French investors and facilitated their acceptance of SRI (see Déjean et al. 2004 and Gond &
Leca 2005).
Rerouting
Rerouting assigns new purpose to a foreign business practice. It changes the meaning and/or
the function of a business practice to make it desirable in the host society. Individuals may
recast a business practice to make it reflect local values and beliefs, creating links between
that practice and well established myths in the host society (see Brannen 2004; Zilber 2006).
Alternatively, individuals present the foreign business practice as a solution to a recognized
problem in the host society. Both instances of rerouting assign a new raison-d’être to the
original business practice.
In the French case, the more striking instance of rerouting is the choice that ARESE
made to shift the methodology from negative screening to positive screening. Negative
screening consists in identifying firms that make money in industries that are considered
immoral, e.g. alcohol and tobacco, and in encouraging investors to exclude these firms from
their portfolio (Giamporcaro 2004). Positive screening consists in identifying firms that
perform best on a set of social and environmental criteria in any given industrial sector and in
encouraging investors to include these firms in their portfolio. Negative screening is still
dominant in the United States (see SIF 2005: 8), reflecting the religious and political elements
of SRI that are also conveyed in social movements that aim to change corporate behavior and
consequently society (see Schepers & Sethi 2003; Vogel 1978).
When ARESE replaced negative screening with positive screening, it radically
transformed the meaning of SRI from a moral device to a managerial tool. SRI became a tool
for assessing extra-financial corporate performance in order to increase longterm financial
performance. As an ARESE analyst reported:
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