Bringing artifacts within institutional work. Arese’s artefacts and the institutionalization of socially responsible investment in France
Résumé
The notion of institutional work has recently been developed to account for the purposive actions whereby actors attempt to create, maintain or disrupt institutions (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). It intends to complement the strong accounts of how institutions govern actions developed in institutional studies by accounts of how actors attempt to shape institutions. Examining the means by which actors do institutional work, researchers devoted to a great deal of attention to some specific means such as discourse while other means have been overlooked (Levy and Scully, 2007). In particular, the role of artifacts and their influence within institutionalization process has been repeatedly acknowledged to be a missing dimension of research on institutional work, and more generally of current institutional analysis (e.g. Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006; Pinch, 2008; Zilber, 2008). This is especially problematic as organized activities increasingly rely on the use of artifacts (Knorr-Cettina, 2007). Acknowledging the problem, an increasing number of authors have recently insist on the need to account for the role of artifacts when studying institutional work (e.g. Gawer and Philipps, 2013; Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). However, despite such calls for more research to be done on the role of artifacts there is little empirical research about how artifacts are used in institutional work and how they influence institutionalization processes. The present paper seeks to address those calls and advance the integration of artifacts within research on institutional work by investigating how an artifact developed by an actor doing institutional work impacts the institutionalization of new practices. As such our work combines an interest for artifacts, with an interest for the institutionalization of practices. It provides novel insights to our understanding of the influence of artifacts within the institutionalization process, and contribute to bring materiality into the analysis of institutional work.More specifically, we draw from an in depth qualitative case study of the artifacts introduced by a non-financial rating agency named ARESE and how they influenced the institutionalization of socially responsible investment (SRI) within the French banks. Arese’s action was decisive to structure the activity, so that years 1997 to 2003, when the market really took off are commonly named the “Arese years” (Loiselet, 2003). Central to the action of Arese was the creation of artifacts to articulate their in-house system elaborated to measure corporate social performance and the demands of socially responsible fund managers. We listed three artifacts : rates available on Excel spreadsheet; a sheet with qualitative corporate data and social responsible indexes. We examine how those artifacts facilitate and shaped the institutionalization of SRI among the banks in France ou French financial market? Ou financial market in France? Ce qui permet d’englober d’autres acteurs que les banques?. We find that those artifacts had four types of effects on the institutionalization of SRI. First they legitimize SRI toward the large financial community. Second they favor the articulation of SRI with the existing routines of fund managers. Third, they limit the in