CEO Activism and Stakeholder Opinion Formation: How Does Incongruence Affect Stakeholder Influence?

Abstract

In recent years, we have seen an increase in the prevalence of corporate executives taking public stances on social and environmental issues that do not directly impact their firms. Strategy scholars, such as Chatterji and Toffel (2017), have begun to refer to this emergent phenomenon as CEO activism. Scholars within the domain of non-market strategy, however, have been slow to examine CEO activism, which is unfortunate insofar as this sub-field possesses the theoretical toolkit necessary for explicating this phenomenon. Thus, in drawing on the rich theoretical tradition within of non-market strategy and CSR, I argue that political CSR provides a useful conceptual foundation by which to theoretically enrich research on CEO activism, while CEO activism scholarship, on the other hand, is able to reciprocate by helping to extend the scope of political CSR theorizing beyond the socially responsible actions of the corporation to that of the CEO. Moreover, I further the CEO activism literature by engaging in a theoretical assessment of stakeholder (i.e. the general public, consumers, investors, and SMOs) reactions to CEO activism, when such action is both congruent and incongruent with firm action.