Socially responsible investment and financial institution's response to secondary stakeholder requests

Tim Benijts

Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, 2014, vol. 4, issue 4, 321-336

Abstract: In order to gain influence over firms, secondary stakeholders can opt for socially responsible investment (SRI) - an investment approach that uses both financial and non-financial criteria to determine which assets to purchase [Guay, T., J. P. Doh, and G. Sinclair. 2004. "Non-governmental Organizations, Shareholder Activism and Socially Responsible Investments: Ethical, Strategic and Governance Implications." Journal of Business Ethics 52 (1): 125-139]. In this article, we argue that SRI, besides a tactic to gain influence over firms, can also be seen as a financial institution's characteristic on the basis of which secondary stakeholders can decide to (not) target a financial institution. It is theorized - based on organizational legitimacy theory - that a financial institution's supply of socially responsible financial products (proxied by the number of products and/or assets/deposits managed) signals a financial institution's likelihood of response to specific stakeholder requests. This relationship is theorized to be positive: the more important SRI is to a financial institution, the higher the likelihood of response to such requests.

Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20430795.2014.946465 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jsustf:v:4:y:2014:i:4:p:321-336

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TSFI20

DOI: 10.1080/20430795.2014.946465

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment is currently edited by Dr Matthew Haigh

More articles in Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().