Diane-Laure Arjaliès

'Integrated Reporting Is Like God: No One Has Met Him, but Everybody Talks About Him.' The Power of Myths in the Adoption of Management Innovations

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the process through which an International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) pilot company adopted “integrated reporting” (IR), a management innovation that merges financial and non-financial reporting.,A seven-year longitudinal ethnographic study based on semi-structured interviews, observations, and documentary evidence is used to analyze this multinational company’s IR adoption process from its decision to become an IIRC pilot organization to the publication of its first integrated report.,Findings demonstrate that the company envisioned IR as a “rational myth” (Hatchuel, 1998; Hatchuel and Weil, 1992). This conceptualization acted as a springboard for IR adoption, with the mythical dimension residing in the promise that IR had the potential to portray global performance in light of the company’s own foundational myth. The company challenged the vision of IR suggested by the IIRC to stay true to its conceptualization of IR and eventually chose to implement its own version of an integrated report.,The study enriches previous research on IR and management innovations by showing how important it is for organizations to acknowledge the mythical dimension of the management innovations they pursue to support their adoption processes. These findings, suggest that myths can play a productive role in transforming business (reporting) practices. Some transition conditions that make this transformation possible are identified and the implications of these results for the future of IR, sustainability, and accounting more broadly are discussed.

The Passion of Luc Boltanski: The Destiny of Love, Violence, and Institution

Abstract On Justification: Economies of Worth (Boltanski & Thevenot, 1991/2006) was a synthetic and comprehensive parsing of common goods, goods that could and had to be justified in public. In response to Bourdieu’s critical sociology, they rather provided a robust and disciplined sociology of critique, the situated requirements of justification. They refused power and violence as integral to the operability of justification. They emphasized the ways in which conventions of worth afforded coordination, not their constitution of or by domination. They refused to make either capitalism, or the state, into primary motors of social order. Indeed, they refused social sphere, structure, or group as the ground of the good. They emphasized the cognitive capacities of agents. There was no passion, no desire, no bodily affect in these justified worlds. There wasn’t even any account of production of value, of children, or of money. And while they recognized the metaphysical aspect of the good and even used Christianity as a template for one of their cites, they rigorously excluded religion. The theory was designed to analyze moments of controversy, not quiescence or quietude. In his subsequent work, Boltanski aimed to address these absences. In this essay, we examine how Boltanski sought to restore love, violence, religion, production, and institution across five texts: Love and Justice as Competences (1990/2012), The New Spirit of Capitalism, co-authored with Eve Chiapello (1999/2007), The Foetal Condition: A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion (2004/2013), On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (2009/2011), and La «Collection», Une Forme Neuve du Capitalisme – La Mise en Valeur Economique du Passe et ses Effets (2014) co-authored with Arnaud Esquerre.

Beyond Numbers: How Investment Managers Accommodate Societal Issues in Financial Decisions

Investment managers use financial numbers to assess the quality of their portfolios, which requires them to estimate the market value of their assets—i.e., the priced trading of such assets. Prior research has shown that investment managers tend to disregard information that does not easily integrate into financial numbers, such as environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. We argue that when investment managers use visuals to incarnate ESG criteria, they are more likely to accommodate societal issues in their financial decisions. We undertook a three-year ethnography of an asset management company to better understand how investment managers respond to ESG criteria. We found that fixed-income investment managers attempted to include ESG criteria in their financial models by financializing the data, so that ESG-related information could be commensurated with their existing models. Equity investment managers, on the other hand, did not financialize ESG issues, but introduced visuals, specifically emojis, to incarnate ESG issues. In this way, ESG criteria were juxtaposed against, rather than integrated into, financial criteria. In doing so, equity managers created a sense of dissonance between financial numbers and the visuals, which fostered creative friction. The visuals permitted equity managers to analyze the ESG criteria not only for their financial insights, but also for the social and environmental information that could not be financialized. We discuss the implications of these findings for prior research on financialization and calculative devices.

The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations

Nils Brunsson, a Scandinavian institutional theorist, is one of the most controversial organisational theorists of the last decades. In accordance with Meyer and Rowans (1977) view on ‘loosely cou...