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Why Do Corporations Engage in LGBT Rights Activism? LGBT Employee Groups as Internal Pressure Groups

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2020

Cory Maks-Solomon Open the ORCID record for Cory Maks-Solomon [Opens in a new window]  and
Josiah Mark Drewry
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Abstract

Most scholarship on corporate political activity assumes that market forces wholly motivate firms’ political strategies. However, this conventional wisdom overlooks the role of employee groups in encouraging corporate activism. To evaluate whether employee groups are associated with firm social activism, we gathered all public statements in support of LGBT rights made by the five hundred largest publicly-traded US corporations from 2011 to 2017. In an exploratory observational analysis, we found robust evidence that in highly-educated workforces LGBT employee groups persuade management to take public stances in support of LGBT rights. Our findings suggest that internal pressure promotes activism on LGBT issues, and market, political, or social forces are insufficient to fully explain firm social activism. Although each does play an important role, since employee groups will use political, social, and especially market-based arguments to convince their managers to engage in activism.

Keywords

corporate political activitycorporate activismLGBT issuesworkplace diversityemployee resource groupsstakeholder management
Type
Research Article
Information
Business and Politics , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 124 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of V.K. Aggarwal

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Footnotes

†

This research was previously presented at the George Washington University Political Science Department's American Politics Workshop, the American Political Science Association's 2018 annual meeting, the National Capital Area Political Science Association's American Politics Workshop, and the Academy of Management's 2019 annual meeting. We are grateful to attendees of each event and to several anonymous reviewers for their feedback. We would especially like to thank Sarah Binder, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, John Sides, and Jorge E. Rivera for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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