Essays on Stakeholder Activism and Firm Practices

In my dissertation, I study the emergence and evolution of novel forms of social activism, including those coming from organizational members, such as employees and shareholders. The first study of my dissertation takes the context of bottom-up activism and explores how activists' employees influence corporate behaviour. I construct a proprietary dataset of employee activism campaigns and use Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative analysis to identify and explain the interaction among movement tactics and organizational factors. The findings highlight the different configurations of successful and failed employee activism campaigns and add to the research on insider activism by highlighting the interaction between tactics and opportunity structures to explain movement outcomes. The second study explores the dynamics within the same stakeholder activists’ group, such as shareholders, and how it might influence the effectiveness of their social proposals when firms face competing requests for change. Results suggest that social-oriented proposals reduce social performance because they can increase the presence of wealth-oriented proposals, which together can have a negative impact on the positive individual effect of social-oriented proposals on social performance. The third study investigates the indirect effect of shareholder activism by borrowing the bandwagon effect. The results suggest that non-targeted firms imitate rivals' social and competitive actions when observing successful shareholder activism. The evidence also indicates that visibility for non-targeted firms can influence the strength of the relationship.

Department dc:contributor.department

Business

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Shaheen, Hadi

Advisor dc:contributor.supervisor

• Litrico, Jean-Baptiste

• Management

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1974/33247

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:queensu.scholaris.ca:1974/33247