Our third Keynote Address will be delivered online by Dave Elder-Vass. Dave is an Honorary Fellow at Loughborough University. His early work, notably in his books The Causal Power of Social Structures and The Reality of Social Construction, addressed broad questions in social ontology and social theory, arguing for a realist – but also constructionist – ontology of the social world. 

More recently, he has brought this perspective to bear on issues in economic sociology, beginning with the role and nature of gifts. His book, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy, developed a realist political economy of practices and uses it to analyse the economic structures of some of the best known organisations in the contemporary digital economy. His most recent book, Inventing Value, investigates how value is established in the financial sector. It builds an ontology of financial assets that shows how value entrepreneurs build discourses, conventions, and institutions that then shape the values ascribed to assets, leading him to question those values and the system that produces them.