Managing Protest: The Political Action Repertoires of Corporations

This chapter analyzes the political action repertoire corporations use to respond to and manage protest. It first offers a typology of the different strategic orientations corporate responses can take: avoidance, acquiescence, compromise, sidestepping, confrontation, and prevention. Building on examples from different case studies, it illustrates the variety of tactics that can be used within each one of these orientations. Second, the chapter discusses some principles of variation of corporate tactics, focussing on institutional and cultural features: the development of specialized firm-internal units to deal with protest management, and the possible role of state capacity and national “varieties of capitalism” for corporate political strategies.