Research seminar by Jean-Pascal Gond from Bayes Business School, invited by Valérie Swaen
Authors:
Jean-Pascal Gond [presenter]
Bayes Business School (formerly Cass) – City & St George’s, University of London, UK
Wafa Ben Khaled
ESCP Business School, FR
Yuval Millo
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK
A puzzle concerning both ESG practitioners and academics is the lack of convergence between ESG ratings produced by different methods. Aiming to address this question, we examine the societal conditions that facilitate the development of nonfinancial ratings’ methodologies. Focusing on the case of the pioneering French rating agency Arese (1997-2002), successively merged with Vigeo and Eiris, and ultimately taken over by Moody’s, we analyze the emergence of an ESG rating methodology. Relying on the sociology of quantification and the concepts of episteme and epistemic culture, we trace the origins of the categories, models, and data used to build its ratings. We document an epistemic culture evolved in relation to the US and French national cultures of quantification. We develop the concepts of epistemic friction, crystallization, materialization, and trapping to characterize the process through which ESG methodologies emerge, become established, and then face challenges due to being rooted in a specific epistemic and calculative culture. Our findings contribute, first, to a better understanding of why ESG methodologies differ widely from one another, second, to a clarification of the culturally loaded nature of ESG ratings and of the epistemic culture concept, and third, to the conceptualization of the inherently idiosyncratic nature of accounting systems.
Key-words:
Arese, Calculability, Episteme, Epistemic culture, ESG rating, Responsible investing.
Jean-Pascal Gond is Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at Bayes Business School, City St George’s, University of London, UK. His research mobilizes organization theory, economic sociology, and psychology to investigate CSR and sustainable finance. He has published extensively in the fields of corporate responsibility, organizational behaviour, and organization theory in leading academic journals such as Academy of Management Review, Business and Society, Business Ethics Quarterly, Human Relations, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Organization Studies and Management Science. He is currently Associate Editor of the Section “Measuring and communicating ethics” that he cocreated at the Journal of Business Ethics, and coediting a Special Issue on the “Government of Sustainability” for the Journal of Management Studies. [Email: jean-pascal.gond.1@city.ac.uk]