Framing ambiguity: insider/outsiders and the successful legitimation project of the socially responsible mutual fund industry

Abstract

This article uses a Bourdieuian notion of organizational field and social movement’s frame analysis to understand the successful legitimation project of the socially responsible (SR) mutual fund industry. We show how institutional entrepreneurs, as both insiders and outsiders of the dominant organizational field, compete with existing mutual fund logics and become a legitimate presence in the mutual fund industry. The SR mutual fund industry has grown exponentially since its introduction in the 1970s, even though the product it sells is ambiguous in nature (Wood, 2000). Thus, while the product could be perceived as subversive, as the SR industry is arguing that companies should act ‘responsible’ in their efforts to make money, the reality is that industry innovators do not disrupt the existing mutual fund logic of ‘fiduciary responsibility’ in order to legitimate themselves. Rather, SR institutional entrepreneurs use their social location in multiple organizational fields to argue that consumers can ‘make money while doing good’. Such a frame is not completely subversive nor completely compliant with the existing logic, yet it successfully appeals to both mutual fund insiders and social movement outsiders.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.