Tinkering Toward the Good––Sustainable Investing Between Utopian Imaginaries and Actualizations

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Authors

This article seeks to reimagine the relationship between sustainability and financial performance in sustainable investing. Employing a utopian lens, I show how sustainability is constantly negotiated in a process of imagining and actualizing sustainable investing. For this purpose, I explore a fin-tech start-up’s endeavors to democratize sustainable investing through digitalization. Empirically, this article contributes a detailed account of the organizational process of––and the complexities involved in––establishing a sustainable investment organization, to this end focusing on the relationship between sustainability and financial performance. The article further provides a novel theoretical perspective (utopianism) on sustainable investing, one offering a processual approach that uses both external and internal factors in its understanding of the practice. I conclude that a utopian mindset of possibility paves the way for an experimentational attitude and future-oriented thinking. Such a mindset could generate new approaches to the relationship between sustainability and financial performance, thus shining a light on the new and innovative solutions needed to establish financial markets oriented to the common good.

Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Business Ethics
Volume185
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)281-297
Number of pages17
ISSN0167-4544
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 06.2023
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

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