In recent years, corporate firms have increasingly positioned themselves towards divisive, sociopolitical issues which are entirely unrelated to their core business objectives, a phenomenon we broadly term firm activism. This trend that has gained considerable academic interest across multiple disciplines, with authors conflating diverse terms and definitions of empirically close, but conceptually distinct sub-categories of firm activism. This paper aims to address the resulting conceptual confusion by clearly defining the conceptual boundaries of the five core sub-categories of firm activism: corporate social advocacy, corporate political advocacy, brand activism advertising, CEO advocacy and CEO activism. Our comprehensive literature review highlights the unique characteristics of each sub-category of firm activism. In doing so, this paper contributes to the literature by offering a structured framework to understand firm activism and highlighting how future research can benefit from considering the distinctions between the various types of firm activism.
