Outcomes of Anti-corporate Protest: The U.S. Fortune 500, 2005-2010

• In Event: 481 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Paper Sessions. Organizational Governance, Deviance and Protest

Abstract

Quantitative social movement research assumes that corporate targets respond to protest demands in isolation. Yet, we know that targets are not atomistic actors, and that large corporations specifically are frequently able to work collectively around political issues. Do corporations respond to protest demands individually or in socially constructed ways with other firms? I address this through an examination of protests against U.S. Fortune 500 firms over 6 years (2005-2010). I created a dataset of protests (N= 420) and incorporate data on the social embeddedness of corporate targets (through board of director networks and corporate involvement in policy-planning organizations) to test the effect of corporate networks on a firm’s behavior. I find that embeddedness in social networks is associated with increased hostility to protest (seen in fewer concessions and more retaliations against protestors). However, this is moderated in two key ways. 1) Embeddedness in the interlocking directorate network leads to more openness to protest demands prior to the financial crisis of 2008. 2) The effect of policy group affiliations is shaped by the ideologies of the groups in which the firm is embedded: firms connected to relatively liberal groups are more amenable to protestors while those connected to conservative groups are more hostile. These findings control for typical firm-specific features, protest features, and protest costs imposed on the firm. This suggests that a) social movements are better equipped by understanding the embeddedness of business targets in corporate networks; b) this has very real implications for movement successes.

Author

• Tarun Banerjee, University of Pittsburgh