Ties: Binding and Structuring a Field. the Case of French SRI

There is an increasing interest for the role of social positions to understand evolutions and changes within organizational fields. This paper advances a new approach to understand how actors manage their connections within an organizational field and how this influences their ability to shape the field and its specific institutions. Precisely, we want to explain how institutions (formal and informal) of the field come to support more the interests of some players than others. To do so we focus on the positions of actors in the field and their strategies of relational brokerage. We define two different types of brokerage: a structural one, in the social network analysis tradition; and an attributive one, which relies on the relational structure of actors but also takes into account their social characteristics.

We focus on a structuring organizational field – i.e. a field which already emerged but which formal and informal institutions are not stabilized yet. Structuration of such fields goes through the creation of professional associations, standards, etc. More specifically, we focus on the French field of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) in the early 2000s. While it emerged in the 1990s in France, SRI remained controversial and a niche market during this decade and only structured in 2000s with laws being passed that support it development and a clear structure of the field emerging.

We consider brokerage strategies in this field when it is structuring, that is after its initial emergence as relations and norms become stabilized. A structuring field is different from an emerging one in two regards. First, the network structure is more stable, which makes it easier to study than in an emerging field where relations are constantly building, which makes the network harder to grasp as it is still in formation and instable and no structure has emerged yet. Second, relations are richer as field members had time to develop multiplex links - when two or more different types of relationships occur together among two actors. This allows to explore the complex plurality of relations that take place within an organizational field while making possible to observe and describe brokerage across those multiple relations. We analyze relational structures, and explore their consequences on the structuration of the organizational field.

To conduct this analysis we rely on a mixed methodology combining formel social network analysis and qualitative analysis to uncover the brokerage structures whereby some field members tried to maintain the existing institutional arrangement and the related field domination structure while others challenged it. Analyses presented in this communication are based on a fieldwork conducted between 2003 and 2006 on the French SRI market. This fieldwork relates on three tools: first on a participant observation of a year and a half in a SRI lobby group; Second, around 30 semi-structured interviews with SRI key players in France, whether they are analysts, fund managers, consultants, clients or associated with CSR initiatives and environmental protection; and third, a face-to-face sociometric questionnaire addressed to 78 individuals working in SRI in France (extra-financial rating agencies, boards, management companies, brokerage houses, NGOs, press, etc.) These 78 respondents represent almost all the people in this professional environment, which remains very small (about a hundred). The questionnaire includes a complete social network analysis of SRI: name generators for complete co-work, professional association and friendship networks. Finally, since the field exit, close links have been maintained with key players, particularly during restitution or some new interviews

Central to the understanding of organizational fields as arenas of power relations are the forms of work developed by field members in order to impose their views and eventually secure power. However, little is known about dimensions of relational structures (e.g. types of brokerage), despite the acknowledgment that networks are crucial to account for the evolution of organizational fields.  When fields are analysed as networks they are approached as given structure that enable or constrain actions—depending on actors’ position within the field the effort devoted by the actors to establish their position and shape those networks are not examined. This approach overlooks the work whereby actors actively shape the connections that constitute the network structure within which they are embedded. We argue that some actors are more likely than others to assert their interests in the constitution of a field by imposing standards that serve them. Why? In the French SRI case, because they are embedded in association networks and there they knit formal and informal heterophilious ties. As a consequence, it shapes SRI in a very specific way in France, withdrawing extra-financial agencies the ability to define ESG criteria and offering financial actor more capacity in this regulation. To sum up, we examine who are the actors and what are the institutional pressures shaping SRI.