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Mistaking an Emerging Market for a Social Movement? A Comment on Arjaliès’ Social-Movement Perspective on Socially Responsible Investment in France

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Abstract

In a recent contribution to this journal, Arjaliès (J Bus Ethics 92:57–78, 2010) suggests that the emergence of socially responsible investment (SRI) in France can be best described as a social movement with a collective identity that aimed to challenge the dominant logic of the financial market. Such an account is at odds with a body of empirical studies that approaches SRI in the French context as a process of market creation led by loosely coordinated actors with contradictory and conflicting interests and values, who have mainly complied with—rather than opposed—the existing dominant financial logic of the asset-management field. In this comment, we build on this prior research to contest Arjaliès’ perspective on both theoretical and empirical grounds, with the aim of highlighting the shortcomings of conflating social movements and other forms of collective actions in understanding the building of new markets in organization theory and SRI studies. We contend that in mistaking for social movement forms of collective actions that underpin the emergence of markets, scholars of organization theory may confuse distinct mechanisms in their explanation of SRI emergence across countries, overlook the complex dynamics and interactions of markets and social movements, and, most importantly, fail to evaluate the real political significance of SRI as an empirical phenomenon. We propose that future research on SRI distinguishes carefully “social-movement research as a theoretical framework” from “social movement as an empirical phenomenon” in order to avoid such drawbacks while benefiting from recent advances in social-movement research.

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Notes

  1. While Professor Arjaliès refers to Gendron and Turcotte (2007) as documenting the Canadian case, their research is more specifically about Québec.

Abbreviations

CFIE:

Centre Français d’Information sur les Entreprises

CIES:

Comité Intersyndical de l’épargne salariale

CSN:

Confédération des syndicats nationaux

CSR:

Corporate social responsibility

EPRU:

Environmental Policy Research Unit

ODE:

Observatoire de l’Ethique

SRI:

Socially responsible investment

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Ecole Management et Société (LIRSA—EA 2430), 40, rue des Jeûneurs, 75002, Paris, France

    Frédérique Déjean

  2. Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Stéphanie Giamporcaro

  3. HEC Montréal, 3000 chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Montreal, QC, H3T 2A7, Canada

    Jean-Pascal Gond

  4. IAE de Lille & Rouen Business School, Boulevard André Siegfried, BP 215, 76825, Mont Saint Aignan Cedex, France

    Bernard Leca

  5. IRISSO-CNRS and Université Paris-Dauphine, Place du Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny, 75775, Paris Cedex 16, France

    Elise Penalva-Icher

Authors
  1. Frédérique Déjean
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  2. Stéphanie Giamporcaro
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  3. Jean-Pascal Gond
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  4. Bernard Leca
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  5. Elise Penalva-Icher
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Correspondence to Bernard Leca.

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Déjean, F., Giamporcaro, S., Gond, JP. et al. Mistaking an Emerging Market for a Social Movement? A Comment on Arjaliès’ Social-Movement Perspective on Socially Responsible Investment in France. J Bus Ethics 112, 205–212 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1241-6

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