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ABSTRACT
The target a social movement selects is important for the type of tactic employed. Research suggests the state can use both a carrot (access) and stick (repression) to encourage conventional protest. Although corporations are more vulnerable to disruptive protest than the state, we suspect that historical developments, both in terms of the overall institutionalization of protest and the growing power of businesses, may encourage greater routinization of anti-business protest as well. Analyses from a dataset of over 7,000 events directed at state and business targets from 1960 to 1995 show that anti-business protests became increasingly routinized in the late twentieth century and provide suggestive evidence that businesses employ similar carrot and stick measures to channel dissent. Given more recent changes in the political economy of the United States, we suspect that these trends have only become more pronounced in recent years.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. As Gamson (Citation1990) noted, the use of repression by the state is much less problematic when the target of such repression is deemed illegitimate or weak by the wider society.
2. Policing of protest has become more aggressive in recent years, prompting what many scholars are calling the end of the negotiated management style of protest policing (Vitale Citation2006).
3. Still, repression is not limited to the use of force and can be carried out in subtler ways (Earl Citation2003); the use of anti-union meetings by management to chill support for union organizing efforts is a classic case in point.
4. Some of the changes in corporate network structure have taken place after the period we analyze (Chu and Davis Citation2016). However, we contend that the broader shifts towards greater corporate power and declining state influence began during our period of analysis, and that we are capturing some, if not all, of the effects of these changes relative to activism.
5. It is important to note that granting shareholders greater voice was not instituted voluntarily by corporations but rather driven by requirements from the state (Soule Citation2009). Nevertheless, these new points of access should be one way for corporations to routinize protest.
6. The dataset is available here: https://web.stanford.edu/group/collectiveaction/cgi-bin/drupal/. We recognize that while this time period does encompass major changes in the market and how it related to politics (Hacker and Pierson Citation2010), it does not include other more recent changes, like the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. We discuss the implications of this in the conclusion.
7. Most of the work in the field of media studies, such as Herman and Chomsky’s (Citation1988) book, argues that the media’s conservative bias manifests itself in how progressive causes are negatively portrayed in the media. While that is obviously a concern here, our reliance on a more liberal news source, the New York Times, as well as a focus on very basic event features, potentially limits such issues.
8. During the mid-twentieth century, unions were a significant countervailing power to corporate influence. We do not include a measure for union membership in our models as it declines precipitously during our period and is highly correlated with the uptick in corporate militancy.
9. We also experimented with year fixed effects to account for other unmeasured temporal influences and the results were similar.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew W. Martin
Andrew W. Martin is a professor of sociology at the Ohio State University. His work focuses on union organizing efforts and innovative strategies these organizations employ to recruit new members. More recently he has focused on ways in which social movement actors more generally seek to influence corporate behavior.
Marc Dixon
Marc Dixon is an associate professor in the department of sociology at Dartmouth College. He has written on unions, social movements, and their impact on corporate and governmental policy. His current research examines conflicts over labor rights in the United States as well as non-state attempts to regulate and improve corporate labor and environmental standards.