The Business of Virtue: Evidence from Socially Responsible Investing in Financial Markets

Using the mainstreaming of socially responsible investing (SRI) as our empirical context, we show that as the divestment movement in the late twentieth century got institutionalized by being incorporated as a business strategy into more mainstream financial instruments like mutual funds, the prior meanings and categorical definition of ethical investing became ambiguous due to fuzzy boundaries, duality of virtue inherent in the portfolio...