Selling Social Issues in the Absence of Strategic Arguments

How do social change agents convince top management to address important social issues when these have no direct strategic value to their organizations? This paper is a six-year longitudinal study of the development of Responsible Investment in Europe from 2010 to 2015 examining how Asset Managers succeeded in pushing forward the practice during the unstable financial crisis environment despite being unable to demonstrate its link to financial performance. We propose a theoretical model of social issue selling which suggests System Social Issue Selling as an alternative to Strategic Social Issue Selling. The former is characterized by a shift in rationale, languages, and solutions that enable social change agents to connect the organization to the broader society.