Sustainable banking: identity. logics.liabilities
View/ Open
Date
30/11/2020Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
30/11/2021Author
Naranova, Anastasia
Metadata
Abstract
This thesis examines the phenomenon of sustainable finance and banking. It explores
how organisations simultaneously pursue the community development and the profitability
goals, therefore, combining the behaviour of the economic and the ethical actor. It features the
Global Alliance for Banking on Values (GABV), an international network of 62 financial
institutions and 16 strategic partners operating globally. Drawing from the existing theories of
the firm, this thesis discusses how the combination of the economic and the ethical goals
creates identity plurality in sustainable banks. It further examines the associated liabilities of
identity plurality and the ways they could be resolved by sustainable banks.
The existing theories of the firm provided insufficient insights on the ways
organisations experience and resolve the challenges of identity plurality. Current research
contributes to the existing theories of the firm and helps synthesise the economic and the
ethical perspectives on the role of the firm. Sustainable banks combine the community
development and the banking identities at their core and, as a result, face competing identity
demands. The identity plurality affects their organisational structures, processes and
meanings. Findings from this study show that sustainable banks face regulatory, governance,
stakeholders relations project assessment challenges due to identity plurality.
Through a qualitative analysis of interviews, participant observations and documents,
this study discovered that challenges of identity plurality experienced by sustainable banks
result in two types of organisational liabilities: liabilities for multiple goals and liabilities to
multiple principle stakeholders. Sustainable banks address liabilities for multiple goals
through a combination of identity work tactics, namely critiquing, contextualising and
intervening. Sustainable banks further approach their liabilities to multiple principle
stakeholders through the relational identity orientation expressed in such behaviours as
inclusion of affected communities, full incorporation of local needs, philanthropic
inclusiveness, transparency and power balance among stakeholders, governmental
commitments and collaborative hiring as well as socialisation.
This thesis extends current theoretical understandings of identity plurality as a
combination of the economic and the ethical goals within an organisation. It shows to which
extent identity plurality is experienced by sustainable banks, what are the liabilities of
organisational identity plurality and how sustainable banks resolve these liabilities. These
findings contribute to earlier conceptualisations of the hybrid identity organisation and the
multiple identities organisation and supports the development of the pluralistic identity
organisation theory.