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

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’ intern...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Organization science (Providence, R.I.) R.I.), 2015-11, Vol.26 (6), p.1769-1786
Main Authors: Hiatt, Shon R., Grandy, Jake B., Lee, Brandon H.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activism
Activists
Analysis
Bureaucracy
Climate change
Companies
Congressional hearings
Demonstrations & protests
environmental sustainability
Global temperature changes
Greenhouse effect
Organization theory
Petroleum
Petroleum industry
Political activism
Political aspects
Politics
Pressure
private and public politics
Responses
Social movements
Tactics
Technological change
technology innovation
Witnesses
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:1047-7039
1526-5455
DOI:10.1287/orsc.2015.1008