How Finance Regulates Trade Union Involvement in French SRI

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility is a somewhat elusive concept. It corresponds to a number of different local contexts and a variety of organizational structures. The resulting vagueness and diversity of definitions of CSR has been the object of several studies (Aguilera and Jackson, 2003; Louche and Lydenberg, 2006; Matten and Moon, 2008), but is also an issue for the major interested parties in CSR, usually called stakeholders, as opposed to shareholders. CSR is also linked to the financial sector through Socially Responsible Investment (SRI), another concept with a range of meanings, from adding ethical criteria to investment motivations to searching for a new kind of social or environmental performance. Use of the term ‘socially responsible’must therefore reach beyond the positive aura surrounding this type of initiative in order to understand how practices are defined, and their potentially complex implications for the actors involved. The ‘green’aspect of sustainable development is frequently foregrounded to the detriment of its social dimension. CSR is most easily explained in environmental terms, and its social aspects tend to escape the attention of journalists and the general public. There is a need for certain actors to show that it is not solely an environmental matter, and that it affects them as much as other stakeholders who have greater media visibility in topics concerning the future of the planet. Finance is one of these actors, and it has chosen the angle of SRI performance (Allouche and Laroche, 2005; Gond, 2001) to increase its legitimacy on this subject. But this financial focus on SRI was not a foregone conclusion; it is the result of discreet regulation by the financial sector in a context that could have been influenced by several types of actor.