Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the legitimacy-building processes of Social Rating Organizations (SRO) and the role of objects in these processes. SROs have played a key role in the development of SRI in Europe by providing social and environmental rating to financial investors. However, little is known about the processes through which they have acquired their legitimacy, i.e. their ‘right-to-rate’ corporations. We provide here an in-depth empirical analysis of the legitimacy-building process of two European SROs and demonstrate the role played by objects in these processes of legitimacy construction.