Constructing Market for Responsibility

Thursday, 2 July 2015: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
CLM.2.04 (Clement House)
Mikolaj Lewicki, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
Neither history of markets (or a market) in Poland, nor the last 25 years after the fall of socialist governments have been  supportive to the ideas of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate governance (CG). By looking at the various ways of legitimizing business ideas and initiatives concerned with CSR or CG my research discloses various mechanisms and processes of valuation that enable to form and reproduce ethical and non purely economic discourse and set of actions that are taken predominantly by companies but also by NGO's,adn local governments in order to legitimize their business and to control the environment (Jackson et al. 2013). This picture was supposed to be changed by the establishment of the Respect Index, Warsaw Stock Exchange Index which is supposed to not only set the standards for the capital market but also drive the "business case of the CSR" (Respect Index description). Thus an institution of the capital market has been playing a role that goes beyond measuring the companies noted at the stock exchange. My research aims at answering the question of insitutional transformations around- and in the capital market that are associated with (formerly) non-economic becoming economic through various regimes of valuation (Lamont 2012, Thevenot Boltanski 2005, Stark 2010).