Making Sense of Responsible Investment as A Driver of Corporate Social Responsibility

Sensemaking is about relating. It is about finding the connections between verbs and nouns, between cues and frames, between beliefs and actions. The fundamental concern of sensemaking is the process by which meaning is created (Weick 1995a, 1979). The focus of this chapter is thus an analysis of (1) enactment processes through which institutional investors and corporations construct their sense of responsibility, (2) interaction processes through which they may influence each other, and (3) intervention processes through which one party may change the process of organizing responsibility of another party such as through issue-selling (Dutton and Ashford, 1993) and impression management (Goffman, 1959). With our approach we follow Weick’s (1995a) reminder that it should not belong to a researcher’s tasks to list the various ideologies an organization may have but to find out how “people select from the vast pool of ideological substance that smaller portion that matters” (p. 112).