Uncritical adoption: academia's role in legitimising ESG ratings

This paper critically examines the role of academic research in legitimising Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings as authoritative knowledge objects. Drawing on the sociology of quantification and social constructionist perspectives, we trace the historical development of ESG ratings and interrogate the purposes they are taken to serve. While we acknowledge the well-documented limitations of ESG ratings, such as opacity, weak convergence, and methodological inconsistency, we argue that these are not incidental technical deficiencies to be remedied through incremental recommendations in academic papers. Rather, we suggest that these limitations reflect deeper structural conditions shaping the production and use of ESG ratings. The core contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how academic research has participated in the legitimation of ESG ratings through their deployment as empirical inputs, the conflation of ESG with sustainability and responsibility, and the treatment of their validity as a problem of convergence rather than conceptual coherence. Through a problematising review of key contributions, particularly within quantitative positivist traditions, we show how academic scholarship has helped stabilise ESG ratings as legitimate empirical proxies, thereby reinforcing hegemonic financial interests under the guise of sustainable finance.