Esteem as professional currency and consolidation: The rise of the macroprudential Cognoscenti

Professional interaction is heavily shaped by the search for and subsequent allocation of esteem. Esteem is understood in this chapter as the positive regard or estimation of one’s performance by significant others, within one’s immediate peer or reference group (Brennan and Pettit, 2004). Consequently, professional networks are often characterized by a seemingly invisible supply of and demand for esteem. This in turn produces a series of systematic interactions determining the allocation of this ‘intangible’good, based on continuous aggregations of evaluation and ordinal rankings of individuals, groups and even organizations’ongoing professional performance. The supply of, demand for and competition for esteem thus results in an unspoken social professional world, which the existing literature on professions has told us relatively little about. This chapter identifies how esteem can also become a resource or currency that can be used by those who possess it to exercise professional control and influence, and crucially to consolidate a group of professionals hold on a particular issue. Esteem played a particularly important role in the rise to prominence of macroprudential regulation following the financial crash of 2008. For some professionals this meant making macroprudential arguments at a time when they knew the climate of professional opinion was against them, sacrificing short-term esteem for longer term gain, by retrospectively appearing prescient. The rise of macroprudential regulation has in turn consolidated the control of a group of regulatory professionals connected to central banks, and their series of transnational regulatory networks, over financial governance, expanding the range and scope of central banks’regulatory powers, and simultaneously casting these very same regulatory professionals and their technical expertise as the primary features of this new macroprudential regulatory project. Professionals are defined by the editors of this volume as individuals with abstract higher-level learning and specific skill sets to address tasks. In this regard, the launch of a new macroprudential regulatory project in the aftermath of the financial crash has created a raft of new prospective skilled tasks, creating a whole new growth industry for economists connected to the central banking community. Macroprudential is therefore the very definition of professional consolidation and renewal following a period of professional stress and duress.