Rational Myths Research Articles

The Limits of Enforcement in Global Financial Governance: Blacklisting in FATF as Rational Myth

Abstract How might international institutions matter? To consider this central question of International Relations, we analyze a most-likely case for the importance of materially driven enforcement: the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) use of blacklisting in the global regime targeting money laundering and terrorism financing. Scholars and practitioners often argue that fear of financial harm caused by FATF’s lists explains the near-global commitment to FATF’s standards, even if compliance lags. We search for statistical evidence of this impact across four different measures of financial flows and find that listing is not correlated with financial harm. To explain these null results, we examine bank decision-making and find that the lists’ impact is likely diminished by two overlooked factors: the existence of multiple, competing lists and banks’ access to more fine-grained, client-specific information provided by third-party companies. We interpret this contradiction—a commitment to compliance generated in part by a fear of enforcement, despite a lack of evidence for enforcement’s impact—as a “rational myth.” The results challenge a common understanding of a major global governance regime, confirm ideas about the limited ability of states or International Organizations to control governance outcomes, and advance a new research agenda on the impact of bank decision-making on global governance.

Dying to Understand How Electronic Word of Mouth Legitimates Sustainable Innovations in Stigmatized Markets

Entrepreneurs entering stigmatized markets face barriers to entry beyond those encountered in traditional markets. Yet, little research examines factors influencing the diffusion of these goods and services. Through the lens of institutional theory, this paper proposes and demonstrates the application of a conceptual model outlining the process by which stigmatized innovations become (de-)institutionalized. We combine mixed methods by blending qualitative with quantitative tools to analyze the legitimating influence of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) over time. Our findings suggest that dichotomized consumer preferences stem from normative (natural and benevolent versus artificial and malevolent), cultural-cognitive (ecological health and sustainable services versus public health and traditional services), and regulatory (government rule versus market rule) binaries that influence the deinstitutionalization of orthodoxy (utopian versus dystopian worldviews). Notwithstanding, we show that, in stigmatized markets, consumers look to eWOM to inform their choices, which can aid in deinstitutionalizing rational myths and help perpetuate service innovation. We also find that in stigmatized markets, the existing industry does not show a predictable response to societal pressures for service innovations that promote social wellbeing and sustainability.

When to Talk and When to Keep It to yourself? Strategies for Legitimating Managerial Intuitions in An Organisational Context

The purpose of this study is to explore the strategies deployed by managers in organisations to legitimate their intuitions. Managerial practice is a continual process of emergence and integration of problems and projects, and by which managers navigate a complex world. To do so, they rely partly on their intuitions, whose effectiveness has largely been demonstrated in the literature. However, the rational model is still considered the optimal cognition and decision-making process in organisations. The persistence of the myth of rationality compels managers to deploy strategies to legitimate their intuitions. But these strategies are poorly understood. The aim of this study therefore was to describe them. For this purpose, we collected 191 accounts of episodes where managers legitimated their intuitions. Our analysis of these accounts revealed seven intuition legitimation strategies. Some of these strategies had not previously been identified in the institutional literature (personalisation, transparency, exploration and compound strategy). For others which had already been partly described (rationalisation, manipulation and relational strategy), we show that managers deploy new modes. These results contribute to the knowledge of legitimation strategies from a conceptual point of view. They also shed some light on the mistrust of intuition that still prevails in organisations, despite its importance.

When to Talk and When to Keep It to yourself? Strategies for Legitimating Managerial Intuitions in An Organisational Context

The purpose of this study is to explore the strategies deployed by managers in organisations to legitimate their intuitions. Managerial practice is a continual process of emergence and integration of problems and projects, and by which managers navigate a complex world. To do so, they rely partly on their intuitions, whose effectiveness has largely been demonstrated in the literature. However, the rational model is still considered the optimal cognition and decision-making process in organisations. The persistence of the myth of rationality compels managers to deploy strategies to legitimate their intuitions. But these strategies are poorly understood. The aim of this study therefore was to describe them. For this purpose, we collected 191 accounts of episodes where managers legitimated their intuitions. Our analysis of these accounts revealed seven intuition legitimation strategies. Some of these strategies had not previously been identified in the institutional literature (personalisation, transparency, exploration and compound strategy). For others which had already been partly described (rationalisation, manipulation and relational strategy), we show that managers deploy new modes. These results contribute to the knowledge of legitimation strategies from a conceptual point of view. They also shed some light on the mistrust of intuition that still prevails in organisations, despite its importance.

What you see is what you get? Building confidence in ESG disclosures for sustainable finance through external assurance

AbstractThe main objective of this study is to understand the value of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure assurance in the context of the development of sustainable finance standards and laws. This study is based on an analysis of 188 comment letters submitted by such actors in the context of public consultations on the development of three new sustainable finance initiatives (the CFA Institute, the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK, and the New Zealand parliament). The study shows these actors' nuanced and often quite critical perceptions of the effectiveness of external assurance in preventing greenwashing and their reservations about its mandatory nature. These actors have raised various criticisms, including concerns about the vagueness surrounding verification practices; the lack of expertise available to conduct assurance in a new, specialized, and complex field; the costs of the assurance process, particularly for small players; and the lack of control over the reliability of the ESG data used. This article contributes to several emerging trends in the literature—in particular, research on governance practices to prevent greenwashing, on the institutionalization of sustainable finance standards and laws, and on the role of rational myths in the assurance process for ESG disclosures.

Market reactions to the Business Roundtable August 19, 2019 announcement on the Purpose of a Corporation

AbstractThe Business Roundtable's “Purpose of a Corporation” letter announced a shift from stockholder primacy to stakeholder primacy. Interestingly, we contend the letter's language employed a technical efficiency emphasis, suggesting a firm's executives chose to make this shift because they believed doing so would improve the firm's financial performance, via improved corporate governance. We examine whether investors actually accepted the technical efficiency arguments at face value, or in contrast believed the announcements were merely a “rational myth,” what management thought investors would want to hear. We employ a 2‐day cumulative abnormal return (CAR) event study for 140 publicly‐held firms. Overall, we find investor support for the announcement. In addition, we found how returns to firms with prior similar announcements were negative at the time of the announcement. Also, the returns for firms having multiple signatories were positive and significant.

Business-Like and Still Serving Society? Investigating the Relationship Between NPOs Being Business-Like and Their Societal Roles

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) becoming business-like is a contested issue. Some understand the adoption of business-like practices by NPOs as a case of adopting rational myths through institutional isomorphism and thus potentially dangerous for NPOs’ ability to fulfill their unique societal roles. Others are more optimistic, arguing that technical rationality is possible in the adoption of business-like practices, and that such practices can therefore support NPOs in fulfilling a wide range of societal roles. Drawing on survey data of NPOs in Flanders, we examine the relationship between the extent to which NPOs use business-like practices, and the extent to which they engage in various societal roles. We find that business-like practices are weakly related to NPOs’ societal roles. All roles are positively related to nonprofit managerialism and unrelated to NPOs’ reliance on commercial funding. Our results suggest that a certain optimism regarding the rational use of business-like approaches is justified.

What and why? Exploring rational myths of industrial symbioses in French case studies

In an industrial symbiosis initiative (IS-I), an initiating actor faced with a situation aims to enroll other actors in a collective action, or response, to address the situation. The rational myth theory embeds this “situation-response” pair. This paper explores the relevance of rational myth, along with that of plausible promise, to understand the emergence and development of IS-Is. We adapt the definition of these two concepts to IS and illustrate how they take shape with real case studies, by conducting the qualitative analysis of 14 French IS-Is. We demonstrate the potential of this framework to shed new light on IS-Is, and address a new range of questions for the dynamic analysis of initiatives. This paves the way to study the role of plausible promises in the initiation and development of IS-Is, and the design of discourses that enhance initiatives in situations of high potential of synergy.

Does proxy voting really promote corporate sustainability?

AbstractResearch question/issueThis study explores the challenges faced by responsible investment and shareholder activism practitioners in integrating sustainability by means of proxy voting as shareholder engagement strategy.Research findings/insightsProxy voting guidelines that sometimes include sustainability provisions are applied in a very elastic and inconsistent way. Proxy voting agents are expected to follow the guidelines; they explain their non‐compliance by pointing out the guidelines' vagueness, the opacity of current proxy voting practices, and portfolio managers not necessarily aligned with their clients' stated sustainability commitments, along with their perceptions of what is in the best interest of the clients.Theoretical/academic implicationsThis study sheds new light on processes underlying proxy voting practices for sustainability, which have been largely overlooked in the literature. By opening the “black box” of proxy voting processes, this study challenges the dominant optimism in this area and raises serious concerns regarding the effectiveness of current shareholder activism practices. This paper also contributes to the critical literature on corporate sustainability and neo‐institutional approaches by showing that the use of proxy voting guidelines in this area can be considered as a rational myth based on symbolic commitments divorced from substantial change in the dominant financial logic.Practitioner/policy implicationsThis paper has important practical implications for institutional investors, organizations involved in proxy voting practices, and stakeholders in general. Among other things, this article shows the importance of clarifying the commitments included in proxy voting procedures, monitoring their application, and providing training on ESG issues to the actors involved in implementing the guidelines.

Evaluating social impact in practice: Constructing a response to institutional demand in a French nonprofit organization

Research into nonprofit organizations’ (NPOs) social impact—and especially how it is measured—has drawn attention in recent years. Social impact evaluation (SIE) is a form of institutional pressure exerted on NPOs and can be considered a rational myth (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). In this article, we focus on the organizational response to this institutional demand and use the theoretical framework of inhabited institutions (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006) to analyze the local dynamics of SIE implementation. The research is based on a case study and uses an action research methodology to investigate the long-term SIE appropriation process in a large French charity that supports young people facing social difficulties. Although external actors have mostly supported the SIE, we show that internal actors have gradually developed a localized and “pragmatic” response to the institutional pressure to SIE. We also show that this response has been constructed through different phases of appropriation and has modified the institutional prescriptions of SIE.

Debate: Politicians' use of accounting information—the myth of rationality

Debate: Politicians' use of accounting information—the myth of rationality

Old Dreams Retold

Abstract As a champion of May Fourth enlightenment and a critic of Chinese tradition, Lu Xun is less understood as a prescient critic of the myth of science and technological rationality. Walter Benjamin invoked the utopian reconciliation of humans and nature from premodern culture in critiques of modernity. Similarly, Lu Xun conjured up images of the ancient world where rural folks lived in reciprocity with nature, worshiped supernatural beings, and observed time-honored rituals. Lu Xun linked the myth of progress and technology to a destructive chorus of “malevolent voices” by a hypocritical gentry, a technocratic elite that sought power, status, and profit in the name of enlightenment and rationality. He proclaimed that it is urgent to “rid of ourselves of this hypocrite gentry; ‘superstition’ may remain.” Invoking Benjamin's insight and affinity with Lu Xun, this article explores the Chinese writer's recovery of the mythical and ecological images from the past in the critique of modernity. Confronted with the fetishism of progress and technology in China's early modernization, Lu Xun sought to uncover and redeem primordial images from archaic traditions.

Measuring sustainability risks: A rational myth?

AbstractThe objective of this paper is to investigate the rigorousness and reliability of sustainability rating agencies' evaluation of corporate sustainability risks. Using grounded theory, this study conducts a qualitative analysis of 32 semi‐structured interviews with practitioners involved in this activity and shows the trade‐offs and rational myths underlying this evaluation process. The image of rationality and rigorousness projected by sustainability risk measurements is mostly intended to address the increasing institutional pressures for reliable and comparable information, particularly from institutional investors and socially responsible investment decision makers. Nevertheless, risk analysts face serious challenges due to the lack of reliable information, the unpredictability of sustainability risks, the methodological issues related to the measurement process, and the complexity and context‐dependency of risk assessment. These challenges call into question the official and optimistic rhetoric of rating agencies. This study contributes to the literature on sustainability risks and rational myths in organizations. Managerial implications and avenues for future research are also discussed.

Capitalizing Rational Myths A Neo-Institutionalist Reading of Organization’s Social Campaign Visuals

Taking a neo-institutionalist lens, this paper examines how organizations visualize societal rational myths in a bid to lend legitimacy to their social claims. Specifically, by unraveling the semiotic features of an organization’s visual communication, this research unpacks how rational myths at the societal level take on a physical, visual form in social campaigns. This study contributes to neo-institutionalism in organization studies by elucidating how less tangible aspects of institutions incarnate in visual forms in organizations’ social undertakings, and by reconciling structural approaches of neo-institutional theory with more agentic ones.

“Integrated reporting is like God: no one has met Him, but everybody talks about Him”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the process through which an International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) pilot company adopted “integrated reporting” (IR), a management innovation that merges financial and non-financial reporting.Design/methodology/approachA seven-year longitudinal ethnographic study based on semi-structured interviews, observations, and documentary evidence is used to analyze this multinational company’s IR adoption process from its decision to become an IIRC pilot organization to the publication of its first integrated report.FindingsFindings demonstrate that the company envisioned IR as a “rational myth” (Hatchuel, 1998; Hatchuel and Weil, 1992). This conceptualization acted as a springboard for IR adoption, with the mythical dimension residing in the promise that IR had the potential to portray global performance in light of the company’s own foundational myth. The company challenged the vision of IR suggested by the IIRC to stay true to its conceptualization of IR and eventually chose to implement its own version of an integrated report.Originality/valueThe study enriches previous research on IR and management innovations by showing how important it is for organizations to acknowledge the mythical dimension of the management innovations they pursue to support their adoption processes. These findings, suggest that myths can play a productive role in transforming business (reporting) practices. Some transition conditions that make this transformation possible are identified and the implications of these results for the future of IR, sustainability, and accounting more broadly are discussed.

Rational Evolution or Socially Constructed Counter-Myth? Cross-Cultural Perceptions of the Development of Chinese Commercial Accounting Up to C.1850 and Its Significance

The recent rapid growth of China’s economy has reopened historical debate about the extent to which it had also prospered during the last Imperial dynasties (the Ming and the Qīng, 1368-1911). Some economic historians have argued that China’s prosperity may have even matched that of Europe, through developing significant market activity on its underlying agricultural base, until ‘the Great Divergence’ sometime in the late 18th/early 19th centuries. Given the recent revitalisation in the literature of Sombartian arguments that Western economic growth was linked to the advent of Italian double-entry bookkeeping (DEB), we question here the extent to which there is justification for the claimed development of a concomitant and indigenous Chinese form of double-entry bookkeeping (CDEB)—conventionally seen as having developed among bankers, merchants and proto-industrialists—and for its significance within that successful Chinese market economy. We sceptically review how far the emerging archival and related historical evidence for the development of Chinese accounting practices and discourses supports the arguments that have hitherto been made for CDEB. Our scepticism reinforces medieval and Renaissance European accounting historiography that continues to indicate that the development of DEB had a textual / pedagogic as well as commercial provenance, and further supports the view that any direct or linear connection between its development from the fourteenth century and that of Western capitalism has become institutionalized as a ‘rational myth’. We comment briefly on the more foundational issue concerning what is increasingly recognised as an Occidentalism that has repeatedly cast the West as ‘modern’ and ‘more developed’; and we also explore how it has in turn influenced the now conventional Chinese expositions about the nature and timing of their historical accounting developments, and led to the creation of a ‘counter-myth’ of CDEB. Drawing inter alia on recent work on original Chinese archives, our aim is to clear away the tangled undergrowth of misconceptions about Chinese accounting history that have accumulated (without a solid evidential base) in the existing literature, and to indicate what we believe are the more important questions that should in future guide Western and Chinese researchers, preferably working collaboratively, in approaching the primary Chinese archival sources as they are increasingly (re)discovered. There is a need to further test the arguments, developed both here and in wider existing research literatures, about the historical roles of accounting microtechnologies in constituting significant domains both of economic activity and of organizational and social structure in both the East and in the West.

The Myth of Instrumental Rationality

The paper distinguishes between instrumental reasons and instrumental rationality. It argues that instrumental reasons are not reasons to take the means to our ends. It further argues that there is no distinct form of instrumental reasoning or of instrumental rationality. In part the argument proceeds through a sympathetic examination of suggestions made by M. Bratman, J. Broome, and J. Wallace, though the accounts of instrumental rationality offered by the last two are criticised.

Management controls in an apparel group: an institutional theory perspective

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how management controls in an organization take shape amidst the tensions between external institutional forces and the internal dynamics arising from the different powers and interests of managers as well as from intra-organizational norms, rules and taken-for-granted assumptions.Design/methodology/approachAdopting an interpretivist stance, this study employs the embedded (nested) case study approach drawing evidence from an apparel group which consists of a head office and four clusters. Theoretically, the paper is informed by institutional theory, and particularly draws on concepts such as organizational field, ceremonials, rational myths, isomorphism, institutional logics and loose coupling. It is further complemented by strategic responses of Oliver (1991), as well as materials and discursive elements in elaborating how external pressures influence control practices of an organization, and how internal actors strategically respond to those pressures in balancing external legitimacy and internal efficiency requirements.FindingsThe field-study findings reveal that management controls of the case-study organization have taken shape amidst external pressures, specifically from customers and internal dynamics such as interests of key actors, who strategically respond to external pressures and head -office specifications.Research limitations/implicationsSituating management controls within external pressures and internal dynamics, the findings of this study have implications for research on organizational heterogeneity, and it offers learning points for managers in formulating management controls by balancing conflicting internal and external pressures.Practical implicationsIn reality, practicing managers are faced with conflicting logics arising from external pressures and internal dynamics stemming from different power- and interest-holding managers as well as intra-organizational norms, rules and taken-for-granted assumptions in their everyday encounters in organizations. This study provides some pointers for such practicing managers in designing and implementing management control systems by effectively balancing these opposing influences and formulating systems suited to the circumstances of a particular organization.Originality/valueMoving beyond the widely held narrow conceptualization of institutional theory akin to (external) isomorphism and organizational conformity, this paper brings out organizational heterogeneity through the active agency of actors in terms of their power, interest and proclivities as well as their use of organizational norms and rules in responding to such external institutions.

Keeping a Dream Alive: Multimodal Study of the Construction Sector's Industrialization 1945-1970

Rational myths provide idealized cultural accounts that specify the appropriate means that organizations should adopt to rationally pursue socially valuable ends. Being taken for granted, rational ...

Budgetary change at a university: A narrative inquiry

This paper reports the results of a qualitative case study of an Australian University's implementation of a new budget model. To inform our research, we developed a theoretical framework by drawing from neo-institutional sociology, old institutional economics and technical-rational choice. A narrative inquiry was employed to elicit the stories of participants' experiences of the budgetary change in its socio-political and institutional contexts. Through this narrative inquiry, we depart from prior institutional management accounting change studies which have presented change steered by external pressures for conformity and/or legitimacy. Our study shows how budgeting, as a management accounting tool, can be viewed as a rational myth conferring social legitimacy upon organisational participants and their actions. Further, we demonstrate that the emergence of a new management accounting practice is attributed to the demands of technical-rational imperatives, and the existence of internal rationalised dynamics and norms. We highlight and analyse the role and ability of organisational actors to create budgetary change in an institutionalised higher education environment.