This booklet is the third of its kind and, as such, the sequel to ‘Critical Issues in Sustainability – Part I’ and ‘Critical Issues in Sustainability – Part II’. It contains several of our reflections as they have appeared in writing throughout 2020, notably but not exclusively through opinion articles. Just as much as we hope this booklet will challenge your ideas and actions and will provide you with the inspiration to change our world for the better, we hope it will be the ancestor of our and others’ future work. In any case, we invite you to let us know what you think about it and how we might join forces
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This paper reveals how the automatising of protocols ignited a public conflict between Dutch banks and their Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) clients in the years after the Global Financial Crisis. The bank’s “infirmary departments” for Financial Restructuring and Recovery (FR&R) were accused of (mal)treating SMEs. The conflict resulted in no formal regulatory or legal change despite public support. Instead, the banks created self-regulation to improve communication with SMEs, leading to shifts in governing FR&R for SMEs. This way, the banks mitigated significant negative symptoms of automation and solved the conflict with the SMEs while keeping FR&R and ongoing automation intact. The research uses an interdisciplinary analytical framework to understand national financial conflicts in a digitalised (business) world. It contributes to the theory of institutionalising values in discursive contests between action fields. The paper highlights the material and causes of normative conflicts of interest among critical actors in established public-private networks through discourse analysis and process tracing.
