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This symposium seeks to understand the strategies related to sociopolitical activism inside of firms as well as the consequences of that activism. In recent years, organizational leaders have publicly expressed positions on social and political matters not directly related to the firm's primary business activities (Chatterji & Toffel, 2019), while employees have raised social, political, and moral concerns at work and protested a myriad of their organization's practices and policies (e.g., Briscoe & Gupta, 2021; Davis & Kim, 2021). For this symposium, we curated four papers that contribute to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of sociopolitical activism inside firms. These papers provide new insights into how employee activists use contentious activism to target their own firms and how they react to leadership responses to this activism, how organizational leaders frame public stances on sociopolitical topics, and stakeholder reactions to such activism. The papers selected for this symposium shed new light on the complexity of how employees protest their own firms as well as the tradeoffs firm leaders experience when deciding how to express positions on sociopolitical matters. Making Movements: How Employee Activists Engage in Contentious Activism Author: Raquel Renee Kessinger; Boston College Threading the Needle: How Firms Frame their Stances on Polarizing Social Issues Author: Kate Odziemkowska; U. of Toronto, Rotman School of Management Media Narratives in Response to Sociopolitical Activism Author: Genevive Gregorich; Columbia Business School To Speak or Not To Speak? Corporate America and George Floyd Author: Olga Hawn; U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research on organizational responses to normative pressures has cataloged a spectrum of strategies, ranging from accommodation to resistance, but more assertive responses have largely been overlooked. We expand the existing repertoire to include the more aggressive, targeted, and intertemporal response of organizational repression. We define repression as a unique strategy designed to prevent, control, or constrain stakeholder collective action (SCA) that aims to induce organizational change. Repression can target both internal and external stakeholders and can operate both proactively and reactively. Our theorizing focuses first on repression's antecedents and second on how organizations select among myriad repressive tactics. We propose that organizations are more likely to repress SCA when they perceive stakeholders as i) having potential, but less actual power relative to the focal organization, ii) less legitimate, and iii) threatening core business activities. Further, we argue that the selection of repressive tactics will vary across i) internal and external stakeholders and ii) temporal stages of SCA. Our theory builds from and contributes to the neo-institutional, nonmarket strategy, and stakeholder theory literatures. Ultimately, we seek to draw scholarly and practitioner attention to repression, as its use has sweeping consequences for organizations, stakeholders, and society more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increasing attention of management scholars to the study of societal grand challenges and the progress made with promoting sustainability programs in the private sector, societal challenges such as economic inequality, public health hazards, climate change, and social divide, have worsened. The purpose of this symposium is to bring together leading scholars to engage in a debate and discuss their views and research concerning established and emerging approaches in management research for solving societal grand challenges. The panelists will identify advantages, limitations and contingencies of focused change interventions and broad system changes as well as debate the private versus public responsibilities for solving societal grand challenges, while considering new forms of economic systems and organizational governance. Thus, the panelists will share diverse views on the topic and deliberate with the audience about emerging perspectives, practices, and promising avenues for future research on solutions to societal challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporations and CEOs are increasingly expected to speak up and speak out on socially contentious issues. We examine investor and public reactions to corporate statements made in the aftermath of George Floyd's death. We conduct content analysis of these statements and assess which Fortune 500 companies issued the statements, how long it took to publish them and through which channel, what sentiment the statements contained, and ultimately, how investors and the public reacted to them. Results show significant variation in how companies responded to George Floyd's death and in how stakeholders reacted. Almost half of Fortune 500 issued statements and 99 made a pledge. Yet investors, on average, reacted negatively to these statements; and even more negatively if companies made a pledge. Surprisingly, they reacted more positively to statements with more positive and negative emotion. The public reaction on Twitter, on the other hand, resulted in more negative emotion and anger in response to tweets of companies with more conservative CEOs. The longer it took to issue the statement, the fewer replies and words in these replies the public used. Domestic firms generated more negative emotion and swearing in replies to their tweet. Other elements of tweets generated other public reactions. Our study sheds light on the trade-offs involved in organizational decision-making regarding social issues and the subsequent evaluations by different stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Companies face pressure from different stakeholders to address various environmental, social and governance issues. In their efforts to engage with these issues, they might pursue symbolic or substantive actions, either pre-emptively (proactive) or in response to specific targeted threats (reactive). Yet we know relatively little about how different stakeholders react to this repertoire of corporate actions. We ask this question in the context of gender inequality, an issue that has become increasingly salient for companies due to heightened societal attention culminating in the #MeToo movement. We analyze reactions to corporate actions among two stakeholder groups: "Wall Street" (investors) and "Main Street" (the general public). Our sample includes 886,000 company-day observations covering 442 companies between 2015 and 2020. We record 607 gender-related corporate actions across this sample. We find that while Wall Street does not react to any type of gender-related actions, Main Street punishes symbolic and reactive actions with reduced consumer perceptions of brand equity and declining social media valence. Their negative reaction is not evident before the #MeToo movement but is strong in its aftermath; moreover, the reduced consumer perception is moderated by negative social media. Our study shows that not all firm actions are created equal, and not all audiences value them equally, and highlights that it is important to delineate the different groups of stakeholders and their responses to different types of firm actions when making strategic decisions about how to act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of societal grand challenges has drawn increasing attention in management research. Despite the various remedies that were proposed, challenges such as economic inequality and the concentration of wealth, climate change, overuse of resources, hunger, and social divide and unrest, have worsened. This symposium takes stock of extant approaches and offers novel approaches for overcoming these challenges. The panelists will share their views and research findings concerning the limitations of established approaches in management research for solving societal grand challenges and highlight the prospects of some emerging approaches. Finally, the panelists will engage in discussion with the audience to encourage and direct further research on possible solutions to these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop a conceptual understanding of how, when, and why organizations respond to normative pressures. We argue that the materiality of the issue at stake and the cost-benefit analysis of resource mobilization to address the issue are the main factors in the underlying organizational decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The business case for CSR is a dominant paradigm in management research which argues that organizations should pursue CSR to maximize profits. However, stakeholders increasingly demand managers consider the short-and long-term societal impact of their decisions, such that many stakeholders likely remain unsatisfied by CSR that is primarily oriented toward short-term financial goals. Given this, two dominant theoretical perspectives of CSR have emerged over time: (1) an instrumental perspective that reflects the traditional business case for CSR, and (2) a more normative injunctive perspective that argues organizations have a duty to move beyond financial goals by reducing harm and creating societal value. For this panel symposium we bring together esteemed scholars with expertise in CSR and corporate sustainability to debate whether, why or why not, and how researchers should re-conceptualize the business case for CSR by comparing, contrasting, and reconciling the instrumental and injunctive perspectives of CSR. The panel will (1) offer a current perspective on the state of the business case for CSR, its importance, and its shortcomings; (2) debate the extent to which researchers should seek to re-conceptualize the business case for CSR; and, finally, (3) propose a launching point for future research on the topic. We thereby seek to chart a path forward for researchers interested in CSR at a time when increasingly impact-oriented stakeholder demands blur the line between instrumental and injunctive perspectives of CSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms face growing pressures from multiple stakeholders on a variety of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. When do they respond, and why? We use media criticisms to identify a number of ESG issues that organizations face simultaneously -- this allows us to model their interdependencies. We hypothesize that the risk of peer contamination and the need for reputational cleansing motivate organizations to respond to a focal issue to a greater extent, and that in conjunction with issue advantageousness and media gravity, both mechanisms produce even stronger effects on organizational action. Importantly, given that firms are criticized both in traditional and social media, our primary data, collected by RepRisk daily by screening over 80,000 sources globally in 15 languages, captures multiple stakeholders and media sources. This large and unique dataset involving 3,037 firms and 20 ESG issues between 2007 and 2016 allows us to produce two sets of results -- panel data and matching analyses -- generating a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the organizational decision-making process for responding to ESG issues. We contribute to the social evaluation literature, the attention-based view of the firm, the nonmarket strategy area, and research on the limits of media effects on organizational decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop and test the idea that financial markets reward firms for "picking sides" along ideological faultlines. Building on sociology research showing that the views of Americans on certain moral values remain polarized, and that Americans associate products with moral values, we suggest that some individuals will reward firms for supporting a contested social issue--and some, for opposing it. We test our argument using data from the Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which scores a large number of U.S. companies on their LGBTQ-related policies and activities (2002-18). We make several observations: (1) firms tend to score the highest (indicating support for LGBTQ issues) when they are headquartered in liberal states and operate in non-heavily regulated, consumer-facing industries; (2) CEI scores become more polarized over time, with a substantial minority of firms reducing their score (i.e., eliminating HR policies supporting LGBTQ employees) and a substantial majority receiving the highest score; and (3) firms receiving very high scores experience a stock-price increase when the index is released, as do firms receiving very low scores. We draw broader implications for the corporate social responsibility and social movements literatures, as well as for popular accounts of a "culture war" in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and when does national culture influence corporate social performance (CSP)? We use culture as an important new lens through which to examine CSP -one that has not been explored holistically to date. We first uncover general patterns in a multi-national, multi-organizational study of CSP, based on social and environmental metrics, using three different measures of national culture (Hofstede, Schwartz, and GLOBE). We then examine various country-, industry-, firm-, and individual-level moderators of this relationship. We find that culture influences the degree of CSP around the world and that this influence is moderated by how globalized the home country is, which industry the firm operates in, whether it is domestic or multinational, and whether it has board directors of a different nationality. We show that higher CSP is associated with greater uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, egalitarianism and power distance, and lower performance orientation and masculinity. Surprisingly, CSP is lower in cultures with higher collectivism and more humane orientation. Our cultural perspective of sustainability offers a new way of seeing why some firms excel in CSP and others lag behind. This paper contributes to practice and theory of sustainable development, with implications for the literature on corporate sustainability and national culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how social perception of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and irresponsibility (CSI) affects organizational outcomes. Drawing from the social psychology literature on stereotypes, we argue that two fundamental dimensions of social perception--warmth and competence-- mediate and moderate the effects of socially responsible and irresponsible practices. We propose that firms engaging in CSR are perceived as higher in warmth and, by default, competence than firms engaging in CSI; moreover, different perceptions of warmth and competence of the organization explain the asymmetric rewards and penalties for CSR and CSI. We conduct two experiments: Experiment 1 links CSR with perceptions of warmth and competence, and shows that warmth perceptions mediate the relationship between CSR and important organizational outcomes, such as sales and reputation. Experiment 2 adds information on firms' countries of origin to show that CSR rewards and CSI penalties will differ depending on the (mis)alignment of CSR strategy with country stereotypes. We find that firms from high-warmth countries (USA, Portugal) receive lower benefits for CSR and pay higher penalties for CSI than firms from low-warmth countries (Germany, Pakistan); furthermore, this effect reverses when combined with high competence. This micro-macro study extends social evaluation, strategic CSR, and international management literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the strategic impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the international expansion of firms from emerging markets. The conceptual contribution is to help develop a multidimensional model of organizational legitimacy that focuses on the different dimensions of organizational legitimacy, which prior research has recognized but under- emphasized: this paper distinguishes between home country legitimacy and social legitimacy, and examines their interdependent effect on business activity and performance. The core argument is that the two dimensions of legitimacy can substitute for each other in affecting organizational outcomes. In particular, international expansion by a firm with low home country legitimacy (the perception that the actions of the firm's home country meet the norms and values of the host country) is more likely to succeed when the firm possesses firm-level social legitimacy (the perception that the actions of the firm in the home country align with the norms and values of the general society in the host country). The study uses a large-scale quantitative analysis of almost 5,000 cross-border M&A deals from 1990 to 2011, where the acquirers come from Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The results show that CSR helps overcome home country disadvantages, leading to a greater likelihood of deal completion and to faster deal completion, supporting the multidimensional view of legitimacy and the strategic literature on CSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]