Abstract
Social movements often target states in their attempts to get legislative redress of grievances or even more fundamental change in the very structure of the state itself. Observers have noted a tendency for contemporary social movements to shift their focus and targets from states to private corporations. Sarah A. Soule argues that this is actually nothing new, noting that even the Boston Tea Party in 1773 targeted the East India Tea Company as much as it targeted the British government. What has changed, she notes, is perhaps an increase in the focus of social movements on private corporations since the 1960s, for several reasons: enhanced corporate power resulting from escalating corporate concentration as a product of mergers and acquisitions, acceleration of globalization prompting transnational corporations which are less subject to individual state governance, and expanding industrial deregulation that unleashed corporate decision making from governmental oversight. Growing corporate power reinforced their ability to influence the state through elections (in campaign financing and access to elected leaders) and a continuing “revolving door” of personnel between corporations and state agencies. And all of this has occurred at precisely the time when organized labor, the traditional and more organized opposition of corporate power, was in decline. Soule notes that contemporary social movements targeting private corporations share a common underlying theme with a much longer history of such social movements: an antipathy to corporate power that translates into a failure of corporations to be socially responsible. That is, social movements that focus on private corporations are nothing new; what is new is that they are increasingly taking on corporations directly in the private politics of tactics and strategies, rather than indirectly in the contentious politics of challenges to the state, as was more common prior to the 1960s.
Why has this shift to direct challenge rather than indirect opposition occurred? Soule points to several reasons: targeting states for legislative relief takes far longer than strategically threatening corporations’ profits; targeting states is more likely to evoke highly repressive and violent responses; increasing globalization of corporations into transnational firms often places them above if not beyond the governance of individual states; and technological developments make it far easier and quicker now for movements to spread their message massively in very creative ways to galvanize supporters and participants.
Soule gathers together the literatures of sociology, political science, and organizational research, into a rich theoretical framework for her analysis. Her comparative analysis of a wide range of seemingly different anti-corporate movement events over three decades helps her build a strong case for her ultimate conclusions. First, she notes that scholars in each of the three threads of research have tended to focus on either contentious politics or private politics of social movements; however, her analysis suggests that anti-corporate activism frequently does both simultaneously: they target both the corporation itself and the state at the same time, making them more hybrid types than discreet classifications. Indeed, she refers to “moving targets” in which anti-corporate movements shift their focus at various points from a specific corporation to an entire industry, from the local or national state to the international arena. To insist on classifying these movements as one type or the other rather than recognize their more hybrid nature forces the researcher to miss many important aspects of anti-corporate activism because these may be relegated as beyond the scope of inquiry. Second, she notes how some scholarship focuses on the internal characteristics of anti-corporate movements affecting their outcomes, while others focus more on the external structures of opportunity. She argues, instead, that anti-corporate movements’ outcomes are frequently affected by both, with activists drawing on a wide repertoire of tactics and strategies as corporate insiders (workers within the firm) as well as outsiders (stockholders and consumers), using multiple sources of opportunity.
My one quibble is perhaps with her highly optimistic conclusion that corporations do pay attention to the contentious and private politics of anti-corporate movements because it makes good business sense for them to be socially responsible. While it is true (and she does give examples) that some corporations have discovered it is in their best economic interest to address the concerns of anti-corporate movements, I am not convinced that it is as generalized, now or in the near future, as she seems to assert. If it was obviously good business sense to be socially responsible, we would expect to see many more corporations behave that way, and it would take far less effort for anti-corporate movements to help them see that it is in their best interest. What we do see, instead, is more effort and more resources being spent by corporations to fend off the anti-corporate challenges and to secure state support to reinforce their relative power against these challenges (witness, for example, the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission that now allows corporations the same “right to free speech” and therefore the right to spend unlimited amounts of money for advertisements espousing their interests over and above that of citizens of more limited means).
That said, Soule’s analysis is tight, rich in detail, and elegant in its comparative power. She makes a persuasive case (apart from her overly-optimistic conclusion of what it all means in a practical sense) in a well-argued, clear and articulate, and theoretically-informed analysis that is accessible to scholars and students alike. Her book would be a wonderful selection for courses in political sociology, political science, social movements, organizations, and business. While it is not framed in theories of the state, it certainly has much to offer that as well, challenging some of the basic assumptions of the relationship of the state and society which frequently neglect the power of social movements from below to affect outcomes. And it clearly extends the conversations and conceptual frameworks evident in social movement literature. It is well worth the read.