Rethinking the link between Corporate Responsibility and Financial Performance: a tale of strange bedfellows?

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