This paper provides preliminary insights into the process of sense-making and developing meaning with regard to corporate social responsibility (CSR) within 18 Dutch companies. It is based upon a research project carried out within the framework of the Dutch National Research Programme on CSR. The paper questions how change agents promoting CSR within these companies made sense of the meaning of CSR. How did they use language (and other instruments) to stimulate and underpin the contextual essence of CSR? Why did they do that in this particular way? What were the consequences of this approach for shaping the process of CSR in their company? Did their efforts contribute to a new way of thinking and acting or was it merely putting old wine in new barrels? A preliminary conclusion is that change agents use above all linguistic artefacts (words and notions) and carry out practical projects while constructing meaning. Still, the meaning of meaning itself remains highly intangible, situational and personality related.

The article analyzes the evolution of the Amsterdam capital market as a consequence of Dutch overseas expansion and the introduction of transferable VOC shares. Offering investors prospects of speculative gains without serious loss of liquidity, these instruments created a booming secondary market offering a wide range of allied credit techniques. By 1609 this market had become sufficiently strong to dictate terms for new public debt issues. These findings show that, contrary to commonly held notions about the emergence of secondary markets, private finance took precedence over public finance in the Dutch Republic.

With their legal personhood, permanent capital, transferable shares, separation of ownership and management, and limited liability, the Dutch and English colonial trading companies VOC and EIC are considered institutional breakthroughs. We analyze the VOC's business operations and financial policy and show that its novel corporate form owed less to foresight than to piecemeal engineering to remedy design flaws. The crucial feature of managerial limited liability was not, as previously thought, integral to that design, but emerged only after protracted experiments with various solutions to the company's financial bottlenecks. Legal form followed economic function, not the other way around.

The debate over the institutions that link economic growth to public finance tends to disregard the need for savings to finance growing public debt. In seventeenth-century Holland the structure, size, and issuing rates of the debt were determined by investors' preferences, wealth accumulation, and changing private investment opportunities. The growth of savings enabled the creation of a huge debt largely with short-term bills. Issuing rates dropped because savings outstripped private investment alternatives. In Holland, and probably elsewhere as well, credible commitment and efficient fiscal institutions were necessary, but not sufficient to create liquid secondary markets and low costs of capital. he main reason for studying early modern public finance lies in its presumed function as foundation for modern economic growth. Proposed first by Peter Dickson in 1967, this idea emphasizes the importance of the switch from haphazard and expensive short-term borrowing by monarchs to a consolidated long-term debt under parliamentary control, more secure, traded on liquid secondary markets, and thus cheaper. 1 Following Dickson, Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast wrote a celebrated article highlighting the institutional