Duncan Wigan
Biographic Data
| ID | 304488 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Duncan Wigan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Duncan |
| FAMILY NAME | Wigan |
| SIGNATURE | WIGAN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Copenhagen Business School |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9805-7408 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 319 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 17 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
What's a Firm, What's a Corporation, and Why Does It Matter?
To understand how corporate activity is changing our economies and societies, we need to distinguish how they organize through bodies of law. In general parlance, the words firm, corporation, and company are used interchangeably. This is a matter of convenience but masks how firms, as organizing units, articulate their activities through corporations as legal entities that offer them affordances. This article reviews the literature in sociolegal …
Getting action for global economic justice
Generating momentum for activist campaigns on complicated economic issues is difficult, especially in a transnational context. So, how did activists get action on tax justice and create a movement that has changed global tax policy? Drawing on 20 years of para-ethnographic fieldwork with the Tax Justice Network, we suggest that activists initially engaged in 'identity switching' tactics to access professional or policy arenas from a footing in on…
Global value and wealth chains in contemporary capitalism
This introduction to a special section on global value chains and global wealth chains elaborates on the concept of entanglement as a way to understand dynamics of value capture, accumulation and inequality in contemporary capitalism. The authors first review the analytical framework they have proposed for analyzing entangled chains based on two dimensions: 1) the relative importance of intangible versus tangible assets; and (2) the primary strat…
Entangled chains of global value and wealth
In recent decades multinational enterprises have developed ways to reorganize production and trade through Global Value Chains (GVCs), and to manage assets and liabilities through Global Wealth Chains (GWCs). This co-evolution has permitted the hyper-extraction of labor and natural resources through financial and legal technologies, entangling value creation and wealth accumulation. While scholars have separately acknowledged the role that GVCs a…
Legal affordances in global wealth chains
Firms can use legal and spatial scaling to increase their control and capacity to exploit assets. Here we examine how platform firms, like AirBnB, Uber, and Bird, scale their operations through global wealth chains. Their use of law is to maximize wealth creation and protection, while their services use local spaces to extract value from established property, labor, and public thoroughfares. We examine how such 'networked accumulation' platform f…
Professional action in global wealth chains
This article provides a framework for explaining professional action in multi‐jurisdictional tax and finance environments, focusing on how relationships between clients, professionals, and regulators shape market structures. Given the complexity of tax and financial regulations within and across national systems, professionals experienced in accounting, financial, legal, and policy systems have opportunities to engage to increase information asym…
Brexit and Global Wealth Chains
One vision of a post Brexit Britain is of a political economy sustained by highly flexible labour markets, light touch regulation, and a hyper competitive low-tax regime. This article focuses on the tax element, evaluating the prospects of this vision’s realization on the basis of the attributes of the British political economy, the substance of the Britain’s new found freedoms and the forces at play in the European and international regulatory e…
Capital unchained
The rise of intangible assets such as brand names, research and development, patents and other forms of abstract capital such as digital platforms and data flows has confounded extant measures and concepts of capital and accumulation. What used to be a residual asset category known as ‘goodwill’ has now overtaken so-called fixed or tangible assets in the profitability and valuation of many leading corporations. Yet these intangible assets lead a …
The governance of global wealth chains
This article offers a theoretical framework to explain how Global Wealth Chains (GWCs) are created, maintained, and governed. We draw upon different strands of literature, including scholarship in International Political Economy and Economic Geography on Global Value Chains, literature on finance and law in Institutional Economics, and work from Economic Sociology on network dynamics within markets. This scholarship assists us in highlighting thr…
Constructing and contesting City of London power
Existing literature on the City of London has tended to focus on its ‘structural power’, while neglecting political and narrative agency. This article acts as a corrective by presenting evidence to show that since the financial crash of 2008, the political terrain the City operates on has become more contested, crowded and noisier. The contribution develops a middle course between a positive assessment of the role of civil society in relation to …
The Finance Curse
Outlines harms caused to countries hosting an oversized financial sector Argues Britain is subject to a Finance Curse, which carries many similarities with the Resource Curse, afflicting mineral-exporting countries Provides a narrative and framework to analyse the political economy of finance and financialisation The Global Financial Crisis placed the utility of financial services in question. The crash, great recession, wealth transfers from pub…
Politics, time and space in the era of shadow banking
In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, there has been an understandable focus on the financial fragility and contagion aspects of shadow banking. This article argues that shadow banking is important for another set of reasons. It has been well established that shadow banking permits the transformation of assets and financial claims. It has also been established that fiscal and regulatory arbitrage occurs through shadow banking, and associate…
Powering ideas through expertise
This contribution discusses how ideas are powered through expertise and moral authority. Professionals compete with each other to power ideas by linking claims to expertise, how things best work, to moral claims about how things should be. To show how, we draw on a case of battles over global tax policy. Corporate reporting for tax purposes is an area where the European Union, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nat…
How activists use benchmarks
Non-governmental organisations use benchmarks as a form of symbolic violence to place political pressure on firms, states, and international organisations. The development of benchmarks requires three elements: (1) salience, that the community of concern is aware of the issue and views it as important; (2) will, that activists and issue entrepreneurs will carry the message forward; and (3) expertise, that benchmarks created can be defended as acc…
Veblen, Bataille and Financial Innovation
This article advances towards the reconceptualization of financial innovation. It examines the calamitous role of financial innovation in the global financial crisis, developing a non-rational theorization of finance within the social economy that factors in the role of affect. Outlining the foundations for such an approach, the analysis draws on Thorstein Veblen and Georges Bataille, whose work encompasses psycho-social conceptions of political-…
Global wealth chains in the international political economy
This work is funded by the ‘Systems of Tax Evasion and Laundering: Locating Global Wealth Chains in the International Political Economy’(STEAL 2012-15) project funded by the TaxCapDev program under the Research Council of Norway (#212210/H30), and based at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
Credit Risk Transfer and Crunches
Rather than in terms of the inevitable demise of a destabilising process of speculation, this article explores the ‘credit crunch’ as a window on the fabrication, and measure of the proportions of a political shift driven by market actors and financial innovation. The Basel process reconceptualised banks as risk navigators and generated a competitive hierarchy within the global banking industry determined on a gauge of this capacity. This private…
Powering ideas through expertise
This contribution discusses how ideas are powered through expertise and moral authority. Professionals compete with each other to power ideas by linking claims to expertise, how things best work, to moral claims about how things should be. To show how, we draw on a case of battles over global tax policy. Corporate reporting for tax purposes is an area where the European Union, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nat…
The governance of global wealth chains
This article offers a theoretical framework to explain how Global Wealth Chains (GWCs) are created, maintained, and governed. We draw upon different strands of literature, including scholarship in International Political Economy and Economic Geography on Global Value Chains, literature on finance and law in Institutional Economics, and work from Economic Sociology on network dynamics within markets. This scholarship assists us in highlighting thr…
Global wealth chains in the international political economy
This work is funded by the ‘Systems of Tax Evasion and Laundering: Locating Global Wealth Chains in the International Political Economy’(STEAL 2012-15) project funded by the TaxCapDev program under the Research Council of Norway (#212210/H30), and based at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
Capital unchained
The rise of intangible assets such as brand names, research and development, patents and other forms of abstract capital such as digital platforms and data flows has confounded extant measures and concepts of capital and accumulation. What used to be a residual asset category known as ‘goodwill’ has now overtaken so-called fixed or tangible assets in the profitability and valuation of many leading corporations. Yet these intangible assets lead a …
Politics, time and space in the era of shadow banking
In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, there has been an understandable focus on the financial fragility and contagion aspects of shadow banking. This article argues that shadow banking is important for another set of reasons. It has been well established that shadow banking permits the transformation of assets and financial claims. It has also been established that fiscal and regulatory arbitrage occurs through shadow banking, and associate…
Professional action in global wealth chains
This article provides a framework for explaining professional action in multi‐jurisdictional tax and finance environments, focusing on how relationships between clients, professionals, and regulators shape market structures. Given the complexity of tax and financial regulations within and across national systems, professionals experienced in accounting, financial, legal, and policy systems have opportunities to engage to increase information asym…
The Finance Curse
Outlines harms caused to countries hosting an oversized financial sector Argues Britain is subject to a Finance Curse, which carries many similarities with the Resource Curse, afflicting mineral-exporting countries Provides a narrative and framework to analyse the political economy of finance and financialisation The Global Financial Crisis placed the utility of financial services in question. The crash, great recession, wealth transfers from pub…
Constructing and contesting City of London power
Existing literature on the City of London has tended to focus on its ‘structural power’, while neglecting political and narrative agency. This article acts as a corrective by presenting evidence to show that since the financial crash of 2008, the political terrain the City operates on has become more contested, crowded and noisier. The contribution develops a middle course between a positive assessment of the role of civil society in relation to …
Credit Risk Transfer and Crunches
Rather than in terms of the inevitable demise of a destabilising process of speculation, this article explores the ‘credit crunch’ as a window on the fabrication, and measure of the proportions of a political shift driven by market actors and financial innovation. The Basel process reconceptualised banks as risk navigators and generated a competitive hierarchy within the global banking industry determined on a gauge of this capacity. This private…
Entangled chains of global value and wealth
In recent decades multinational enterprises have developed ways to reorganize production and trade through Global Value Chains (GVCs), and to manage assets and liabilities through Global Wealth Chains (GWCs). This co-evolution has permitted the hyper-extraction of labor and natural resources through financial and legal technologies, entangling value creation and wealth accumulation. While scholars have separately acknowledged the role that GVCs a…
How activists use benchmarks
Non-governmental organisations use benchmarks as a form of symbolic violence to place political pressure on firms, states, and international organisations. The development of benchmarks requires three elements: (1) salience, that the community of concern is aware of the issue and views it as important; (2) will, that activists and issue entrepreneurs will carry the message forward; and (3) expertise, that benchmarks created can be defended as acc…
Legal affordances in global wealth chains
Firms can use legal and spatial scaling to increase their control and capacity to exploit assets. Here we examine how platform firms, like AirBnB, Uber, and Bird, scale their operations through global wealth chains. Their use of law is to maximize wealth creation and protection, while their services use local spaces to extract value from established property, labor, and public thoroughfares. We examine how such 'networked accumulation' platform f…
Getting action for global economic justice
Generating momentum for activist campaigns on complicated economic issues is difficult, especially in a transnational context. So, how did activists get action on tax justice and create a movement that has changed global tax policy? Drawing on 20 years of para-ethnographic fieldwork with the Tax Justice Network, we suggest that activists initially engaged in 'identity switching' tactics to access professional or policy arenas from a footing in on…
Veblen, Bataille and Financial Innovation
This article advances towards the reconceptualization of financial innovation. It examines the calamitous role of financial innovation in the global financial crisis, developing a non-rational theorization of finance within the social economy that factors in the role of affect. Outlining the foundations for such an approach, the analysis draws on Thorstein Veblen and Georges Bataille, whose work encompasses psycho-social conceptions of political-…
Brexit and Global Wealth Chains
One vision of a post Brexit Britain is of a political economy sustained by highly flexible labour markets, light touch regulation, and a hyper competitive low-tax regime. This article focuses on the tax element, evaluating the prospects of this vision’s realization on the basis of the attributes of the British political economy, the substance of the Britain’s new found freedoms and the forces at play in the European and international regulatory e…
Global value and wealth chains in contemporary capitalism
This introduction to a special section on global value chains and global wealth chains elaborates on the concept of entanglement as a way to understand dynamics of value capture, accumulation and inequality in contemporary capitalism. The authors first review the analytical framework they have proposed for analyzing entangled chains based on two dimensions: 1) the relative importance of intangible versus tangible assets; and (2) the primary strat…
Credit Risk Transfer and Crunches
Rather than in terms of the inevitable demise of a destabilising process of speculation, this article explores the ‘credit crunch’ as a window on the fabrication, and measure of the proportions of a political shift driven by market actors and financial innovation. The Basel process reconceptualised banks as risk navigators and generated a competitive hierarchy within the global banking industry determined on a gauge of this capacity. This private…
Global wealth chains in the international political economy
This work is funded by the ‘Systems of Tax Evasion and Laundering: Locating Global Wealth Chains in the International Political Economy’(STEAL 2012-15) project funded by the TaxCapDev program under the Research Council of Norway (#212210/H30), and based at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
How activists use benchmarks
Non-governmental organisations use benchmarks as a form of symbolic violence to place political pressure on firms, states, and international organisations. The development of benchmarks requires three elements: (1) salience, that the community of concern is aware of the issue and views it as important; (2) will, that activists and issue entrepreneurs will carry the message forward; and (3) expertise, that benchmarks created can be defended as acc…
Veblen, Bataille and Financial Innovation
This article advances towards the reconceptualization of financial innovation. It examines the calamitous role of financial innovation in the global financial crisis, developing a non-rational theorization of finance within the social economy that factors in the role of affect. Outlining the foundations for such an approach, the analysis draws on Thorstein Veblen and Georges Bataille, whose work encompasses psycho-social conceptions of political-…
The Finance Curse
Outlines harms caused to countries hosting an oversized financial sector Argues Britain is subject to a Finance Curse, which carries many similarities with the Resource Curse, afflicting mineral-exporting countries Provides a narrative and framework to analyse the political economy of finance and financialisation The Global Financial Crisis placed the utility of financial services in question. The crash, great recession, wealth transfers from pub…
Politics, time and space in the era of shadow banking
In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, there has been an understandable focus on the financial fragility and contagion aspects of shadow banking. This article argues that shadow banking is important for another set of reasons. It has been well established that shadow banking permits the transformation of assets and financial claims. It has also been established that fiscal and regulatory arbitrage occurs through shadow banking, and associate…
Powering ideas through expertise
This contribution discusses how ideas are powered through expertise and moral authority. Professionals compete with each other to power ideas by linking claims to expertise, how things best work, to moral claims about how things should be. To show how, we draw on a case of battles over global tax policy. Corporate reporting for tax purposes is an area where the European Union, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nat…
Brexit and Global Wealth Chains
One vision of a post Brexit Britain is of a political economy sustained by highly flexible labour markets, light touch regulation, and a hyper competitive low-tax regime. This article focuses on the tax element, evaluating the prospects of this vision’s realization on the basis of the attributes of the British political economy, the substance of the Britain’s new found freedoms and the forces at play in the European and international regulatory e…
Capital unchained
The rise of intangible assets such as brand names, research and development, patents and other forms of abstract capital such as digital platforms and data flows has confounded extant measures and concepts of capital and accumulation. What used to be a residual asset category known as ‘goodwill’ has now overtaken so-called fixed or tangible assets in the profitability and valuation of many leading corporations. Yet these intangible assets lead a …
The governance of global wealth chains
This article offers a theoretical framework to explain how Global Wealth Chains (GWCs) are created, maintained, and governed. We draw upon different strands of literature, including scholarship in International Political Economy and Economic Geography on Global Value Chains, literature on finance and law in Institutional Economics, and work from Economic Sociology on network dynamics within markets. This scholarship assists us in highlighting thr…
Constructing and contesting City of London power
Existing literature on the City of London has tended to focus on its ‘structural power’, while neglecting political and narrative agency. This article acts as a corrective by presenting evidence to show that since the financial crash of 2008, the political terrain the City operates on has become more contested, crowded and noisier. The contribution develops a middle course between a positive assessment of the role of civil society in relation to …
Professional action in global wealth chains
This article provides a framework for explaining professional action in multi‐jurisdictional tax and finance environments, focusing on how relationships between clients, professionals, and regulators shape market structures. Given the complexity of tax and financial regulations within and across national systems, professionals experienced in accounting, financial, legal, and policy systems have opportunities to engage to increase information asym…
Entangled chains of global value and wealth
In recent decades multinational enterprises have developed ways to reorganize production and trade through Global Value Chains (GVCs), and to manage assets and liabilities through Global Wealth Chains (GWCs). This co-evolution has permitted the hyper-extraction of labor and natural resources through financial and legal technologies, entangling value creation and wealth accumulation. While scholars have separately acknowledged the role that GVCs a…
Legal affordances in global wealth chains
Firms can use legal and spatial scaling to increase their control and capacity to exploit assets. Here we examine how platform firms, like AirBnB, Uber, and Bird, scale their operations through global wealth chains. Their use of law is to maximize wealth creation and protection, while their services use local spaces to extract value from established property, labor, and public thoroughfares. We examine how such 'networked accumulation' platform f…
Getting action for global economic justice
Generating momentum for activist campaigns on complicated economic issues is difficult, especially in a transnational context. So, how did activists get action on tax justice and create a movement that has changed global tax policy? Drawing on 20 years of para-ethnographic fieldwork with the Tax Justice Network, we suggest that activists initially engaged in 'identity switching' tactics to access professional or policy arenas from a footing in on…
Global value and wealth chains in contemporary capitalism
This introduction to a special section on global value chains and global wealth chains elaborates on the concept of entanglement as a way to understand dynamics of value capture, accumulation and inequality in contemporary capitalism. The authors first review the analytical framework they have proposed for analyzing entangled chains based on two dimensions: 1) the relative importance of intangible versus tangible assets; and (2) the primary strat…
What's a Firm, What's a Corporation, and Why Does It Matter?
To understand how corporate activity is changing our economies and societies, we need to distinguish how they organize through bodies of law. In general parlance, the words firm, corporation, and company are used interchangeably. This is a matter of convenience but masks how firms, as organizing units, articulate their activities through corporations as legal entities that offer them affordances. This article reviews the literature in sociolegal …
Economics (13 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Finance (8 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (8 works) · Business (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Political economy (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Sociology (5 works)