Bad Company: Shifts in Social Activists’ Tactics and Resources After Industry Crises

Social movement organizations (SMOs) are increasingly using collaborative tactics to engage firms. Implications of this are not well understood by researchers. This study investigates one risk that looms over such collaborations: if the corporate partner is later implicated in an industry scandal. Ideas are investigated in the context of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. First, we find that industry scandals differentially affect contentious and collaborative SMOs’ ability to mobilize resources. SMOs that had collaborated with the oil and gas industry before the spill suffered from reduced public support after the spill, and those that had contentiously interacted with the industry enjoyed increased contributions. Second, we find that industry scandals affect SMOs’ willingness to collaborate with firms in the future. We show that the Horizon oil spill produced a broad chilling effect on environmental SMOs’ collaborations with firms both within and outside of the oil and gas industry. Our findings show that there are risks inherent to a collaborative strategy that cannot be fully mitigated. Further, we demonstrate that industry scandals represent critical exogenous events that affect social activists’ tactical repertoires for engaging in private politics.

Approaching the Necessity of Pediatric Palliative Care in Colombia: A challenge for the Health System. A Retrospective Cross Sectional Study.

Background: Pediatric Palliative Care (PPC) focuses on achieving quality of life and control the symptoms for children during the sickness process, also provide support to the family in order to relief suffering and give response to needs assessment. In Colombia, this subspecialty does not exist, as a result of not having clinic practice guides and information about the population who benefit under 18 years of age. This study is to approach the necessity of PPC in our country, defining a methodology to characterize and estimate prevalence of pediatric population who may need special care in order to develop an attention model. Methods: A retrospective descriptive study was conducted among 80,926 members between 0 and 18 years of age who has a private health insurance in Colombia between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2018. Data was obtained from the insurance transactional database. Patients were grouped based on the Association for children with life threatening conditions and their families (ACT) of the Royal College of Pediatrics four classifications plus perinatal group. Results were processed and analyzed using descriptive statistical functions in Microsoft Excel. Results: 1,694 patients (2,09%) were eligible to enter a PPC program according to their IDC-10 diagnoses based on ACT plus Perinatal Group classification. Approximately 54% were male, 57.97% were considered early childhood, 26.56% childhood and 15,47% adolescence. With regards to ACT classification and Perinatal Group; 55.55% of patients had diagnosis from Perinatal Group (55.55%) followed by group 4 (23.2%) and group 1 non-cancer (9.68%). Conclusion: Being able to identify patients in need of PPC programs early may increase it being utilize at the time of diagnosis and not wait till the end of life. This might also help alleviate misconception of PPC only being offered during the end of life period. This study should help with the development of public and private politics aimed to promote the creation of PPC programs in developing countries.

Approaching the necessity of pediatric palliative care in Colombia: a challenge for the health system.

Background: Pediatric Palliative Care (PPC) focuses on achieving quality of life and control the symptoms for children during the sickness process, also provide support to the family in order to relief suffering and give response to needs assessment. In Colombia, this subspecialty does not exist, as a result of not having clinic practice guides and information about the population who benefit under 18 years of age. This study is to approach the necessity of PPC in our country, defining a methodology to characterize and estimate prevalence of pediatric population who may need special care in order to develop an attention model. Methods: A retrospective descriptive study was conducted among 80,926 members between 0 and 18 years of age who has a private health insurance in Colombia between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2018. Data was obtained from the insurance transactional database. Patients were grouped based on the Association for children with life threatening conditions and their families (ACT) of the Royal College of Pediatrics four classifications plus perinatal group. Results were processed and analyzed using descriptive statistical functions in Microsoft Excel. Results: 1,694 patients (2,09%) were eligible to enter a PPC program according to their IDC-10 diagnoses based on ACT plus group 5 classification. Approximately 54% were male, 57.97% were considered early childhood, 26.56% childhood and 15,47% adolescence. With regards to ACT classification and group 5; 55.55% of patients had diagnosis from group 5 (55.55%) followed by group 4 (23.2%) and group 1 non-cancer (9.68%). Being able to identify patients in need of PPC programs early may increase it being utilize at the time of diagnosis and not wait till the end of life. This might also help alleviate misconception of PPC only being offered during the end of life period. This study should help with the development of public and private politics aimed to promote the creation of PPC programs in developing countries.

Strategic Activism in an Uncertain World

We model private politics in the presence of two-sided incomplete information. An interest group (IG) threatens to inform consumers about a firm’s damaging technology should the firm not adopt a clean technology. The IG does not know how costly adopting the clean technology is and the firm does not know how much the IG cares about the damages. In equilibrium an IG who cares a lot signals its type to the firm and the firm is more inclined to adopt the clean technology if it receives such a signal. However, impasses can occur: the firm does not adopt the clean technology despite the fact that the IG has signaled that it cares a lot and threatens to inform a large fraction of the consumer population. The IG never informs all consumers: as soon as a certain fraction of the consumers is informed by the IG the firm reduces its price and thereby reveals to the remaining consumers that it is employing a damaging technology. The IG’s actions increase consumer well-being, but decrease total welfare unless the cost of adopting the clean technology is likely to be low. Yet, since the IG is inclined to target firms with this property, a regulator might want to delegate information provision to the IG.

Conclusions: What Have We Learned?

This chapter summarizes each preceding chapter and then offers lessons for scholars and practitioners. Scholars should note the value of dynamic modeling in understanding interactions between activists and firms in the realm of private politics. Activists and firms can use the insights of the model to approach corporate campaigns more strategically. For example, for activists, the framework suggests that efforts aimed at hurting the reputations of firms can do more than serve an ideological aim at making companies look bad, or as a device to threaten harm. Activists can play the role of private regulators when effective public regulation is missing. For leaders of firms, the analysis highlights that corporate social responsibility and other initiatives can serve to enhance a firm’s reputation, but they can also be viewed as a form of risk management in the face of activist pressures that can potentially harm reputation.

An Introduction to Corporate Campaigns

In recent years, many activists have concluded that public processes, such as new legislation, regulatory enforcement, or lawsuits, respond too slowly and can be blocked too easily by special interests. In response they have turned to private politics instead. Private politics refers to actions by private interests, such as activists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), that target private agents, typically firms. This chapter describes two key elements of private politics: corporate campaigns and private regulation. It discusses the logic of corporate campaigns, how firms endeavor to respond to them, and empirical evidence on the consequences of campaigns. It then turns to private regulation, and its close counterpart, corporate social responsibility. The chapter raises a puzzle about corporate social responsibility that the models in later chapters will help resolve. The chapter concludes by providing an overview of the remainder of the book.

Understanding the Organization of Green Activism: Sociological and Economic Perspectives

Environmental activists are an important voice in public and private politics, urging governmental and corporate responses and solutions to ongoing environmental damage. Scholars have become increasingly interested in understanding environmental movements and the influence of environmental activist organizations. This article describes two literatures that have analyzed the dynamics and outcomes of activism, one based in a sociological examination of social movements and the other in economic analysis of activist nongovernmental organizations. Although the literatures sometimes use different language and methods, they have much in common. We highlight the consistent themes—in particular the shared respect for the rational actor model—the particular strengths of each tradition, and directions for future research where synergies between the disciplines could be more fully exploited.