Feeling Ethical: Affect, Storytelling, and Impact Investors

• In Event: Critical Interventions in Corporate Communications

Abstract

The social capital sector, including social enterprises and impact investors, seeks to distill the social mission of corporate social responsibility into a standalone business model. Offering a triple bottom line (social, environmental, and financial) “value proposition,” impact investors wish to incite a broader shift in finance by introducing an “invisible heart” to guide markets’ invisible hand. A core challenge for this emergent sector is to communicate what unique value(s) they offer to the marketplace. Drawing on ethnographic research with impact investors in the U.S. and Canada, this paper argues that storytelling practices are central to investors’ attempts to renegotiate what it means to be valuable in the marketplace. By routinely pitching investments in the form of testimonials to their personal moral commitments, I argue that impact investors’ performance of ethical feeling contributes to the narrative construction of value in financial markets.

Author

• Zenia Kish, Stanford U