doing so is to make the foreign business practice more useful or legitimate in this context.
Much like hybridization (Zeitlin & Herrigel 2000) and bricolage (Campbell 2004), coupling
consists in attaching another element to the foreign business practice. This element can be a
local practice, a piece of a belief system, or a concept with high symbolic value. It could also
be a person or an organization that confers legitimacy or value upon the foreign business
practice.
The French case provides many instances of coupling. The foreign SRI practice was
combined with elements that were familiar to French managers, which helped solve technical
problems and also provided legitimacy to the practice. Elements such as the European
Framework for Quality Management (EFQM), the well-established principles from Total
Quality Management (TQM), and a very basic description of firms’ stakeholders were indeed
used to construct the methodological tool for corporate social evaluation. Moreover, the
decision to name ARESE a ‘social rating organization’ also contributed to adapting SRI to the
new context. The notion of rating captures the standard logic of financial markets. Outside
France, providers of extra-financial information used more fuzzy labels such as ‘research
offices’ and ‘social information provider’. The term ‘social rating organization’ is clearly
aligned with the financial domain and facilitated communication with investors. The
combination of SRI with TQM and financial concepts also facilitated acceptance in the
evaluated firms, especially by managers trained in Total Quality Management. Some of them
decided to use ARESE’s questionnaires to design their own internal CSR policy:
“Personally, I found the ARESE referential [SRI evaluation tool] to be well designed. As
the underlying framework of that approach was satisficing, we decided to use it! You can
consider social rating to be an external constraint and adopt a compliance attitude by
simply providing the requested information. Well, we decided to adopt a positive attitude
and use rating as a managerial exerciser... So, we use the ARESE referential as an internal
management tool.” (Director of quality management, bank of the CAC 40)
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