Performative Work: Bridging Performativity and Institutional Theory in the Responsible Investment Field

Callon’s performativity thesis has illuminated how economic theories and calculative devices shape markets, but has been challenged for its neglect of the organizational, institutional and political context. Our seven-year qualitative study of a large financial data company found that the company’s initial attempt to change the responsible investment field through a performative approach failed because of the constraints posed by field practices and organizational norms on the design of the calculative device. However, the company was subsequently able to put in place another form of performativity by attending to the normative and regulative associations of the device. We theorize this route to performativity by proposing the concept of performative work, which designates the necessary institutional work to enable translation and the subsequent adoption of the device. We conclude by considering the implications of performative work for the performativity and the institutional work literatures

Performances and risk of socially responsible investments across regions during crisis

Very few studies verified whether Socially Responsible Investments (SRIs) add value during a financial turmoil. We fill this gap. We conduct the analysis by employing the Fama and French (2015) five-factor model along with the usual Fama and French's (1993) and Carhart's (1997) models. We also propose an innovative methodology that takes into consideration the higher moments of the explanatory variables in order to deal with the non-normality and the heteroskedasticity of return distributions. Rather than inspecting Socially Responsible (SR) mutual funds as done by most of the existent literature, we concentrate on SR indexes, in the conviction to overcome some of the limitations that can potentially bias an analysis carried out on mutual funds. Our results show that both SR and conventional indexes performed almost in the same way independently of the financial market conditions. Little evidence can at best support the conclusion that SRIs dampened the downside risk during the recent financial crisis in North America only. At the same time, SRIs do not seem to suffer from a risk-adjusted perspective during normal times. As expected, SRIs bear a higher level of idiosyncratic volatility compared to their respective conventional investments. Our innovative methodology plays an important role in explaining the cross section of SR returns