Corporations and their executives are at the frontlines of some of the most important and contentious issues of our time, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, voting rights, gun violence, racial justice, climate change, and gender equity. The days when activists focused on moral fights over social issues while businesses concentrated on the amoral pursuit of commercial profit are gone. Through pronouncements, policies, boycotts, sponsorships, lobbying, investments, and divestments, businesses and business leaders are directly engaging with many of the most significant challenges confronting modern society. This is the new reality of capitalism and activism in America.
My new book, The Capitalist and the Activist, explores this complicated new reality of contemporary corporate social activism—its driving forces, promises and perils, and implications for our laws, public policies, and businesses. It does so mindful of the structural shortcomings and systemic limitations of capitalism and activism, yet hopeful of progress.
Throughout U.S. history, corporations have played a critical role in social activism. Because businesses, their executives, and their consumers do not exist in a social vacuum, corporations have taken on different roles in the ebbs and flows of social change. Sometimes, they were on the right side of history; other times, they were not.
While corporate social activism itself is not entirely new, the times, tools, and context of the present have made contemporary corporate social activism meaningfully different in kind, not just degree. Contemporary corporate social activism differs from past corporate activism because it is occurring within a singular historical moment, where business and government are converging, and corporate political power is ascending in the context of an awakened society equipped with unprecedented tools and technology to communicate, capitalize, and organize. Contemporary corporate social activism gives ordinary citizens, consumers, and shareholders unprecedented power and influence to leverage corporate resources to help effectuate social progress.
This new emerging dynamic between capitalism and activism has resulted in both a new change in business and a new business of change that blurs conventional divisions between public and private, profit and nonprofit, capitalism and activism.
Today, one can effectuate change and progress on important social issues like voting rights, racial justice, income inequality, gun violence, immigration reform, gender equity, and climate change by changing laws and public policies and by changing the institutional practices and priorities at major corporations. Increasingly, social activists and concerned citizens are choosing to pursue change and progress via the converging paths of government and business. The old way of conceptualizing either public or private avenues for change has been rendered a false choice. On issue after issue, the preferred choice is one that engages both public policymakers and institutions as well as private businesses and executives.
The story of contemporary corporate social activism is, in one sense, a story of how we can meet and master old, yet urgent social challenges with new perspectives and approaches to both corporate and democratic governance. It is one of the most consequential stories of business and society in recent history and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Professor Lin’s book, The Capitalist and the Activist, can be purchased here.
Tom C.W. Lin is the Feinberg Chair Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of law. His areas of scholarly research include business organizations, corporate governance, and financial technology.