SODAS Lecture: Algorithmic Global Wealth Chains 

SODAS lecture
We are delighted to host Leonard Seabrooke and Saila Stausholm for this SODAS Lecture
Title:

Algorithmic Global Wealth Chains 

Abstract:

Legal affordances are pathways of action supported by professional communities in and across jurisdictions in the international political economy. Recent work has explored how multinational enterprises take advantage of legal affordances for wealth protection, including the use of legal arbitrage, ambiguity, and absences. Given the complexity of legal systems across jurisdictions, digital technologies are being put to use to search for legal affordances and calculate optimal allocations of economic activity between jurisdictions. This ranges from automating the manual handling of tax data to algorithms searching for optimal use of tax incentives, as well as machine learning to actively suggest tax planning strategies. In this paper we explore the use of digital tax technologies in the Big Four accounting firms. We explore how algorithms are able to locate legal affordances and how this changes the articulation of global wealth chains in three ways. The first is influence on professional characteristics, including the emergence of new hierarchies based on technological prowess. The second is new practices that permit new temporal ordering in tax planning, with the tax technologies integrating financial, operational and legal data and operating in real-time. The third is professional services that foster closer firm-level coordination between tax planning with financing and supply chain operations, entangling global value chains with global wealth chains. 

Bios:
Leonard Seabrooke is Professor of International Political Economy and Economic Sociology in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. His current research concentrates on transnational professionals across a range of cases, from finance and tax experts, to consultants, sustainability experts, and others. Seabrooke's work has appeared in leading journals, including American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Governance, International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Political Economy, and many others.


Saila Stausholm is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Her research is focused on corporate taxation and the policies governments undertake to attract investment and growth, as well as the ways corporations and professionals interact with these policies. Stausholms work spans across macro and micro dimensions and has included work on tax in mining contracts, Global Professional Service Firms, international tax reforms and algorithms in tax planning.




This autumn, the theme of the SODAS lecture series is "Global Data Politics".

Global Data Politics 

Almost everything we do – how we meet, vote, shop, socialize or love – has become infused with, and is constantly generating new, digital data. Such data has helped generate entire professions such as (social) data science, and providing new insights into personal habits and convictions. With its capacity to reconfigure social relations, data has become the object of both local political struggles and activism and large-scale geopolitical clashes. In this lecture series, we investigate the emerging field of global data politics and turn to questions about the simultaneous datafication of politics and the politicization of data: What is the place of data in contemporary democracies? Does data have a nationality? How can and should cross-border data flows be governed and regulated? Can states, companies – or citizens – become digitally sovereign? Who owns (digital) data and their material infrastructure and why does this matter? (How) can we use digital data to change the world?