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AcknowledgementsWe thank our Organization Studies acting editor on this paper, Professor David Courpasson, for his guidance and help through the review process, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their valuable insights. Earlier drafts of this paper benefitted of useful comments from Liliana Doganova, Peter Karnøe and the other attendees of the panel on 'Calculability and Performativity' at the conference of the Society for the Social Studies of Sciences (SSS) held in 2013 (San Diego), as well as from two presentations of our research at Principle for Responsible Investing (PRI) academic conference in 2013 (Paris) and 2010 (Copenhagen). We also acknowledged the useful comments from Dianela Laurel-Fois and the other participants of the sub-theme 51 at the 2015 EGOS Conference (Athens) as well as helpful informal discussions with Peter Fleming and Emilio Marti.
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Authors' biographiesStéphanie Giamporcaro is Associate Professor and Research Director at the University of Cape Town Graduate School Of Business. Her theoretical roots are in sociology of markets and consumption, social studies of finance, economic sociology and French pragmatic sociology. She has published a book on political consumption and various peer reviewed academic articles. Her research focuses particularly on how sustainable and responsible investment (SRI) and impact investing practices are currently be implemented in the developed and emerging economies. Prior to that, she was the head of SRI research for the French think-tank Novethic, a subsidiary of the French Public Investment Group Caisse des Dépots.Jean-Pascal Gond is Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at Cass Business School, City University London (UK). His research mobilizes organization theory and economic sociology to investigate corporate social responsibility (CSR). His research in economic sociology is concerned with the influence of theory on managerial practice (performativity), the governance of self-regulation, and the interplay of society's commodification and markets' socialization.
AbstractThis paper examines some of the processes by which power constitutes calculability and, in so doing, shapes the construction of markets. We combine insights from performativity studies about calculability with Lukes' 'radical view of power' to investigate how multiple facets of power are mobilized to influence the creation and activities of calculative agencies in the process of market construction. An in-depth longitudinal study of the French socially responsible investment market shows how organizations acting as calculative agencies become sites of power through calculability. We identify how power is exercised over, through and against these calculative agencies by a variety of actors in order to build their position in the socially responsible investment market. Our results complement the broader question of the 'government...
Although a growing stream of research investigates the role of government in corporate social responsibility (CSR), little is known about how governmental CSR interventions interact in financial markets. This article addresses this gap through a longitudinal study of the socially responsible investment (SRI) market in France. Building on the “CSR and government” and “regulative capitalism” literatures, we identify three modes of governmental CSR intervention—regulatory steering, delegated rowing, and microsteering—and show how they interact through the two mechanisms of layering (the accumulation of interventions) and catalyzing (the alignment of interventions). Our findings: 1) challenge the notion that, in the neoliberal order, governments are confined to steering market actors—leading and guiding their behavior—while private actors are in charge of rowing—providing products and services; 2) show how governmental CSR interventions interact and are orchestrated; and 3) provide evidence that governments can mobilize financial markets to promote CSR.
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