Defense of Léo Denis

«Building the Social Impact of Finance: An Organizational Perspective ».  

Supervised by Nicolas Mottis

Thesis defense is scheduled for June 3, 2026 at 2:00 pm, at Ecole polytechnique, Bâtiment d'Enseignement Mutualisé (BEM) - Amphi 1, Avenue Fresnel, 91120 Palaiseau.

Abstract: 

Despite two decades of significant growth, the social impact of the phenomenon of “sustainable finance” remains contested. Observing that today's financial system is largely intermediated by professional investment organizations, this thesis studies the conditions under which these actors can jointly pursue financial and societal objectives. While the literature mainly analyzes the effects on corporate behavior of conventional capital allocation and shareholder engagement practices based on social and environmental indicators, this research shifts the analysis toward institutional investors themselves, considered as organizations in their own right whose characteristics structure behavior on markets. The analysis builds on three empirical studies, primarily grounded in French private equity, a particularly intermediated asset class. The first, based on an eighteen-month ethnography inside an environmental impact fund, shows how interactions between asset owners and the asset manager stabilize the organizational architecture of an investment vehicle upstream in the financial system, and how this architecture then influences investment and asset-support behaviors. The second extends this framework to 89 private equity funds in France, based on an strong analysis of their contractual and marketing documentation. It highlights heterogeneity in funds' organizational architectures and shows that the coherence between investors' extra-financial ambition and their organizational design is not automatic, and that market standards (SFDR, Impact) do not capture this heterogeneity. The third study examines shareholder engagement cases on private and listed markets, including around TotalEnergies, in order to analyze what these architectures produce in interactions with portfolio companies. The thesis shows that the impact potential of sustainable finance is largely built upstream from financial markets, during the design of investment organizations. It contributes to research on sustainable finance, financial intermediation, and hybrid organizations by proposing an organizational reading of sustainable investment practices, centered on the configurational coherence of investment vehicles. It also offers a reinterpretation of contemporary debates on corporate purpose and governance by shifting the analysis to the level of our financial system, which is supposed to reflect the preferences of its ultimate beneficiaries: citizens

Key words : Sustainable finance, impact investing, private equity, organizational design, financial intermediation, corporate governance

Mots-clés : Finance durable, investissement à impact, capital-investissement, design organisationnel, intermédiation financière, gouvernance d'entreprise