ABSTRACT
Finance is one of the spheres of society that appears furthest removed from sustainable development and which could be believed to be impenetrable to any form of outside influence. Nevertheless, the notion of sustainable development does interact with the financial world. There exists for that matter a type of investment called 'socially responsible investment' (SRI) which proclaims its identity from this very notion. The chapter, using the case of SRIs, examines the manner in which sustainable development and finance influence and/or clash with one another. In accordance with the theoretical project of the social studies of finance, the chapter proposes to use the contribution from economic sociology and the analysis of social networks to understand the way in which a market is built, around which particular actors, and how during their interactions these actors define the quality of what becomes 'socially responsible' within the world of finance.
