Mary-Hunter McDonnell
Northwestern

m-mcdonnell@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Bio forthcoming

If you can't beat them, join them: Corporate sponsorship of social movement boycotts

This article explores the link between market contention -activist campaigns working to coerce companies to change contested practices or products - and cooperative relationships between firms and activists. Specifically, I argue that firms react to stakeholder social activism by joining with - rather than fighting against -- contentious social movements. I explore this possibility by empirically tracking a new non-market phenomenon - the corporate-sponsored boycott - in which firms voluntarily cooperate with contentious social movement organizations to sponsor boycotts that protest contested social practices of other companies, industries, or states. Using a longitudinal database that tracks the internal and external activism faced by 300 large companies between 1993 and 2007, I employ a rare events discrete time event history analysis to examine the link between contention and the incidence of a corporate-sponsored boycott. I find that firms targeted with more activism are more likely to use the tactic, that this relationship is moderated by performance declines. Finally, I find that firms that cooperate with social movements tend to continue to do so in the future, suggesting that the tactic may lead to longer-term shifts in the relationship between firms and activists.