This article studies the idea of Corporate Social Performance (CSP) from a critical perspective using empirical elements derived from analysis of year 2000 ARESE data. ARESE is the French first mover social rating agency providing quantified data about the Social Performance of French companies. The paper starts out by reviewing leading CSP models and discussing problems inherent to the measurement of this construct before going on to present and analyse ARESE data - whose suitability for existing models will be discussed.

Around the globe, economists affect markets by saying what markets are doing, what they should do, and what they will do. Increasingly, experimental economists are even designing real-world markets. But, despite these facts, economists are still largely thought of as scientists who merely observe markets from the outside, like astronomers look at the stars. Do Economists Make Markets? boldly challenges this view. It is the first book dedicated to the controversial question of whether economics is performative--of whether, in some cases, (...) economics actually produces the phenomena it analyzes.The book's case studies--including financial derivatives markets, telecommunications-frequency auctions, and individual transferable quotas in fisheries--give substance to the notion of the performativity of economics in an accessible, nontechnical way. Some chapters defend the notion; others attack it vigorously. The book ends with an extended chapter in which Michel Callon, the idea's main formulator, reflects upon the debate and asks what it means to say economics is performative.The book's insights and strong claims about the ways economics is entangled with the markets it studies should interest--and provoke--economic sociologists, economists, and other social scientists.In addition to the editors and Callon, the contributors include Marie-France Garcia-Parpet, Francesco Guala, Emmanuel Didier, Philip Mirowski, Edward Nik-Khah, Petter Holm, Vincent-Antonin Lépinay, and Timothy Mitchell. (shrink)

What makes trust such a powerful concept? Is it merely that in trust the whole range of social forces that we know play together? Or is it that trust involves a peculiar element beyond those we can account for? While trust is an attractive and evocative concept that has gained increasing popularity across the social sciences, it remains elusive, its many facets and applications obscuring a clear overall vision of its essence. In this book, Guido Möllering reviews a broad range (...) of trust research and extracts three main perspectives adopted in the literature for understanding trust. Accordingly, trust is presented as a matter of reason, routine or reflexivity. While all these perspectives contribute something to our understanding of trust, Möllering shows that they imply, but cannot explain, ‘suspension’ – the leap of faith that is typical of trust. He therefore proposes a new direction in trust research that builds on existing perspectives but places the suspension of uncertainty and vulnerability at the heart of the concept of trust. Beyond a purely theoretical line of argument, the author discusses implications for empirical studies of trust and presents original case material that captures the experience of trust in terms of reason, routine, reflexivity and suspension. Möllering concludes by suggesting how the new approach can enhance the relevance of trust research and its contributions to broader research agendas concerning the constitution of positive expectations in the face of prevalent uncertainty and change at various levels in our economies and societies. The book is essential reading for anyone who wants to gain a thorough understanding of trust. It can serve as a general introduction for advanced students and scholars in the social sciences, especially in economics, sociology, psychology and management. For more experienced researchers, it is a challenging and provocative critique of the field and a new approach to understanding trust. (shrink)

Regulation must target the financial sector, which often funds and profits from environmentally unsustainable development. In an era of global financial markets, the financial sector has a crucial impact on the state of the environment. The long-standing movement for ethically and socially responsible investment (SRI) has recently begun to advocate environmental standards for financiers. While this movement is gaining more adherents, it has increasingly justified responsible financing as a path to be prosperous, rather than virtuous. This trend partly owes to (...) how financial institutions view their legal responsibilities. The business case motivations that now predominantly drive SRI are not sufficient to make the financial sector a means to sustainable development. Some modest legal reforms to improve the quality and extent of SRI have yet to make a tangible difference. A more ambitious strategy to promote SRI for environmental sustainability is possible, based on reforming the fiduciary duties of financial institutions. Such duties, tied to concrete performance standards, could make financiers invest in more ethically responsible ways. Other collateral reforms to financial markets, including improved corporate environmental reporting, are required to promote sustainability. (shrink)

The impact of corporate social performance on firm financial performance has been examined previously with mixed results. This study examines the possibility that corporate social performance enhances financial performance by allowing the firm to differentiate, and that this effect may be moderated both by innovation, which also drives firm differentiation, and the level of differentiation in the industry. Hypotheses concerning both direct and moderating effects are developed and tested using secondary data. Our results support both innovation and the level of (...) differentiation in the industry as moderators for a positive relationship between corporate social performance and financial performance: corporate social performance most strongly affects performance in low-innovation firms and in industries with little differentiation. (shrink)

Winner of the Schumpeter Prize, 2000 and Winner of the Smith Prize in Austrian Economics, 2000, this book explores how the limitations of human knowledge create both opportunities and problems in the modern economy. The growing field of evolutionary economics has developed as a result of the traditional failure of the discipline to explain certain phenomena that impact greatly on the economy. These are: *_Evolution_ - the impact on the economy of natural change over time *_Institutions_ - the impact on (...) the economy of government and/or company policy, rules and regulations *_Knowledge_ - the impact on the economy that is felt when new information becomes available _Knowledge, Institutions and Evolution in Economics _is a punchy overview of these topics and one that has become regarded as something of a modern classic that no serious social sciences academic or student should be without. (shrink)

The charged debate on the ‘C‐S‐R‐ization’ of organizational practices seems to have produced two opposing and seemingly incompatible explanations for why organizations should engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR): one, the normative rationale based on an appeal to ethics; and the other, the instrumental rationale, based on an appeal to business pragmatism. This paper argues that a missing link in this debate is the failure to recognize that the normative and instrumental approaches to corporate social responsibility are underpinned by substantively, (...) differentiating, relative logics of emotional rationalism on the one hand, and instrumental rationalism on the other. The paper makes a case that for CSR as a management practice to be practicable and actionable within a sustainable business agenda, it will need to be stripped of its current normative undertone and reconstructed in the instrumentally, pragmatic (utlish) language of business. Otherwise, the whole concept of CSR may continue to dwell in the realm of abstract theorizing without yielding many beneficial and practicable outcomes. The paper concludes that such an approach that situates CSR within a pragmatic business lingua, rather than a non‐business lingua, will help in legitimizing CSR as a ‘neutral’ management practice. (shrink)

The charged debate on the ‘C‐S‐R‐ization’ of organizational practices seems to have produced two opposing and seemingly incompatible explanations for why organizations should engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR): one, the normative rationale based on an appeal to ethics; and the other, the instrumental rationale, based on an appeal to business pragmatism. This paper argues that a missing link in this debate is the failure to recognize that the normative and instrumental approaches to corporate social responsibility are underpinned by substantively, (...) differentiating, relative logics of emotional rationalism on the one hand, and instrumental rationalism on the other. The paper makes a case that for CSR as a management practice to be practicable and actionable within a sustainable business agenda, it will need to be stripped of its current normative undertone and reconstructed in the instrumentally, pragmatic (utlish) language of business. Otherwise, the whole concept of CSR may continue to dwell in the realm of abstract theorizing without yielding many beneficial and practicable outcomes. The paper concludes that such an approach that situates CSR within a pragmatic business lingua, rather than a non‐business lingua, will help in legitimizing CSR as a ‘neutral’ management practice. (shrink)

Drawing from the varieties of capitalism theoretical framework, the study explores the home country influences of multinational corporations on their corporate social responsibility practices when they operate outside their national/regional institutional contexts. The study focusses on a particular CSR practice of seven MNCs from three varieties of capitalism – coordinated, mixed and liberal market economies – operating in the oil and gas sector of the Nigerian economy. The study concludes that the corporate codes of conduct of these MNCs operating in (...) Nigeria, to a large extent, reflect the characteristics of their home countries' model of capitalism, respectively, albeit with certain degree of modifications. The home countries' model of capitalism is also found to have implications for the degree of adaptability of these MNCs' CSR practices to the Nigerian institutional context – with the mixed market economy model of capitalism adapting more flexibly than the liberal and coordinated market economies, respectively. The findings of this study will contribute to the emerging literature on the institutional embeddedness of CSR practices in transnational social spaces, understanding of varieties of capitalism, and CSR in developing economies. (shrink)