Increasingly, multinational corporations (MNCs) have taken public stances on sociopolitical issues such as immigration, LGBTQ rights, and racism. Although MNCs may engage in sociopolitical activism (SPA) in their home countries in response to a sociopolitical issue, stakeholders have criticized them for behaving inconsistently in response to the same issue in a host country. In this paper, we develop a theory of MNCs’ (in)consistency in SPA across home and host countries. Specifically, we argue that MNCs' SPA in a host country stems from a desire to consistently express organizational values across countries. This baseline argument, however, is conditioned upon institutional complexity at three levels: within a host country, between home and host countries, and among the international community. This paper contributes to the International Business (IB) literature by situating MNCs’ SPA as a new, complementary area within international nonmarket strategy research. Furthermore, we extend IB research on institutional complexity by theorizing how heterogeneity not only within but between normative and regulatory institutions in a host country influences MNCs’ behaviors. Lastly, we expand the literature on corporate SPA from a focus on domestic firms to MNCs.
