A mainstream of stakeholder theory focuses on how firms address interest conflict among multiple stakeholders. This paper call attention to a new strategy of firms, especially multinational enterprises (MNEs), to reconcile political ideologies conflicts among stakeholders—contradictory corporate sociopolitical activism (CSA). Contradictory CSA occurs when a firm takes contradictory stances on controversial sociopolitical issues. We argue that firms take divergent stances to appeal various stakeholder groups with different political ideologies by leveraging the fact that these stakeholder groups are usually isolated by time and space. We submit that firms leverage stakeholder isolation and conduct three types of CSA contradictions, i.e., temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal. However, with the development of social media, along which information retentivity and information connectivity was largely enhanced, formerly isolated stakeholder groups are more easily to detect and react to firms’ CSA contradictions. Implementing a formal modeling approach, this paper theorizes on how CSA contradictions influence stakeholders’ evaluations of firms’ sociopolitical legitimacy by proposing that the effect depends on characteristics of stakeholder groups (power, information connectivity, political polarization) and characteristics of CSA contradictions (information retentivity, extent of contradiction). This research contributes to the literatures on corporate activism, stakeholder management, and legitimacy.
