It's a concept steeped in history: limiting investments to businesses that conform to one's particular ethical standards. Seventeenth-century Quakers avoided companies that conflicted with their religious beliefs, as did 19th century groups of Christian investors who shied away from firms that dealt in alcohol and pornography.
Today, the most controversial form of socially responsible investing (SRI) is divestment -- the formal process of selling off shares in specific businesses. The technique gained its initial strength in the 1960s among college students protesting American involvement in the Vietnam War.
With no umbrella group coordinating the many divestment causes, analysts find it difficult to estimate the number of current campaigns.
The success of such efforts is just as ambiguous as their actual number. Divestment campaigns, many of which are centered on college campuses, have met both victory and failure in recent years. Relatively few have managed to gain widespread awareness and support.
Separation from tobacco interests has probably been the SRI movement's most successful cause. By 2000, 96 percent of all organizations that look to invest responsibly had withdrawn from tobacco stocks.
Meanwhile, campaigns to end business with less controversial corporations have yet to catch fire.
For inspiration, many divestment supporters look to a massive, and overwhelmingly successful, anti-Apartheid campaign that culminated during the early 1990s. Calling for divestment from Apartheid-era South Africa, institutions nationwide dropped their investments in corporations that operated in that country.
That success, however, only came after 15 years of persistent efforts.
At Dartmouth, the Board of Trustees decided to divest from South Africa in November 1989. In 1993, the Board decided to divest again -- this time from Hydro Quebec, a company that allegedly exploited Native Americans and damaged the environment.
But in the past decade, the College has been largely removed from the divestment debate, even as activists elsewhere have continued to push their institutions to end financial support of companies whose practices they question.
In 2001, a student-led effort at the University of Virginia forced that school to divest more than $1 million in stock from Unocal, a California-based oil company that built a pipeline in Burma, a country in southeast Asia known for widespread human rights abuses.
Despite these successes, many of those advocating for SRI still view divestment as a periphery movement. Others expect that it will gain more clout in future years.
At the Washington-based Social Investment Forum, representative Fran Teplitz noted that most of SIF's 500 members are concerned with portfolio screening rather than divestiture.
"Up until recently, it's been sort of a fringe strategy," Center for Corporate Citizenship executive director Bradley Googins said. "It's moving now into a much more vibrant arena of social investing, as over the last five years there's been a growing disenchantment with the shareholder-only view of capitalism."
Changing expectations of acceptable corporate behavior have given strength to divestment activists furthering their causes, Googins said.
University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Michael Knoll added that because of pressure induced by the SRI movement, profit maximization cannot be a company's sole concern.
But still, many divestment campaigns are viewed as extremist movements by the majority of consumers. Current efforts to divest from Israel at dozens of colleges and universities throughout the nation have yet to garner support from the administration officials who make investment decisions.
Divestment from Israel is a particularly polarizing topic because supporters have portrayed Israel as a racist, apartheid state, while detractors have alleged that anti-Semitism underlies the movement. Meanwhile, those on both sides agree that corporations have maintained and strengthened their financial ties to the Jewish state primarily for business, not ideological, reasons.
