Threading the Needle of Corporate Activism: How Firms Frame Their Stances on Polarizing Social Issues
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Corporate activism, or the active involvement of business in contested social and political issues, presents strategic challenges for organizations. Despite the risks of stakeholder backlash, corporate activism is on the rise. We suggest that how firms speak out on polarizing social issues may help explain this quandary. Leveraging corporate press releases and Twitter accounts of Fortune 500 companies that spoke on LGBTQ issues between 1999 and 2019, as same-sex marriage progressively became legal across the United States, we find that prior to legalization in their home state, firms default to touting the economic merits of their track record on LGBTQ workplace issues, avoiding contentious debates. Once marriage equality is enacted, firms shift their speech toward activism, advocating for broader societal change. Further, the shift to activism is highly dependent on internal and external stakeholder preferences. Our findings point to an irony: corporate “activism” in pursuit of social change often takes place only after polarizing issues have been settled. This study contributes to the growing literature on corporate activism by shedding light on how firms strategically frame their communications to navigate the complex terrain of stakeholder expectations, and how these framing strategies are shaped by the evolving legal and institutional landscape.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it