Research on the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has revealed the critical role of CSR departments vis-à-vis functional departments. While both CSR and functional departments influence CSR implementation, the question of how they work together remains underexamined. We address this question by mobilizing and merging two complementary yet separate perspectives on CSR implementation: “coordination” and “enactment.” Building on a comparative case study involving seven large Swiss financial institutions that have established CSR departments and implemented CSR to varying extents, we (...) inductively derive six courses of actions conducing to CSR implementation, involving both coordination and enactment. We distinguish between four courses of actions in the CSR departments ( centralizing, coalescing, orchestrating, and consulting) and two courses of actions in the functional departments ( decentralizing and tailoring). As our data suggest that coordination and enactment work in tandem, we capture these insights in a model of CSR implementation as coordinated enactment. Our research contributes to the literature by explaining how CSR departments and functional departments enact and simultaneously coordinate CSR at a particular implementation stage, thus illuminating how and why the variance in CSR implementation occurs. (shrink)

Business and society (B&S) scholarship that uses the theoretical perspective of institutionalism combines different research approaches to values. Within the B&S literature drawing on institutionalism, we identified and categorized the research on values according to a spectrum of normative and/or descriptive approaches (including both and neither approaches). Primarily, we focused on how the normative and descriptive approaches interrelate and integrate. We argue that drawing on John Dewey’s pragmatism and Philip Selznick’s institutionalism can help further an integrative approach, which holds great (...) potential for advancing theorization in the B&S field while increasing its practical relevance. (shrink)

This article seeks to reimagine the relationship between sustainability and financial performance in sustainable investing. Employing a utopian lens, I show how sustainability is constantly negotiated in a process of imagining and actualizing sustainable investing. For this purpose, I explore a fin-tech start-up’s endeavors to democratize sustainable investing through digitalization. Empirically, this article contributes a detailed account of the organizational process of––and the complexities involved in––establishing a sustainable investment organization, to this end focusing on the relationship between sustainability and financial (...) performance. The article further provides a novel theoretical perspective (utopianism) on sustainable investing, one offering a processual approach that uses both external and internal factors in its understanding of the practice. I conclude that a utopian mindset of possibility paves the way for an experimentational attitude and future-oriented thinking. Such a mindset could generate new approaches to the relationship between sustainability and financial performance, thus shining a light on the new and innovative solutions needed to establish financial markets oriented to the common good. (shrink)