Socially responsible investment between supply and demand: analysis of and issues in the social construction of “political saving”

This study focuses on a movement in methods of structuring that has been around for the past twenty years: socially responsible investing. The study focuses on France between 2001 and 2005 and a particular category of actors: asset managers who sell financial products presented as socially responsible on the French market.

This study focuses on a movement in methods of structuring that has been around for the past twenty years: socially responsible investing. The study focuses on France between 2001 and 2005 and a particular category of actors: asset managers who sell financial products presented as socially responsible on the French market. The goal is to depict the social construction of the sale of these financial products that also have political aspects. The methodology was a field survey (survey by questionnaires, interviews, observation). The analysis extracted rests on and contributes to the fields of the sociology of finance, markets, and consumption. Socially responsible investing, part of both the finance industry and the sustainable development movement, is a lens for analysing the development of an invention (here a financial one), from conception through institutionalization in both the market and politics. More generally, by redefining “investor” and “shareholder,” this movement informs the potential emergence of a “political saving” in a world where retirement financing will pass through financial markets more and more.