Journal article
Organizational responses to public and private politics: An analysis of climate change activists and U.S. oil and gas firms
SR Hiatt, JB Grandy, BH Lee
Organization Science | Published : 2015
Abstract
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 ..
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Funding Acknowledgements
The authors thank senior editor Brayden King and the anonymous reviewers for their guidance, as well as Steve Barley, J. P. Eggers, Kira Fabrizio, Michael Lenox, Ben Lewis, Sangchan Park, Huggy Rao, Sarah Soule, and Lori Yue for helpful comments on drafts. The authors also thank participants from the Academy of Management; the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability; the Junior Faculty Organization Theory Workshop; the Oxford Workshop on Reputations and NGOs; the Sustainability, Ethics, and Entrepreneurship Conference; and the London Business School Sumantra Ghoshal Strategy Conference, as well as seminar participants at Melbourne Business School, SCANCOR, and Stanford University for their helpful criticism. Portions of this research were supported by the Harvard Business School Division of Research. A previous version received the 2014 Best Paper Award from the Organizations and Natural Environment Division of the Academy of Management.