The “Modus Operandi” of Sustainable Finance Morality: The Case of the Sustainable Stock Exchange Initiative

Stock exchanges have changed over time: having as initial status an image more associated with gambling, they experienced a process of rationalization and professionalization that turned out to produce various forms of rational calculation, as confirmed by anthropological studies. Regardless of these changes, the moral view objectified in movies portraying stock exchanges’ routines, as well as dictionaries that give “official” meaning to the verb “invest” and shared by those participating in the stock market use to be guided solely by the pursuit of profit at any cost. However, the idea of sustainable finance assigns a new moral to the act of investing in the stock market: the moral of sustainability, in other words, the moral of an investment that takes environment and society into account. The main sociological question that rises is not whether the listed companies are becoming more or less sustainable, but, instead, what are the sociological mechanisms working for the spreading of this moral view to financial centers around the world. This article presents the case of the Sustainable Stock Exchange Initiative analyzed through the lens of economic sociology theories seeking to understand the modus operandi of the global creation of this new shared moral trend. The Sustainable Stock Exchange Initiative was established in 2012 by institutions related to the United Nations and contained five signatory stock exchanges. Three years later, the Initiative was up to 23 signatories. A research in the Initiative website, as well as other online documents, led to the identification of elements that indicate the patterns producing this new morality. The aim of this paper is to describe the institutional isomorphism process of the Initiative’s modus operandi that is exported to different countries. The analytical interpretation clarifies (1) the central role of the United Nations, (2) the existence of classification criteria that contains the necessary steps [seen as a form of private regulation] to creating a sustainable stock market and (3) the influence of countries such as England, United States and Netherlands in providing consultancies to the creation of sustainability indexes. The paper also highlights the hybrid trajectories of three social actors that act as a plasma membrane selectively controlling exchanges between the world of mainstream finance and sustainable finance. As means of a conclusion, the Initiative case study has become a weberian ideal type and, thus, an interesting analytical tool for future comparative studies about the shared language that diffuses finance and sustainability in the signatory countries.