Competing Voices, Persistent Gaps: Shareholder Proposal Activism and ESG Decoupling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigate the occurrence and the persistence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) decoupling when firms are exposed to heterogeneity in shareholder proposal activism, reflected by the different orientation of shareholder activists and the competing nature of their demands. We find that the greater the extent that shareholder proposals blend financial and social logics, the more likely firms are to respond by adopting policies that are not fully implemented in practice. Our results also suggest that decoupling is more persistent among targeted firms that are exposed to heightened heterogeneity in shareholder proposal activism. Our findings suggest that such heterogeneity not only prompts decoupling but also leads to its persistence, contributing to our understanding about why firms may place their legitimacy at risk to respond to shareholder activism, and the conditions that motivate (or inhibit) such behavior. Our study contributes to the symbolic management literature and the ongoing debate on whether and how shareholders impact societal challenges.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".