G-CHANGE

The project examines value-hijacking processes, where organizations exploit and distort “progressive” ideals—like environmental sustainability, ethical responsibility, openness or transparency—to gain unfair competitive advantage or mislead stakeholders, without truly upholding those ideals or the underlying concerns. The research has a foundational nature and is based on interdisciplinary approach, drawing on expertise from legal studies, information technology, business administration, ethics and communications studies. The general objectives of the research are

1. to develop a theory of value-hijacking processes in different sectors of the economy and public administration, and, based on this theory,
2. to shed light on what aspects of legal professionalism, business organisation and technological innovation can better resist such processes and contribute to genuine commitment to fair market practices.

Within the framework of the first general objective (“hijacking theory”), the research will pursue, as specific objectives, a critical investigation, analysis and discussion of the following crucial value-hijacking processes:

• Greenwashing, i.e. the practice of portraying products, services or businesses as environmentally friendly without significant sustainability efforts.
• Ethics-washing (aka fair-washing), i.e. when companies endorse ethical trade practices while neglecting real commitments or actions towards social, environmental or governance issues.
• Open-washing, i.e. when organizations falsely claim to embrace transparency, interoperability, open-source and open-access practices while maintaining proprietary control and secrecy.
• Peace-washing, when military actions, political endorsements, or investments in the arms industry are presented as initiatives purportedly aimed at restoring peace in contexts of armed conflicts, while in fact they amount to military operations designed to determine, consolidate, or alter geopolitical arrangements, to advance specific political agendas, and to secure the economic interests of the war economy and its corporate actors.

The analysis may extend to other instances of value-hijacking that will emerge in the course of the research. Crucially, the analysis includes exploring the various mechanisms through which protective legal institutions transition from upholding counter-hegemonic ideals emerging from social movements or grassroots activism, to yielding to de facto appropriation by economic powers (be they private or state-endorsed powers).

With respect to the second general objective (“resistance”), the research will engage in four specific objectives:

• To elaborate legal strategies, whit the existing legal framework, to resist value-hijacking processes in selected (critical) areas of today’s market economy and public administration;
• To carry out practical experimentations of these strategies in actual business practices, collective actions, NGOs advocacy and in the practice of legal professionalism;
• To critically assess the impact of these actions and practices as genuine commitment to fair market practices and, ultimately, as instruments of social emancipation.

Ultimately, the aim of this basic research is to develop a theory of value-hijacking processes in the law, that should shed light on what aspects of legal professionalism, market organization and technological innovation can better resists such processes. More generally, in the current phase of impressive acceleration in the rate of substitution of human decision-making process with so-called “artificial intelligence”, it is crucial to understand whether the law can still work as a force to promote fundamental principles of human dignity or whether it will be reduced into an obsolete narrative entirely in the interest of dominating economic powers.