Business Unity and Anticorporate Protests: The U.S. Fortune 500 in 2010*

Abstract

Do large corporations respond to social movement protests following a firm-centric rationale or do they develop their strategies relationally? If they do so relationally, do corporate networks help foster class-wide unity in their responses to protests? We address these questions through an examination of protests against U.S. Fortune 500 firms. We incorporate data on board of director interlocks and corporate involvement in policy planning organizations to test the effect of corporate networks on firm behavior. Utilizing firm- and dyadiclevel analyses, we show that firms more embedded in the capitalist class concede to protest demands less often while retaliating against protesters more. However, this resistance is moderated by the ideologies of the networks in which the firm is embedded: firms connected to relatively liberal groups instead display the reverse pattern. These findings suggest class-wide networks shape corporate responses to protests in ideologically identifiable ways and enable greater unity between these firms.