Abstract: This paper explores how contentious stakeholders can disrupt a firms non-market strategy. We offer the first systematic study of the effect of public protest on corporate political strategy, using a unique database that allows us to empirically analyze the impact of social movement boycotts on targeted firms’ campaign contributions. We show that boycotts lead to significant reductions in the amount of targets’ campaign contributions and increase the percentage of contributions that are refused by politicians. These results highlight the importance of considering how a firm's socio-political environment shapes its non-market strategy. We supplement this primary analysis by drawing from social movement theory to extrapolate and test a number of mechanisms that moderate the extent to which movement challenges effectively disrupt corporate political activity.

Abstract: Relying on the institutional logics perspective, we analyze the factors that enable dialogue between corporations and external actors on social and environmental issues. We define an institutional context consisting of an overarching shareholder value logic, a social welfare logic and an environmental logic. Using data on shareholder activism, we hypothesize that external actor characteristics (power and legitimacy), CEO characteristics (NGO experience, elite education, major board participation and newly-appointed) and organizational visibility have different effects on enabling dialogue on social and environmental issues. Our study aims to support the idea that dialogue is a concrete mechanism that links logics to change, and that social and environmental issues are rooted in different institutional logics.

Abstract: This working paper intends to shed light on the role of stakeholders’ relative nonmarket resource endowments on influencing policy decisions. Nonmarket resource endowment accounts for the potential strength of stakeholders’ nonmarket action, but their relevance is related to the competing forces in the nonmarket environment. The different combination of resource endowments, from stakeholders competing or cooperating over the same issue, is hypothesized to explain different policy outcomes. The theoretical frame is from the emerging research focus on nonmarket strategies, capabilities, and resources (Henisz and Zelner, 2012; Lawton, McGuire, and Rajwani, 2013). The empirical analysis is proposed to be over the adoption of different types of Renewable Portfolio Standards within U.S. states. The expected results might give information for managers on whether to compete or not over specific nonmarket issues.