TY  - CHAP
AB  - Abstract German ethical banks have experienced a significant increase in customers, deposits, and lending. They aim to establish a fairer banking system. But the simultaneous pursuit of social, ecological, and economic goals leaves them vulnerable to conflicting orders of worth. The authors examine the normative foundations that ethical bank employees refer to when they describe their everyday practices and identify the specific problems that arise from negotiating between moral principles and economic demands to provide insights into the impacts, constraints, and paradoxes of normatively oriented business practices. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the sociology of critique, the authors assume that moral categories, social processes of interpretation, and justification are an essential part of markets. Ethical banking is characterized by the need to meet both market-limiting and market-expanding requirements, and this particularly becomes contentious when dealing with economic growth. By analyzing ethical banks’ freely accessible documents, the authors first outline the institutional guidelines. In a second step, the authors analyze 27 qualitative interviews with employees of ethical banks to gain insights into everyday lending practices and action-guiding normative orientations. The goal of this chapter is to examine the tensions that may arise from applying normative guidelines under the condition of increasing economic requirements and to disclose the way that ethical banks negotiate between mechanisms of expansion and limitation. The analysis of this chapter points out a paradox of ethical banking: due to the banks’ economic expansion, investments corresponding to their ethical commitments tend to become a luxury they cannot afford.
VL  - 63
SN  - 978-1-78769-120-9, 978-1-78769-119-3/0733-558X
DO  - 10.1108/S0733-558X20190000063015
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20190000063015
AU  - Lenz Sarah
AU  - Neckel Sighard
ED  - Simone Schiller-Merkens
ED  - Philip Balsiger
PY  - 2019
Y1  - 2019/01/01
TI  - Ethical Banks between Moral Self-commitment and Economic Expansion
T2  - The Contested Moralities of Markets
T3  - Research in the Sociology of Organizations
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 127
EP  - 148
Y2  - 2024/04/25
ER  -