Matthew M Haigh

ABSTRACT Purpose ‐ Reflects on the process of summarising research. Design/methodology/approach ‐ A musical structure is used as a trope for the usual research cycle of distilling reams of data into a short article that is sectioned into meaningful chunks, all of which is summarised in an abstract and represented by a few keywords. Findings ‐ The reductive process ultimately sublates the empirical world to a series of keywords. Research limitations/implications ‐ Provides a reflexive break to academic work. Originality/value ‐ Reflects on the experience of summarising a lengthy research project to a few keywords. Hopefully, the thing is read at the end.

As a field of practice, responsible investment has most often been designated as a niche investment style or labelled as corporate social responsibility (CSR). Neither is completely incorrect. What is responsible investment? The research has stumbled on a definition. Descriptors such as sustainable , responsible, social and environmental that may preface finance and investment can, it seems, sideline finance and investment into areas that are ill-defined (and which may seem unhelpful to the career paths of scholars interested in the area!). It seems fair to state that the research on responsible investment – and those that would participate in the research – face problems of aim, scope and nomenclature. Whatever the researcher's 'home' research field or teaching department, a researcher in responsible investment needs to recognize the existence of differing definitions of core concepts in the field, and differing relevancies accorded to those definitions. As important are questions for the field, namely: questions of method, timing and the specific circumstances in which investing and financing activity can connect with sustainability and responsibility. Solutions to problems of social responsibility in the current era of globalized markets have, if unsurprisingly, sought refuge in market-based ideas. Shamir (2008) develops a concept of 'responsibilization' to describe contemporary tendencies to economize public domains and methods of government. This becomes a convenient working definition of responsible finance. Examples of responsibilization are manifold in finance. The shifts of retirement provision from private provision in the first half of the twentieth century to a public governmentality in the postwar period to the current return to private arrangement is one. Responsibilization has accompanied the rise of fiduciary capitalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is in this period that the recognizable form of responsible investment arrived. This is a version of fiduciary investment that widens its fiduciary scope to include notions of the public good and the public interest. Cochran (1974) characterizes the public interest along a spectrum of four types: normative, abolitionist, consensualist and process types. The norma-tive view is necessarily consistent with the concept of the common good bound in the welfarist state. At the other end of the spectrum, the abolitionist views the public interest as an orientation toward the maximization of private interests. Responsible investment covers both spectrums, causing scholars and practitioners enormous problems as a result.

It is shown that the international human rights regime remains settled on the notion of the state as the main institutional enactor of human rights obligations. This contrasts the concept of corporate citizenship, which argues that the state has failed its obligations and that corporations have become the new key actors in providing social rights.

"To enter the academe, provisionally,
A rewriting will take time
Enough to adjust naïveté

Entering the academe as bounded property

To enter the academe, editorially
Discontinuous. Divergent. Too many themes.
Straightforward change of emphases

Bounded property of the Library

To enter the academe, a door shuts silently,
A noble work undeniably
Finding use in Industry

On entering the academe, bounded property of the Library

To enter the territory Blue, Ruby & Gold
A known quantity appraises Faculty
Accepts the modus operandi"

Connecting reception theory and social semiotics, this article offers a framework for the analysis of hortatory texts. An illustrative case uses the pronouncements of environmental regulators, with the reader group represented by a sample of executives in financial institutions. Although the participants thought the texts important, none had found any use for them. It is unlikely that financial institutions en masse will address environmental issues before and until communicators frame their material in terms of customary financial discourse and investors’ dominant cognitive rationalities. The depth of insights gained suggests wider application of the framework to a range of hortatory texts and authoritative reader groups.

This chapter describes the resultant emerging challenges to population health and the global change-related health risks. An overview of climate change, its impact on health, and detecting health (or directly health-related) impacts attributable to climate change are discussed. The focus and purpose of research and policy response are also discussed.

Nowadays, one often hears and perhaps participates in discussions on sustainable financial architecture and getting economies to a secure financial footing. Sustainability in this context means stability and resilience, referring to the ability of economies to protect jobs and livelihoods, and avoid collapse. Relevant issues become financing and fuel security; financing and biodiversity threats; financing and inequality; and financialization.

Consider the representation of value in the organizations we rely on for our long retirements. Social security has been symbolized by private mechanisms such as the employment-related pension scheme, yet, reporting requirement would impute its fitness for financial trading. A scheme's financier sees a mounting unsecured debt where its members see practical value. Between the two, a steward who may not profit from its office delegates it to back-office agents whose fiduciary management is engendered by box-office sized bonuses. Standard theorisation has foundered. The architecture of the pension scheme would challenge the most ardent advocate of agency theory; its market rationality enfeebles stewardship theory; resource dependency and stakeholder analysis shrug off the complexity of substitutable interests. A dialectical reconstruction of network theory allows comprehension at the systemic level, instantiating the symbolic values with the real.

The articles in this issue of Sustainable Finance address the relations of financing activity with sustainability goals. In providing an introduction to the issue, two aspects of sustainable finance deserve prefatory mention. Initially, the various aspects by which sustainability goals connect to financing activity demand consideration. We can then consider the different strands of research in sustainable finance. Sustainable finance can seem cynical, impractically hopeful and entirely sensible – all at the same time. The cynical perspective is if sustainable finance is thought of as green capitalism. If so, sustainable finance becomes, at most, a way to deal with collective guilt that the global financial system is neither humane nor just. Connecting sustainability to finance is hardly about maintaining the status quo. Rather, sustainability in respect of financing activity is about addressing predatory lending practices and exploitative investments. The hopeful aspect is if sustainable finance is treated as an imperative, not a nice-to-have but an essential attribute of a financial system. In these troubled financial times, one hears and participates in talk of sustainable financial architecture and getting back to a secure financial footing, and usually in the context of financialization. Financialization has become a dominant feature of the global political economy. Financialization describes the exposure of companies to financial instruments; of banks mediating in financial markets and of individuals becoming exposed to financial markets via housing debt and through their pensions. In such an unavoidable context, what does and can sustainable finance aspire to? A useful attempt at an answer can be found in adaptive systems theory. Based on relationships, emergence, patterns and cycles, adaptive systems theory first identifies system components within an institutional context; identifies direct and indirect relationships between system components; and then examines whether the components are good for purpose. Understanding sustainable finance using an adaptive systems approach means to consider its context, activity, scale and distributive capacity. Finance is understood as various sets of complex activities, operating on many levels, and in the context of the complex behaviour of policymakers, regulators, companies and stock exchanges, employers, educators, media and so on through the entire political economy. Sustainable finance can mean the well functioning (oikos) of ecosystems and the society in which a financial system operates, as well as the actual systems of globalized finance. Relevant issues become the relations of finance and climate change and fuel security; finance and biodiversity threats; and finance and inequality. Sustainable finance can also mean resilience – the ability of economies to protect jobs and livelihoods and avoid collapse in the face of external shocks. Sustainability, of course, has modernist roots in development, which means that sustainable finance as a meaningful category relies on what finance does, on the activity of financing. What is the appropriate scale of sustainable finance? Does sustainable finance refer to addressing the massive levels of social risk that capital markets produce? Or does sustainable finance refer to workers’ increased borrowing for housing, and expanding financial assets, e.g., held

Under consideration is whether organisations can validate moral norms that cannot be appropriated by capital. Meta-ethics and moral philosophy can help progress discussions from debates over the existence of collective morality onto exercise of corporate responsibilities. We contribute to recent modelling work in universalist thinking (L. Boltanski and L. Thivenot, 2006, On Justification: Economies of Worth, C. Porter (trans), Princeton University Press NJ) by identifying salient and, is argued, necessary conditions for the exercise of collective moral decisions. Adequate preparation for justified decision-making calls for a requisite level of moral bravery. Spatial reflexivity informed from the concept of reflective equilibrium and a collective self-reliance informed from the moral practices of parrhesia provide for integrity of action.

Investment products that deploy ethical values and social considerations in portfolio construction have persisted since the 1980s. Pitting Habermasian discourse ethics against Foucauldian power relations and radical institutionalism, the paper argues that socially directed mutual funds ascribe capital markets with validities of high moral magnitude, work up extant tendencies toward financial hegemony and stymie criticism of the political-economic order. Institutional pressures do not permit the exercise of an ethic stronger than an aesthetic care of the self. The balance struck between economic and social priorities is investigated by interviewing investment managers, reviewing archival material and surveying the attitudes of unit holders in retail social mutual funds.

This essay identifies epistemologi-cal, theoretical and methodological problems in a potentially influential subset of the interdisciplinary cor-porate responsibility literature, that which appears in the management literature. The received conceptu-alization of stakeholder analysis is ...

Emergent practices of reform-oriented shareholder engagement are characterised as a professional social movement which gains credibility by influencing the institutional networks imbricating investors. The limitations of structuralist and atomistic tendencies in social movement analysis are resolved with an inductive, dialectical approach which is used to illustrate two cases of internal attempts to change investment policy at pension funds. Linkages are identified between organizational responses to pressure for change, and mobilization strategies of embedded proponents of change. The paper urges the involvement of governing boards in vehicles that promulgate reformist engagement, and identifies institutional networks as warranting greater regulatory attention.

In an effort to improve comparability between socially responsible investment products and standardize investment terminology, Australian legislators recently required investment managers to report to retail investors the extent to which ‘social considerations’ are used in portfolio construction. Using a lens of political economy, this paper assesses whether the objectives of the legislation to standardize investment terminology, promote inter-product comparability and encourage the accountability of product claims have been met. The context of legislative development is examined in Australian Parliamentary debates. Practised accountabilities are identified by examining a representative sample of the initial set of regulated disclosures issued. The quality of regulated information disclosures is assessed by the degree of correlation with legislators' objectives and the regulatory requirements. Initial disclosures were poor, providing little basis for comparability. In some instances, the quality of information had declined relative to the information supplied on a voluntary basis before the legislation took effect. The evidence supports a criticism of a regulatory laissez faire approach to self-reporting and an argument for more directed regulation of management processes.

Despite speculation from legislators and practitioners, no studies have investigated the reasons for social funds’ marginal market penetration. More generally, calls for a greater understanding of investors’ motivations, needs and purchasing intentions have not been met. By identifying what attracts consumers to social mutual funds and the information-processing difficulties consumers face when considering a purchase, this paper claims to make a meaningful contribution to the literature on social investment and mutual funds. In 2004 an Internet questionnaire survey attracted 382 interested, current and former social investors from Australasia, North America and Europe. The questionnaire measured motivations to invest in social funds and attitudes towards information sources and selection criteria. A restricted data set was used to test a set of propositions relating to respondents’ investment intentions and information asymmetries. Results are largely as expected. Respondents were attracted to social funds from moral conviction and from desires to influence corporate behavior. One in two respondents had chosen not to invest on the basis of informational concerns. Unexpectedly, social investment styles, portfolio listings and perceived accuracy of information were considered more important to an investment decision than manage- ment expenses. Findings underline a need for careful product design and management.

This paper adds to the literatures on socially responsible investment (SRI), investment management, regulation of financial services and social accounting by providing a comprehensive survey of investment methods used in SRI products and regulated social reporting in financial services. Australian and New Zealand regulations require issuers of self-declarative SRI products to provide details on methods used in portfolio construction. Regulators' objectives to standardize the reporting of portfolio construction and thus improve its comparability were identified by examination of parliamentary debates and other public reports. Portfolio construction styles of 86 SRI products managed by 63 financial institutions in Australia and New Zealand were chosen for analysis. Statistical analysis was conducted to identify associations between styles, construction methods and assessment techniques over a four-year period: 2004–2007. These aspects were further examined in 18 case studies. Over the period, diversity and intensity of construction methods had increased both within and between investment managers. The non-standard nature of management consultation used in SRI products, marketing needs to distinguish rather than standardize investment methods and the types of information thought relevant to clients did not reconcile easily with the types of information required by regulation. The more recent products in the sample tended to reference market indexes in portfolio construction, separate social considerations from financial considerations and delegate qualitative assessments of invested companies. Consumer policy implications arise from questions bearing on the integrity of information attached to investment products and the effective monitoring of delegated investment processes. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

The paper claims theoretical, empirical and normative contributions to the fledgling research on social accountabilities in financial services. Managers of managed (mutual) funds with public social mandates are obligated to pursue clients’ economic interests and exercise claimed moral considerations. Theoreticians working in post-modern accounting are invited to examine alignment difficulties. Guidance is offered in the form of Foucault's resigned response to Nietzsche's moral cynicism. Theoretical antagonisms are empirically illustrated in interviews with managers of social investment portfolios, comparisons of the portfolios of selected Australian social funds with conventional counterparts, and comparisons of selected investment decisions with claimed investment criteria in a sample of Australian social funds. Research has suggested that a recognisably distinct management bias in Australian socially screened investment products may have diffused into the investment styles adopted by managers of conventional unscreened products. The paper suggests that performance convergence might also be attributable to similar stock holdings. The requirement to sustain competitive economic performance renders the use of moral considerations in managed funds as camouflage play. A number of investment policy innovations are suggested that might serve to increase net fund inflows and so bring closer the objective of social investment to transform capital.

Investment products that deploy ethical values and social considerations in portfolio construction have persisted since the 1980s. Pitting Habermasian discourse ethics against Foucauldian power relations and radical institutionalism, the paper argues that socially directed mutual funds ascribe capital markets with validities of high moral magnitude, work up extant tendencies toward financial hegemony and stymie criticism of the political–economic order. Institutional pressures do not permit the exercise of an ethic stronger than an aesthetic care of the self. The balance struck between economic and social priorities is investigated by interviewing investment managers, reviewing archival material and surveying the attitudes of unit holders in retail social mutual funds.

Informed by a semiotics that directs attention to the context of the message, this paper contributes to work on the meanings of terms such as ‘‘low-carbon’’, ‘‘green’’, and ‘‘sustainability’’.
Interview-based evidence and printed material are used to assess the interest of hundreds of financial institutions in data on carbon emissions levels and environmental projects.
The collection of such data is where for most interviewees its usefulness stopped.
Such is typical of myth. By collecting carbon data, financial institutions can connote they are doing something about addressing the risks posed by global warming, without actually describing what it is they are doing.

This paper contributes to the research by framing and consolidating the literature on energy and environmental regulation, financial investing, and decision psychology. The paper reports the outcomes of a study on the influence of environmental regulation on the investment decisions of pension funds, insurance companies and mutual funds.  Subjects are allocated to one of two groups: one group invests with reference to environmental considerations, while the other tracks a conventional equities index.  Participants indicate the frequency with which they use nominated sources of information and rate the importance of nominated types of information in their decisions concerning the portfolio. The outcomes suggest that financial institutions dismiss environmental regulation, yet, on liquidity grounds, might be prepared to take environmental considerations into account in the portfolio construction process.

Investment products that deploy ethical values and social considerations in portfolio construction have persisted since the 1980s. Pitting Habermasian discourse ethics against Foucauldian power relations and radical institutionalism, the paper argues that socially directed mutual funds ascribe capital markets with validities of high moral magnitude, work up extant tendencies toward financial hegemony and stymie criticism of the political–economic order. Institutional pressures do not permit the exercise of an ethic stronger than an aesthetic care of the self. The balance struck between economic and social priorities is investigated by interviewing investment managers, reviewing archival material and surveying the attitudes of unit holders in retail social mutual funds.

Connecting reception theory and social semiotics, this article offers a framework for the analysis of hortatory texts. An illustrative case uses the pronouncements of environmental regulators, with the reader group represented by a sample of executives in financial institutions. Although the participants thought the texts important, none had found any use for them. It is unlikely that financial institutions en masse will address environmental issues before and until communicators frame their material in terms of customary financial discourse and investors' dominant cognitive rationalities. The depth of insights gained suggests wider application of the framework to a range of hortatory texts and authoritative reader groups.