In September 2024, the School of Management hosted the 7th International CSR Communications Conference. Dr Laura Olkkonen spent the summer at the School as a visiting research fellow, and is one of the conference’s 2026 hosts at her home institute of LUT University, Finland. In this article, she examines whether companies’ words on societal debate match up with their actions.
While the most well-known examples of corporate activism come from global brands such as Ben & Jerry’s and Patagonia – with high-profile campaigns including ‘Get the Dough out of Politics’ and ‘the President Stole Your Land’ – a lot is also happening locally and out of the global limelight.
Finlayson, a mid-sized Finnish textile company, is one such example of a regionally well-known company that speaks up on topics revolving around equality – as we have previously studied. Over the years, Finlayson has launched campaigns that address topics such as the gender wage gap and racism. The company has also very vocally opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But it’s not just Finlayson taking an active role in societal debate, as our ongoing study focused on social media data from 600 Nordic companies shows.
Our current, highly politicised times have impacted the ways in which companies think about their responsibilities – particularly if and how they engage in societal debate. Corporate activism, defined as business actors’ public stance-taking on divisive issues, has become one way to take a more active role in debate on controversial topics such as LGBTQ+ rights, racism, climate change and democracy.
A question of values
The range of issues addressed in corporate activism is expanding, especially to current geopolitical tensions, but their topics have something in common: they are typically polarising, and thus link directly to societal debates about values and ideologies.
Because of this inherent divisiveness, corporate activism has raised a lot of questions about its motives and implications. If the practice is controversial and risky, why are companies exposing themselves to the reactions and critique that follow? What kind of outcomes are they expecting and do those outcomes relate to societal impacts?
And, perhaps most importantly: how invested are companies in this debate?
While motives and implications have been among the first questions to arise, we may need to assess many questions anew with a more profound understanding of the nuances of companies’ activist stances.
What we are seeing in our current research, focused on large Nordic companies, is that organisations don’t just choose between taking or not taking a stance, but they invest in or withdraw from debates by taking stances in different ways.
When we look at corporate activism as a broader phenomenon, there is rarely a single formula – firms may engage in societal debate much more subtly than what the most well-known examples suggest.
For example, companies may keep to their commercial role and make stances that highlight business benefits, or condemn deficits much more directly from the position of a societal actor.
Continuing conversations
Besides the variety in stances, companies stay invested in these debates to a varying degree. In our earlier study on Finlayson’s campaigns, we identified several activities that allowed the conversation to keep going. These activities took place both before and after the stance, extending the conversation beyond the immediate moment of stance-taking.
In Finlayson’s case, much of the activism took place after the stance, when they defended both the issue and their role in the conversation. As such, there is much to explore and learn when looking into the trajectories of company stances in the post-stance phase.
How the stances start is also important to the conversation. While companies may use different tactics, starting from their own campaigns and continuing to individual statements in interviews or social media posts, it is both the form and the intensity that matters. Companies may also choose to initiate or join conversations, and they may invest different resources to stay engaged.
Studying the variety and intensity of corporate activism is likely to give us a better understanding of not only the reactions toward their stances, but also how invested companies are in pushing for societal change. In the broadest sense, this will help us to understand the political roles that accompany firms’ activist stances.
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