Companies are increasingly expected to contribute, above and beyond a profit motive, to society. Leaders across industries have addressed the expectation by engaging in activism. While some upper ...echelons leaders initiate activism efforts in a way that strengthens their firms, others are struggling to do so without risking brand and business performance. This research addresses this important managerial challenge by conceptualizing activism through a risk paradigm. To do this, we first introduce and define a construct called Enterprise Activism. The construct comprises all forms of firm-initiated activism which can impact brand and business performance, such as brand activism, CEO activism, and corporate activism, regardless of who is making the decision (e.g., Chief Marketing Officer or store manager) or whether a portfolio brand or the corporate brand is involved (e.g., Harris Teeter or the corporate brand, Kroger). We then conceptualize the Enterprise Activism Risk Model, providing insight into how different types of actions can pose market share and positional advantage risks. Leveraging insight from C-level leaders, we identify ways that firm leaders can deploy the model to advance business practice. Finally, we provide a research agenda to develop new theory and evidence to help support and improve practice. The new insight provided herein provides a framework that can enable upper echelons leaders to evaluate, discuss, and navigate activism to minimize business risk.
Cilj ovog istrazivanja bio je provjeriti mogucnost objasnjenja raznih oblika gradanskog aktivizma na temelju osobina licnosti Petofaktorskoga modela lokusa kontrole i nekih sociodemografskih ...varijabli. U istrazivanju je sudjelovalo 278 aktivnih clanova iz 25 organizacija civilnoga drustva. Podaci su prikupljeni BFI upitnikom licnosti, Rotterovom skalom unutarnjeg prema izvanjskom mjestu kontrole potkrepljenja, Indeksom gradanskog aktivizma i Skalom aktivisticke orientacije. Rezultati istrazivanja pokazali su kako je ekstraverzija znacajan pozitivan prediktor gradanskog aktivizma i konvencionalnog aktivizma. Otvorenost prema iskustvu pokazala se kao znacajan pozitivan prediktor konvencionalnog aktivizma, dok se savjesnost pokazala kao znacajan negativan prediktor aktivizma visokog rizika. Lokus kontrole, neuroticizam i ugodnost nisu se pokazali kao znacajni prediktori raznih oblika gradanskog aktivizma. Osobinama licnosti, lokusom kontrole i sociodemografskim varijablama objasnjava se relativno malen udio varijance raznih oblika aktivizma (< 26 %). The aim of this study was to verify the possibility of predicting various forms of civil activism based on personality traits, locus of control, and some sociodemographic variables. In this study the participants were 278 activists from 25 NGOs. Data was collected using the Big Five Inventory, Rotter's Internal-External Locus of Control Scale, Index of Civil Activism, and Activism Orientation Scale. The results indicated that Extraversion was a positive predictor of civil activism and conventional activism. Openness to experience was a positive predictor of conventional activism, while consciousness was a negative predictor of high risk activism. Locus of control, neuroticism and agreeableness were not significant predictors of any of the various activism forms. Personality traits, locus of control, and sociodemographic variables were able to explain a relatively small percentage of variance (< 26%) in different forms of activism. Kljucne rijeci: osobine licnosti, lokus kontrole, gradanski aktivizam, aktivizam visokog rizika, konvencionalni aktivizam Keywords: personality traits, locus of control, civil activism, high risk activism, conventional activism
To Defend this Sunrise examines how black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under ...conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state’s co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of “multicultural dispossession.” This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.
Shareholder Activism Goranova, Maria; Ryan, Lori Verstegen
Journal of management,
07/2014, Volume:
40, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Shareholder activism has become a dynamic institutional force, and its associated, rapidly increasing body of scholarly literature affects numerous disciplines within the organization science ...academy. In addition to equivocal results concerning the impact of shareholder activism on corporate outcomes, the separation of prior research into financial and social activism has left unanswered questions critical for both the scholarly discourse on shareholder activism and the normative debate on shareholder empowerment. The heterogeneity of factors in shareholder activism, such as the firm, activist, and environmental characteristics that promote or inhibit activism, along with the breadth of activism’s issues, methods, and processes, provide a plethora of theoretical and methodological opportunities and challenges for activism researchers. Our multidisciplinary review incorporates the financial and social activism streams and explores shareholder activism heterogeneity and controversy, seeking to provide an impetus for more cohesive conceptual and empirical work in the field.
Recent contributions in feminist historiography challenge the reading of women's movements through the waves metaphor and destabilise rigid periodisations. These contributions have triggered debates ...about the way feminism and women's activism are analysed in the West, but their implications for feminist historiography in non-Western contexts have yet to be discussed. New studies, including our own, on Kemalist and socialist women's activisms suggest that the agendas affiliated with the post-1980 'second wave' of feminism in Turkey had been raised prior to the 1980s. These findings call for critical engagement with the long-established idea that there have been two waves of women's movement in Turkey with a period of 'barren years' in between. In this article we explore the formation and scholarly implications of the waves analysis as a grand narrative in feminist historiography on women's activism in Turkey. We argue that the literature on feminism and women's activism must be rewritten, by not only incorporating the previously omitted histories of women's activism but also challenging the salient assumption that women's organising must be independent and position itself in opposition to the state to qualify as feminist.
Stakeholders have long pressured firms to provide societal benefits in addition to generating shareholder wealth. Such benefits have traditionally come in the form of corporate social responsibility. ...However, many stakeholders now expect firms to demonstrate their values by expressing public support for or opposition to one side of a partisan sociopolitical issue, a phenomenon the authors call “corporate sociopolitical activism” (CSA). Such activities differ from commonly favored corporate social responsibility and have the potential to both strengthen and sever stakeholder relationships, thus making their impact on firm value uncertain. Using signaling and screening theories, the authors analyze 293 CSA events initiated by 149 firms across 39 industries, and find that, on average, CSA elicits an adverse reaction from investors. Investors evaluate CSA as a signal of a firm’s allocation of resources away from profit-oriented objectives and toward a risky activity with uncertain outcomes. The authors further identify two sets of moderators: (1) CSA’s deviation from key stakeholders’ values and brand image and (2) characteristics of CSA’s resource implementation, which affect investor and customer responses. The findings provide new and important implications for marketing theory and practice.
Studying the nexus of media and social movements is a growing subfield in both media and social movement studies. Although there is an increasing number of studies that criticize the overemphasis of ...the importance of media technologies for social movements, questions of non-use, technology push-back and media refusal as explicit political practice have received comparatively little attention. The article charts a typology of digital disconnection as political practice and site of struggle bringing emerging literatures on disconnection, i.e. forms of media technology non-use to the field of social movement studies and studies of civic engagement. Based on a theoretical matrix combining questions of power, collectivity and temporality, we distinguish between digital disconnection as repression, digital disconnection as resistance and digital disconnection as performance and life-style politics. The article discusses the three types of digital disconnection using current examples of protest and social movements that engage with practices of disconnection.
Abbreviations: AFA: Anti-Fascist Action; CHRI: Center for Human Rights in Iran; DDoS: Distributed Denial of Service
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