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About the speaker
Diane-Laure Arjalies has been Assistant Professor at the Ivey Business School since 2015. Diane-Laure belongs to the ‘Managerial Accounting and Control’, ‘Sustainability’ and ‘General Management’ groups – a cross-disciplinary appointment that reflects my research and teaching.
She is currently working on the rise of financial technologies and their impacts on society and the development of Indigenous forms of business and accounting that accommodate the spiritual and cultural beliefs of Aboriginal communities. Her last book was co-authored with a renowned team of social scientists of finance, is available at the Oxford University Press, Chains of Finance: How Investment Management is Shaped.
Diane-Laure's work in this area has won several academic, teaching and professional prizes. The French Ministry for Finance and Economy has recently appointed me to the Scientific Committee of the French SRI label. She is also a board member of the French Social Investment Forum, an advisory member of the Principles for Responsible Investing and a Jury member of the FIR-PRI Finance and Sustainability Awards. Since 2017, Diane-Laure has also been an honorary research fellow at Cambridge, Centre for Alternative Finance.
About the event
What if no money could be produced – hence debt allowed – if the transactions in the real economy were not matching the overall financial evaluation of the latter? What if the primary role of accounting was to allow a transaction to happen, instead of recording it? Would we see a new form of capitalism arise in which the land of our desires would match the land of our lives? What would be the conditions for such change to happen? This project is a first step towards such understanding. By analyzing a cryptocurrency impak Coin whose explicit goal is to align the production of value in the real “impact” economy (i.e. making positive change in society), it aims to uncover the mechanisms through which such form of valuation and production could be obtained.
Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies transacted securely, transparently and peer-to-peer by means of cryptography in the form of a blockchain. This article aims at studying whether and how cryptocurrencies could help align the mechanisms of value creation in the “real economy” and those that lead to the financial value of cryptocurrencies. “Real economy,” in this context, encompasses the transactions (products and services) for which the cryptocurrency is being used. The financial value of cryptocurrencies is often expressed in comparison to other (fiat) currencies. This value can also be understood within the cryptocurrency ecosystem itself, notably through its purchasing power among the network of their members.
The expected contribution of the research is twofold. Firstly, it will provide one of the first analyses of the relationship between accounting and cryptocurrencies. Despite blockchain being a ledger, research about this new technology and its potential effects on the practice and theory of accounting has indeed been particularly scarce. Secondly, it will elaborate on the potential use of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology for re-coupling the value produced in the real economy with the financial value derived from these transactions.
At this event
Professor, Lingan University
Professor of Accounting