A viral spot (that has however not yet taken off) advocating sustainable investment as being the investment strategy of the present and future caught my attention yesterday. The video clip, initiated by an investment management group headquartered not far away from our institute in Zurich, both thrilled and puzzled me at the same time.
The clip
busts several myths regarding sustainable investments in order to propagate the
initiator’s investment strategy. The underlying proposition suggests that you
can earn more money when your investment manager assesses the stocks’ potential
of your portfolio in the most complete manner available. The approach applied
by the initiator enlarges the financial analysis of firm’s performance by adding
an analysis of the social and ecological performances of the firm. Apart from its
rather instrumentalist application, the concept behind it—called the triple
bottom line—excites me. It demands of firms to take into account their responsibilities
to all stakeholders (e.g. employees or customers), not only stockholders. The
result suggested in the clip may seem paradoxical: The less a firm tries to solely
meet the demands of its stockholders, the merrier is the stock’s potential in
the future.
However, the
puzzling aspect of the clip unfolded just as I tried to connect it with my (current)
research interest: the diffusion of business practices. The question arises as
to how widespread the above business is. As I am eager to learn more about rhetoric
theories that highlight the potency of language in shaping organizational life
and behaviour, the language used in the clip awakened my interest.
From a
rhetorical perspective, the way a particular practice is accompanied by
language tells you a lot about its state of acceptance. The relationship
between the rhetoric used by people and their social practice is theorized
about in many complicated ways. A catchy—and thus highly persuading, as
rhetorical theorists would say—framework was, however, introduced by the
management scholar Sandy Green. As evidence of a practice’s acceptance, he
proposes the lack of a need to justify it, for example in legitimating it by
rationalizing the matter of subject. And what is the video clip actually doing?
It’s not a typical commercial trying to persuade the audience that the
initiator is better at doing its business than its counterparts. In the core,
however, this clip is purely a justification of the initiator’s business
practice at all. Even though it repeatedly refers to the triple bottom line as being
common sense, this clip can be taken as a testimony of the rather weak
penetration of this business practice even without knowing much about this
business (as I definitely do not).
My puzzling
to me is, therefore, the weak state of diffusion of business practice that
corresponds to my very own idea of how business ought to work. However, the theory of rhetoric gives us a master
plan about institutional change. Among the factors impacting whether a business
practice is adopted or not, the most powerful ones are not those seeming the
most efficient or the most effective, but rather the ones that make sense to
the people. From a rhetorical viewpoint, you just have to talk about it long
enough until a critical mass of people is persuaded. Christian Stutz
