OMT
SIM
Mary-Hunter McDonnell
The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania, United States
Raquel Kessinger
Boston College, United States
Genevive Gregorich
Columbia Business School, United States
Kate Odziemkowska
U. of Toronto, Rotman School of Management, Canada
Olga Hawn
U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States
This symposium seeks to understand the strategies related to sociopolitical activism inside of firms as well as the consequences of that activism. In recent years, organizational leaders have publicly expressed positions on social and political matters not directly related to the firm’s primary business activities (Chatterji & Toffel, 2019), while employees have raised social, political, and moral concerns at work and protested a myriad of their organization’s practices and policies (e.g., Briscoe & Gupta, 2021; Davis & Kim, 2021). For this symposium, we curated four papers that contribute to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of sociopolitical activism inside firms. These papers provide new insights into how employee activists use contentious activism to target their own firms and how they react to leadership responses to this activism, how organizational leaders frame public stances on sociopolitical topics, and stakeholder reactions to such activism. The papers selected for this symposium shed new light on the complexity of how employees protest their own firms as well as the tradeoffs firm leaders experience when deciding how to express positions on sociopolitical matters.
Author: Raquel Renee Kessinger – Boston College
Author: Kate Odziemkowska – U. of Toronto, Rotman School of Management
Author: Genevive Gregorich – Columbia Business School
Author: Olga Hawn – U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill