Paper Short Abstract:

This paper investigates how corporate communication employees inside sustainable finance institutions employ writing practices to build institutional coherence and address some fundamental dilemmas of sustainable finance.

Paper Abstract:

Despite being known for their emphasis on responsible practices, sustainable finance institutions are vulnerable to a problem of institutional incoherence. To uphold their dual promise of profitability and positive environmental/social impact, these institutions need to find investments that are most profitable to their clients and most beneficial to the environment and society. This entails a challenging act of translating the incommensurable environmental and social goods into terms legible to the financial industry. At times, they are also faced with seemingly impossible choices, like choosing between the rights of indigenous communities and the mainstreaming of clean wind energy, or between deep ocean biodiversity and increasing the supply of critical transition minerals. Adding to the mix is a roster of employees, each passionate and unbudging in their own understanding of sustainability. All considered, these institutions become one of the main battlegrounds for building institutional coherence.

Enter the corporate communication employees of Fjord Future, a sustainable finance institution headquartered in Norway. Functioning as the in-house journalists and story-tellers, they strive to address institutional incoherence by writing narratives that paint their employer as a coherent and decent actor of sustainable finance. Based on ethnographic fieldwork entailing 12-month-long participant-observation as a ‘writer’ at this company, I show that Fjord Future's writing practices seek to address some fundamental dilemmas of sustainable finance and to create a coherent corporate persona. Yet, these efforts are almost always adorned with widespread intra-institutional tensions that render them ever-tentative in settling for good the problem of institutional incoherence.