From discourse to action: Multivocal inscription in the emergence of impact investing in Spain

Interstitial issue fields offer important opportunities for collaboration across sectors, but they also pose significant challenges because field members come with diverse and often opposed value systems and evaluative criteria. Recent research has shown that multivocality can enable collaboration in such contexts, as it promotes coordination without the need for consensus. We explore these issues in the context of the emergence of impact investing in Spain, where we have carried out a field-level study based on interviews and continued participant observation, with especial emphasis on the case of social impact bonds. We find that multivocality is indeed relevant in the process of field emergence, but that it is through its interplay with calculability - reaching consensus over new calculative practices - that field members acquire new roles and responsibilities. We hence contribute to the literature on field emergence by showing the complementarity between multivocality and calculability, and to the literature on impact investing by suggesting how impact measurement and social impact bonds can drive significant changes in actors' roles and accountability."