Micro-strategies of Contextualization Cross-national Transfer of Socially Responsible Investment

Johannesburg. In addition, she always made mention of social gains in relation to profits and
sometimes replaced the notion of synergy with the idea that profits lead to social gains:

“When this project starts to make money, the part of that money that belongs to the
environmental organization will be reinvested in environmental groups and educational
projects. The money we generate will sustain the survival of the environmental
organization.” (CEO of FIR)

This subordination of profit making to social goals fitted better with the dominant ideology in

Quebec. It made SRI more legitimate and desirable in this society.

The organizational development in the French case also relied extensively on filtering to
develop an evaluation tool for the purpose of socially responsible investment. The CEO of
ARESE faced the French financial market where mainstreams investors perceived moral and
religious claims related to SRI with some suspicion. Prior to the formal creation of ARESE,
she had travelled to the United States and other European countries to deepen her knowledge
of SRI. She identified some dimensions of the American SRI practice that she perceived to be
potentially exportable, others that she deemed culturally incongruent with French society. As
she stated:

“I realized that the model was extremely militant... and really difficult to export. The
model of [socially responsible] investment was marked by values directly inherited
from puritanism or civil rights engagement. So, it was something really embedded in
the American and Anglo-Saxon culture. On the religious side, it was the Quakers, on
the civil side, it was related to the problem of minority discrimination and inspired by
Luther King, on the consumer side, it was Ralph Nader. The three leverages were a
racial leverage, consumerist leverage and a religious leverage... With these
approaches, the evaluation method was not of importance, and this value-based
legacy was really not exportable. On the contrary, the financial leverage of pension
funds appeared very credible to me.” (CEO of ARESE)

When preparing the business plan of ARESE, she and her team carefully removed the overtly

moral and religious elements in the American SRI construct, highlighting instead the technical

dimensions of corporate evaluation. They constructed a quantitative methodology that was

susceptible to pass as morally neutral in French society, an emphasis that resonated well with

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