G-CHANGE
- Periodo: 2025-2028
- Coordinato da: Maurizio Borghi
Countering Value-Hijacking
We call value-hijacking the market practice of exploiting and distorting counter-hegemonic ideals to gain an unfair competitive advantage or mislead stakeholders, without genuinely upholding those ideals and/or their underlying concerns. From a legal standpoint, these practices include, most notably, greenwashing, a legal term initially introduced to address false green statements in the financial sector and then expanded to encompass a broad range of deceptive claims about a company’s sustainability commitments. Subject to recent EU legislation, greenwashing is just the most visible example of unfair practices involving false, misleading, or deceptive assertions of “virtuous” market behaviours. The project explores legal and practical strategies to tackle greenwashing and other value-hijacking practices in the current economic phase as characterised by so-called “transitions”, where both private companies and public administrations are required to show adherence to values such as environmental responsibility, ethical commitment and transparency. It analyses practices such “open-washing”, “ethics-washing” and “woke-washing” across different levels of the market economy, from the green to the digital transition, and in both private and public sectors, with the aim of charting the blurring boundaries of this phenomenon. A specific focus of the project is on how protective, countervailing legal mechanisms are co-opted into the mainstream economic agenda of continuous growth and capital accumulation. The project questions the hijacking of legal doctrines, ideas, institutional solutions and even “keywords” that have been developed over the last decades to resist market fundamentalism and promote broad social, environmental, and economic goals. Its main aim is to theoretically and practically reconstruct the original intent of these doctrines and solutions in a manner that fosters genuine commitment to fair market practices for the benefit of future generations.
Obiettivi e attività
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
- to develop a theory of value-hijacking processes in different sectors of the economy and public administration, and, based on this theory,
- 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.
- Wokewashing, where companies use progressive social justice rhetoric to improve their image without taking meaningful action to improve labour conditions.
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.
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