It has recently been argued that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is ‘political’. It has been neglected however, that firms also operate politically in a traditional sense, in seeking to secure ...favourable political conditions for their businesses. We argue that there are potential synergies between CSR and corporate political activity (CPA) that are often overlooked by firms and that recognition of these synergies will stimulate firms to align their CSR and CPA. We develop a conceptual model that specifies how various configurations of a firm's CSR and CPA – alignment, misalignment, and non‐alignment – affect the firm's reputation beyond the separate reputation effects of CSR and CPA. This model has important implications for understanding how and why firms should pay attention to their CPA and CSR configurations, and thereby contributes to the broader issue of why firms should make sure that they are consistent in terms of responding to stakeholder concerns.
This study tests an integrative model of corporate political action, the filter model, based on the behavioral theory of the firm. The filter model posits that external political, economic, and ...industry environments are mediated by organizational structures and resources to affect a firm’s political actions. The authors rate the filter model’s predictive power against that of an economic-based direct-effects model by examining the efforts of about 1,100 U.S.-domiciled manufacturing firms to influence trade policy. LISREL analysis demonstrates that the integrative filter model provides a superior explanation of corporate political action.
Corporate diplomacy is an emerging concept within the management literature. It describes corporate conduct in the international arena, particularly in challenging political and social environments. ...Management scholarship and practitioner literature have focused on the communication processes and instrumental benefits associated with corporate diplomacy, exploring and explaining how managers negotiate stakeholder relationships to achieve a firm's profit-oriented goals. We enrich the current understanding of corporate diplomacy by viewing it as an umbrella concept that encompasses scholarship from political corporate social responsibility, international relations, diplomacy, and peace studies. We also suggest that corporate diplomacy includes the political role that multinational enterprises play in addressing social issues and governance gaps affecting less developed and potentially conflict-prone host countries where they operate. Based on this approach, the concept of corporate diplomacy builds on the premise that multinationals have an expanded role and responsibilities in terms of global governance and that the practice of corporate diplomacy can play a role in resolving social or political conflicts, leading to wider societal benefits beyond corporate profits. To illustrate our concept of corporate diplomacy, we focus on the governance gaps addressed in the literature on peace through commerce, discussing instances where firms implement corporate diplomacy through peacemaking or peacebuilding to accomplish both private and public goals in conflict-prone regions. We conclude with the practical implications of corporate diplomacy as well as suggestions for research to further develop a richer understanding of corporate diplomacy.
Shareholder activists increasingly pressure corporations on social policy issues; yet, extant research provides little understanding of who these activists are and how they choose their corporate ...targets. In this article, we adopt an activist-centered approach and rely on hybrid organizational identity theory to determine, in a two-phase analysis, how shareholder activists define their economic and social identities and whether these identities are associated with specific target characteristics and tactical strategies. Our findings form the premise of a typology of institutional shareholder activists that is empirically derived and takes into account the wide range of hybrid organizational identities that shareholders exhibit. With a sample of 735 social policy shareholder proposals filed by 104 institutional shareholders in the 2009-2010 period, our study presents one of the first empirical tests examining the heterogeneity of identities within the broad stakeholder category of “social shareholder activists.” Our empirical evidence demonstrates that these shareholders’ mix of economic and social identities is systematically related to their targets’ characteristics and tactical strategies. The implications of our new typology for research on shareholder activism and the value of our findings for managers conclude this article.
Abstract
E‐petitions have evoked an important debate about the potential for digital activism to pressure firms to change social policies and practices. One prevailing perspective is that ...slacktivism, a tendency of online supporters to provide only token support, undermines any possible impact. An alternative perspective is that social media dynamics underlying digital activism offer new pathways for social activists to pressure firms toward social change. To explore this debate, we combine insights from research on social movements, social media, and the logic of connective action to theorize the impact of social media mechanisms such as e‐petition connectivity and velocity. With a hand‐coded database of 1587 e‐petitions targeting Fortune 500 firms from 2012 to 2017 through the platform
Change.org
, we empirically evaluate whether these e‐petitions matter. Our empirical results strongly suggest that e‐petitions do matter, and we explain when digital activism has impact. The activation of social media mechanisms spreads negative information and directly intensifies the threat to the targeted firm's reputation, pressuring firms to concede to e‐petitioner demands. Furthermore, our findings indicate that firm visibility and resource availability can represent boundary conditions for the firm's vulnerability and ability to respond to digital activism.
This article examines the relationship between an aspect of a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate community programs (CCPs), and the effectiveness of its corporate political ...activity (CPA). Developing a conceptual model based on resource-based view of the firm, the authors argue that the mechanism linking a firm’s CCP to CPA mechanism is the effect of CCPs on the development of firm level resources. Specifically, the intensity of a firm’s CCPs enhances a firm’s human capital, organizational capital, and geographic resources, which in turn improve the effectiveness of two key aspects of CPA: information and constituency-building political strategies. This linkage of CCPs to CPA effectiveness may be particularly relevant when the firm faces unfavorable political markets.
Multinational enterprises are aware of their responsibility to protect human rights now more than ever, but severe human rights violations, including physical integrity abuses (e.g., death, torture, ...disappearances), continue unabated. To explore this puzzle, we engage theoretically with the means-ends decoupling literature to examine if and when oil and gas firms’ policies and practices prevent severe human rights abuse. Using an original dataset, we identify two pathways to mitigate means-ends decoupling: (a) while human rights policies alone do not reduce human rights abuses, firms with a high-quality human rights policy over the long-term reduce severe human rights abuses; (b) firms that combine preparedness—which we define as a firm’s capabilities, practices, and engagement—with a long-term human rights policy also reduce the likelihood of human rights abuses. Preparedness, we argue, can lead to reinforcement dynamics between long-term policy efforts and additional capabilities that provide a more holistic understanding of firm behavior.
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