Standardization as Institutional Work: The Regulatory Power of a Responsible Investment Standard

By Rieneke Slager, Jean‐Pascal Gond, J. Moon. 2012

233 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper conceptualizes standardization as institutional work to study the emergence of a standard and the deployment of its regulatory power. We rely on unique access to longitudinal archival data for exploring how the FTSE4Good index, a responsible investment index, emerged as a standard for socially responsible corporate behavior. Our results show how three types of standardization work – calculative framing, engaging and valorizing – support the design, legitimation and monitoring processes whereby a standard acquires its regulatory power. Our findings reveal new facets in the dynamics of standardization by approaching standardization as a product of institutional work and in showing how unintended consequences of that work can be recaptured to strengthen the regulatory power of the standard.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/020816c05f2e051d3a31bbbba2dd6bfc574e5a8c

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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Institutional work: Taking stock and making it matter (2017, background): “Standards represent mechanisms of control that “facilitate coordination by defining the appropriate attributes of the standardized subject, rendering these aspects visible to external inspection and opening up the possibility of sanctioning non-compliance” (Slager et al., 2012: 765).”
Doing Well by Doing Good: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda for Sustainable Investment (2019, background): “Slager, Gond, & Moon [20] conducted a systematic review of the newspaper articles, and Yung & Siew [60] relied on content analysis of corporate websites, sustainability, and annual reports of the organizations.”
Revisiting the impact of ESG on financial performance of FTSE350 UK firms: Static and dynamic panel data analysis (2021, background): “Slager et al. (2012) find that several companies initiate a valuation of their ESG ratings and communicate the results on ESG issues with interested parties.”
How Do Firms Comply with International Sustainability Standards? Processes and Consequences of Adopting the Global Reporting Initiative (2015, methodology): “In a summary, Slager et al. (2012) identified three characteristics that defined standards’ regulatory power: design (established set of common practices), legitimacy (authority based on multi-stakeholder nature) and monitoring (rule enforcement through monitoring of practices).”
Rating the Raters: Evaluating how ESG Rating Agencies Integrate Sustainability Principles (2019, background): “Consequently, ESG rating agencies influence not only the behavior of financial market actors [27] but also the institutionalization of sustainability management in companies and are being considered as “institutional entrepreneurs” [2].”