Leveraging Ambiguity: A Long-Game Strategy of Corporate Reform Activism

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: Movements at the Organizational Level

Abstract

Research on corporate reform activism has primarily examined how various categories of activist secure concessions from their target firms. Far less attention has been paid to what happens after those firms adopt corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Yet reform campaigns rarely conclude with corporate concessions. This study investigates the strategic processes through which activists sustain reform efforts once firms claim to have addressed their concerns. Drawing on an 18-month ethnography of a professional advocacy organization and its multi-year engagements with three Fortune 500 firms, this paper develops a process model explaining how corporate reform activism is sustained over time. I argue that the polysemic character of CSR – its lack of fixed standards and universally accepted benchmarks – provides activists with a strategic resource. Rather than allowing firms to declare CSR issues resolved, activists leverage the interpretive ambiguity of CSR to keep debates over “responsible business” open. The analysis identifies three recursive subprocesses: problematizing, negotiating, and ratcheting. Activists first destabilize firms’ claims of responsibility by foregrounding competing interpretations of CSR. Through ongoing negotiation, both parties seek to legitimize their respective definitions of CSR, thereby reinforcing rather than resolving ambiguity. Finally, activists ratchet reform by layering supplementary CSR obligations onto concessions, sustaining previously rejected CSR demands, and introducing new ones. This dynamic prevents closure and transforms corporate reform into an open-ended process. By shifting theoretical and analytical attention from episodic victories to sustained contention, the paper advances a temporal perspective on activism–firm interactions. It contributes to scholarship on collective action, corporate reform, and organizational change by demonstrating how activist groups can mobilize ambiguity not to stabilize standards but to preserve contestation, progressively recalibrate expectations, and transform reform into an ongoing process.

Author

• Prami Sengupta, University of California, Irvine