Citation:
Kenneth Amaeshi, Rethinking the link between Corporate Responsibility and Financial Performance: a tale of strange bedfellows?, PRI Academic Conference 2009, Carleton University, Ottawa, 1st-2nd October, 2009.
Abstract:
The extant literature on the link between corporate social performance and
corporate financial performance has continued to be surprised by mixed and at
best, inconclusive results. Leveraging recent theoretical and empirical
developments in the social studies of financial markets this paper explores the
assumption often made in the literature with regards to the link between
corporate social and financial performances. A significant proportion of this
literature often tends to operate from the view that corporate social
performance and financial performance share the same market logic and common
exchange ‘currencies’, which is not the case. Drawing from an empirical study of
the challenges of mainstreaming responsible investment practices, this paper
highlights the competing logics undermining the markets for corporate social
responsibility, and argues the case that corporate social responsibility is a
unique economic paradigm that will either need to develop its own markets, in
order to be viable, or lend itself to be easily translated into the current
dominant markets for financial goods and services largely characterised by the
logics of calculation and singularization, in order to fit into the logic of
corporate financial performance. If not, corporate responsibility and the
financial markets will continue to be strange bedfell