Organizational Responses to Public and Private Politics: An Analysis of Climate Change Activists and U.S. Oil and Gas Firms

Shon R. Hiatt (), Jake B. Grandy () and Brandon H. Lee ()
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Shon R. Hiatt: USC Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089
Jake B. Grandy: USC Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089
Brandon H. Lee: Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

Organization Science, 2015, vol. 26, issue 6, 1769-1786

Abstract: We explore how activists’ public and private politics elicit different organizational responses. Using data on U.S. petroleum companies from 1982 to 2010, we investigate how climate change activists serving as witnesses at congressional hearings and engaging in firm protests influenced firms’ internal and external responses. We find that public politics induced internally focused practice adoption, whereas private politics induced externally focused framing activities. We also find that private and public politics had an interaction effect: as firms faced more private political pressure, they were less likely to respond to public political pressures; similarly, as firms faced greater public political pressure, they were less likely to respond to private political pressures. The results suggest that activists can have a significant impact on firm behavior depending on the mix of private and public political tactics they engage in. We discuss the implications of our study for social movement research, organization theory, and nonmarket strategy.

Keywords: private and public politics; social movements; organization theory; environmental sustainability; technology innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

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