Social movements and corporate political activity: Corporate/regulatory responses to social activism

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
pp. 10592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hadani ◽  
Jonathan P Doh ◽  
Marguerite Schneider
Author(s):  
Ann Brooks

This chapter addresses the significance of social movements in accelerating women into the public sphere as public intellectuals. Indeed, the role of social movements was important in defining women public intellectuals politically. The growth of social movements has to be set alongside the expansion of higher education for women, as well as the expansion of the print industry. This led to an expansion and broadening of the base of women's participation in political activity, particularly around specific campaigns and causes. Women were actively involved, individually and collectively, in a number of campaigns prior to the emergence of the suffrage movement. Ultimately, the intersection of gender and class was an important factor leading to the growth of both political activism and, more specifically, the emergence of the suffragettes and later women's liberation movement (WLM). Analysis shows that the motivation of most women was pragmatic and issue based as opposed to ideological. Issue-based politics covered all social classes and thus brought women together in social activism and within social movements.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Cory Maks-Solomon ◽  
Josiah Mark Drewry

Abstract Most scholarship on corporate political activity assumes that market forces wholly motivate firms’ political strategies. However, this conventional wisdom overlooks the role of employee groups in encouraging corporate activism. To evaluate whether employee groups are associated with firm social activism, we gathered all public statements in support of LGBT rights made by the five hundred largest publicly-traded US corporations from 2011 to 2017. In an exploratory observational analysis, we found robust evidence that in highly-educated workforces LGBT employee groups persuade management to take public stances in support of LGBT rights. Our findings suggest that internal pressure promotes activism on LGBT issues, and market, political, or social forces are insufficient to fully explain firm social activism. Although each does play an important role, since employee groups will use political, social, and especially market-based arguments to convince their managers to engage in activism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 161 (4) ◽  
pp. 855-876
Author(s):  
Tahiru Azaaviele Liedong ◽  
Daniel Aghanya ◽  
Tazeeb Rajwani

Abstract There is a lack of research about the political strategies used by firms in emerging countries, mainly because the literature often assumes that Western-oriented corporate political activity (CPA) has universal application. Drawing on resource-dependency logics, we explore why and how firms orchestrate CPA in the institutionally challenging context of Nigeria. Our findings show that firms deploy four context-fitting but ethically suspect political strategies: affective, financial, pseudo-attribution and kinship strategies. We leverage this understanding to contribute to CPA in emerging countries by arguing that corporate political strategies are shaped by the reciprocity and duality of dependency relationships between firms and politicians, and also by advancing that these strategies reflect institutional weaknesses and unique industry-level opportunities. Importantly, we shed light on the muttered dark side of CPA. We develop a CPA framework and discuss the research, practical and policy implications of our findings.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Amado Bahia Gama ◽  
Gisele Walczak Galilea ◽  
Rodrigo Bandeira-de-Mello ◽  
Rosilene Marcon

Agency theory explanations for corporate political activity assume that managers distort resource allocation to invest in political connections to pursue personal benefits. While distorted resource allocations yield poor earning quality, we expect that companies with efficient governance may curb this opportunistic behavior. We used matching procedures to identify the effects of financing political campaigns on the earning quality of the firm. We assembled an original panel of listed firms in Brazil from 1998 to 2013. We found that firms that donated to electoral campaigns had a lower earning quality than nondonor firms. Firms with superior corporate governance instruments were able to reduce the harmful effects on earning quality. These results support the tenets of agency theory in explaining why firms engage in politics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 1084-1113
Author(s):  
Jianjun Zhang ◽  
Pei Sun ◽  
Kunyuan Qiao

ABSTRACTManagerial networking with political actors has long been recognized as a crucial co-option strategy to navigate the challenging institutional environment in emerging economies. However, we know much less about what drives the variation of political networking investment by private ventures. Drawing on resource dependence theory, we unpack the dyadic business-government relations and identify the key organizational and environmental factors that shape the power dependence relationships between private ventures and the government. By examining power imbalance and mutual dependence in this dyadic relationship and considering both the necessity and the capability of political networking, we develop hypotheses regarding the ways in which size-, connection-, and location-based dependencies affect firms’ political networking intensity. These hypotheses are tested through a unique survey of Chinese private ventures. Our study finds that political networking intensity (1) has an inverted U-shaped relationship with firm size, (2) is negatively associated with the presence of embedded political ties while positively associated with that of achieved political connections, and (3) is smaller when the focal firm is located in business development zones. This research bears rich implications for our understanding of corporate political activity in emerging economies from a resource dependence lens.


2007 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saku Mantere ◽  
Kalle Pajunen ◽  
Juha-Antti Lamberg

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