first centuries. Criticizing presentism and conceptual reductionism in the notion of scientization, I characterize the evolution of economic expertise at the BdF as being a result of ‘field effects’ emerging from the BdF’s attempts to build state capacity. The BdF’s development of economics expertise should be interpreted as a way of negotiating the boundaries between various fields (private banking, technocracy, academia, and international central banking). In particular, I highlight two distinct boundary arrangements: technicalization and academization. From the late-nineteenth century to the 1960s, the rise of technical functions results from a dual positioning at the boundary between, respectively, the state and the market, and national and international institutions. The BdF’s nationalization, in the mid-twentieth century, fostered its integration into the administrative and technocratic field, putting it in competition with other ‘technicalized’ institutions. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the BdF negotiated new arrangements with the academic field. Finally, as a member of the European System of Central Banks since 1999, the BdF has sought scientific legitimacy to have a say in European monetary policymaking.

This article focuses on the elites governing central banks in order to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into central bank scientization. We first critically discuss the ‘politics of scientization’ as a discursive strategy that depoliticizes monetary policy under neoliberalism. We then propose an alternative, sociological approach to scientization, defining it as a reconfiguration of power dynamics in favour of the scientific field and asking whether there has been a recent increase in the share of actors from this field in central bank governance. Using global data from our prosopographical database, we analyse the educational and professional backgrounds of central bank governors worldwide from 2000 to 2020. We combine descriptive statistics, geometric data analysis, and qualitative analysis to examine global trends and variations between the Global South and North. Our findings contradict the hypothesis of a linear socio-historical process wherein academic professionals and qualified scholars replace ‘less scientific’ actors from political, bureaucratic, or financial fields. Instead, we reveal diverse dynamics shaping global monetary governance.