El libro Micropolítica del terror y de la resistencia. Militantes de alto riesgo, escuadrones de la muerte y centros clandestinos de detención está dividido en dos partes. La primera ofrece al lector ...una radiografía de la estructura burocrática de los centros clandestinos de detención, como maquinaria de guerra deliberada para conocer el modus operandi de las organizaciones guerrilleras y eliminarlas. La segunda parte está vinculada a la primera: a partir de cinco trayectorias de vida, Manolo E. Vela Castañeda muestra el escenario de la militancia de hombres y mujeres en la Ciudad de Guatemala tras la reconformación de las estrategias de guerra.
Research Summary
This article examines whether—in the absence of mandated disclosure requirements—shareholder activism can elicit greater disclosure of firms' exposure to climate change risks. We ...find that environmental shareholder activism increases the voluntary disclosure of climate change risks, especially if initiated by institutional investors, and even more so if initiated by long‐term institutional investors. We also find that companies that voluntarily disclose climate change risks following environmental shareholder activism achieve a higher valuation postdisclosure, suggesting that investors value transparency with respect to firms' exposure to climate change risks.
Managerial Summary
Climate change poses increasing risks to companies. Yet, despite the growing importance of climate change risks, little is known about companies' exposure to climate change risks, their disclosure of these risks, and what strategic actions they take to manage and mitigate these risks. In this study, we examine whether—in the absence of mandatory disclosure—shareholders can elicit greater corporate transparency with respect to climate change risks. We find that shareholder activism is effective, especially if initiated by long‐term institutional investors. We also find that the stock market reacts positively to companies' climate risk disclosure following environmental shareholder activism, suggesting that investors value transparency with respect to firms' exposure to climate change risks.
Recognizing the need to better understand institutional change processes in authoritarian states, which play an increasingly prominent role in the world economy, we examine the efficacy of civic ...activism aimed at spurring governmental action concerning the environmental performance of firms in China. We highlight the paradox of “responsive authoritarianism” on display in China: to avoid needing to rule by coercion alone, the government seeks citizens’ feedback and tolerates pressures for change, but at the same time it resists the associated legitimacy threats regarding its capacity to rule. Local governments and the media play crucial and dual roles in this system: they mitigate change pressures from civic activism that takes place within the state’s systems, but they magnify change pressures from publicly visible civic activism occurring outside those systems. We test our conceptual model using a unique data set of environmental penalties imposed on Chinese publicly listed firms from 2007 to 2011. Our findings contribute to understanding processes of institutional change and outcomes of social movements.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1212
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How do protest actions impact public support for social movements? Here we test the claim that extreme protest actions-protest behaviors perceived to be harmful to others, highly disruptive, or ...both-typically reduce support for social movements. Across 6 experiments, including 3 that were preregistered, participants indicated less support for social movements that used more extreme protest actions. This result obtained across a variety of movements (e.g., animal rights, anti-Trump, anti-abortion) and extreme protest actions (e.g., blocking highways, vandalizing property). Further, in 5 of 6 studies, negative reactions to extreme protest actions also led participants to support the movement's central cause less, and these effects were largely independent of individuals' prior ideology or views on the issue. In all studies we found effects were driven by diminished social identification with the movement. In Studies 4-6, serial mediation analyses detailed a more in-depth model: observers viewed extreme protest actions to be immoral, reducing observers' emotional connection to the movement and, in turn, reducing identification with and support for the movement. Taken together with prior research showing that extreme protest actions can be effective for applying pressure to institutions and raising awareness of movements, these findings suggest an activist's dilemma, in which the same protest actions that may offer certain benefits are also likely to undermine popular support for social movements.
Research Summary
We investigate how hedge fund activism affects firms' financial and social performance. So far, research has examined either the impact of hedge fund activism on firms' short‐term ...financial performance, or how other types of shareholder activism affect firms' social performance. Crossing these boundaries with data on 1,324 activist hedge fund campaigns between 2000 and 2016, we find a clear trade‐off associated with hedge fund activism: benefits are shareholder‐centric and short‐lived, reflected in immediate increases in market value and profitability; however, these increases come at a mid‐ to long‐term cost to other stakeholders, captured by decreases in operating cash flow, investment spending, and social performance. We discuss our findings from a multi‐stakeholder perspective to move beyond a polarizing debate about the merits of hedge fund activism.
Managerial Summary
With hedge fund activism on the rise, determining the consequences of equity ownership by activist hedge funds on target companies' short‐term and long‐term financial and social performance takes on central importance. In this study, we find hedge fund campaigns are associated with three broad sets of outcomes for targeted companies: (a) an immediate but short‐lived increase in market value and profitability, and an immediate and long‐lived decline in operating cash flow; (b) decreases in number of employees, operating expenses, R&D spending, and capital expenditures; and (c) the suppression of corporate social performance. By capturing the range of positive and negative effects on target companies, our study presents the competing implications of hedge fund activism on business and society.
As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and ...commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the militarized response that followed circulated widely through social media networks. Through a theorization of hashtag usage, we discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. We show how engaging in "hashtag activism" can forge a shared political temporality, and, additionally, we examine how social media platforms can provide strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the materiality of racialized bodies. Our analysis combines approaches from linguistic anthropology and social movements research to investigate the semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in "hashtag ethnography."
This article starts from the recognition that digital social movements studies have progressively disregarded collective identity and the importance of internal communicative dynamics in contemporary ...social movements, in favour of the study of the technological affordances and the organizational capabilities of social media. Based on a two-year multimodal ethnography of the Mexican #YoSoy132 movement, the article demonstrates that the concept of collective identity is still able to yield relevant insights into the study of current movements, especially in connection with the use of social media platforms. Through the appropriations of social media, Mexican students were able to oppose the negative identification fabricated by the PRI party, reclaim their agency and their role as heirs of a long tradition of rebellion, generate collective identification processes, and find 'comfort zones' to lower the costs of activism, reinforcing their internal cohesion and solidarity. The article stresses the importance of the internal communicative dynamics that develop in the backstage of social media (Facebook chats and groups) and through instant messaging services (WhatsApp), thus rediscovering the pivotal linkage between collective identity and internal communication that characterized the first wave of research on digital social movements. The findings point out how that internal cohesion and collective identity are fundamentally shaped and reinforced in the social media backstage by practices of 'ludic activism', which indicates that social media represent not only the organizational backbone of contemporary social movements, but also multifaceted ecologies where a new, expressive and humorous 'communicative resistance grammar' emerges.
Prior studies have tended to focus on the figure of consumer movements rather than the ground from which they arise. This AI-assisted netnography interprets data from the WallStreetBets (WSB) ...subreddit during the GameStop short squeeze and for a period of 2.5 years afterwards. Analysis reveals an intimate relationship between the subreddit and portrayals of participants' everyday lives, connecting financial strategies to jokes, memes, banter, and personal anecdotes. Collective identities are forged through discussions of life situations, populist counternarratives, shared cultural referents, and self-deprecation. Findings reveal digital activism ranging from the everyday and transitional to the extraordinary, bridging literatures on fluid consumer movements with everyday politics. Results affirm the value of collective identification to digital activism and suggest conceptual linkages to participatory culture and infinite gameplay.
This paper presents an account of technopolitics in Mastodon, noncommercial, decentralized social media. Mastodon’s significance has further risen in light of Twitter/X’s recent decimation of its ...public sphere functions; a noncommercial and ideally public alternative to commercial social media is (even more) urgently needed. The autoethnographic narrative presented here, hinging on a dispute initiated and sustained by an intemperate donkeykeeper in Europe, is idiosyncratic, to say the least. But it reveals meaningful aspects of the network’s features, which point to both the promise of such an architecture and to how it falls short in hailing other users and facilitating transparent communication, two important and related functions in democratic communication online. If we appraise Mastodon in view of civic commitments, this peculiar episode contains lessons for thinking about distribution, conviviality, and their intersections in social media. I show how Mastodon has been designed for “lossy distribution” and argue that this has implications for optimizing democratic functions of noncommercial social media.
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