The Business of Virtue: Evidence from Socially Responsible Investing in Financial Markets

Saheli Nath ()
Additional contact information
Saheli Nath: University of Central Oklahoma

Journal of Business Ethics, 2021, vol. 169, issue 1, No 11, 199 pages

Abstract: Abstract Using the mainstreaming of socially responsible investing (SRI) as our empirical context, we show that as the divestment movement in the late twentieth century got institutionalized by being incorporated as a business strategy into more mainstream financial instruments like mutual funds, the prior meanings and categorical definition of ethical investing became ambiguous due to fuzzy boundaries, duality of virtue inherent in the portfolio targets, and exercise of discretion by portfolio managers. We find that increased heterogeneity in standards led to greater ambiguity about who belongs to a category, and fund managers adopted distinct measures-based, values-based and expertise-based approaches to resolve this ambiguity. One consequence of such ambiguity is that individual self-expression, self-consciousness and agency that are central in such movements become appropriated by discretionary and meaning-making work at the institutional level.

Keywords: Financial markets; Socially responsible investing; Categories; Institutionalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-019-04291-9 Abstract (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:kap:jbuset:v:169:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s10551-019-04291-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-019-04291-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().