ESG and Performative Responsibility: The Quantified Moral Governance of Business-Society Relations

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a theoretical framework for understanding ESG as a system of quantified moral governance and performative responsibility.

🏢実務担当者:Warns that optimizing ESG metrics may lead to performative responsibility rather than genuine ethical engagement.

🏛政策担当者:Suggests that audit-based governance may narrow corporate accountability to what is measurable, potentially displacing deeper stakeholder engagement.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks have become central to contemporary business-society relations, promising to align corporate activity with broader social and environmental goals. While existing research has largely focused on whether ESG improves firm performance, less attention has been paid to how it reshapes the meaning and practice of corporate responsibility. This paper develops a theoretical account of how ESG reshapes business-society relations by reconfiguring the characterization and evaluation of corporate responsibility. Drawing on Crane (2000), Porter (1995), and Shore and Wright (2015), we theorize ESG as a system of quantified moral governance that operates through a three-part process: the amoralization of ethical issues into managerial and financial categories, the legitimation of these categories through quantification, and their institutionalization through audit-based governance mechanisms such as ratings, rankings, and reporting standards. Through this process, ESG reconfigures ethical concerns into measurable indicators aligned with financial materiality. As ethical concerns are quantified, responsibility becomes defined and evaluated through these indicators, incentivizing firms to orient their practices toward optimizing measurable performance. We conceptualize this transformation as performative responsibility, where firms demonstrate responsibility by optimizing visible metrics rather than engaging substantively with underlying ethical concerns. This transformation is driven by a dynamic interaction between firms' pursuit of social legitimacy and society's reliance on metric-based forms of governance, which together reinforce the translation of ethical concerns into measurable indicators. This analysis contributes to business-society scholarship by showing how contemporary corporate sustainability systems redefine responsibility through metrics, narrowing the scope of corporate accountability to what can be measured and audited, while displacing more substantive forms of stakeholder engagement.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6709678first seen 2026-05-15 18:53:52