The Performativity of Literature Reviewing: Constituting the Corporate Social Responsibility Literature through Re-Presentation and Intervention

Although numerous books and articles provide toolkit approaches to explain how to conduct literature reviews, these prescriptions regard literature reviewing as the production of representations of academic fields. Such representationalism is rarely questioned. Building on insights from social studies of science, we conceptualize literature reviewing as a performative endeavor that co-constitutes the literature it is supposed to “neutrally” describe, through a dual movement of re-presenting—constructing an account different from the literature, and intervening—adding to and potentially shaping this literature. We discuss four problems inherent to this movement of performativity—description, explicitness, provocation, and simulacrum—and then explore them through a systematic review of 48 reviews of the literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) for the period 1975-2019. We provide evidence for the performative role of literature reviewing in the CSR field through both re-presenting and intervening. We find that reviews performed the CSR literature and, accordingly, the field’s boundaries, categories, priorities in a self-sustaining manner. By reflexively subjecting our own systematic review to the four performative problems we discuss, we also derive implications of performative analysis for the practice of literature reviewing

Micro-strategies of Contextualization Cross-national Transfer of Socially Responsible Investment

This paper examines how individuals select and mobilize local institutions when they transfer business practices across societies that are construed as dissimilar to one another. We investigate empirically how the American business practice of socially responsible investment (SRI) was transferred to France and Quebec. Our analysis identifies five micro-strategies that were employed to contextualize SRI, namely filtering, rerouting, stowing, defusing, and coupling. This repertoire of micro-strategies extends previous research on contextualization, translation, and institutional transfers and links them to one another. They may also help explain why some transfers succeed while others fail.Contextualization; transfer; translation; institutional theory; socially responsible investment

Reactivity to sustainability metrics: A configurational study of motivation and capacity

Previous research on reactivity – defined as changing organisational behaviour to better conform to the criteria of measurement in response to being measured – has found significant variation in company responses towards sustainability metrics. We propose that reactivity is driven by dialogue, motivation and capacity in a configurational way. Empirically, we use fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to analyse company responses to the sustainability index FTSE4Good. We find evidence of complimentary and substitute effects between motivation and capacity. Based on these effects we develop a typology of reactivity to sustainability metrics, which also theorises the use of metrics as tools for performance feedback and the building of calculative capacity. We show that when reactivity is studied configurationally, we can identify previously underacknowledged types of responses. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for studying and using sustainability metrics as governance tools for responsible behaviour