Hello!
Just a quick reminder that the virtual seminar series of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS) will be hosting Vanessa Burbano (Columbia Business School) on April 2nd. She will present "Asymmetry or Alignment? The Role of Ideology in Consumer Responses to Sociopolitical Stances" co-authored with Max Kagan. It is a great opportunity for all to learn about research-in-progress in corporate sustainability (the presentation is 20 mins long and Q&A is another 10 mins) and for all juniors out there (PhD students and junior faculty) to socialize with the speaker afterwards (the last 30 mins). Please find the abstract below:
A growing body of research shows that corporate sociopolitical stance-taking can lead to ideologically polarized stakeholder reactions between liberals and conservatives. We investigate two potential explanations for these findings. First, the ideological asymmetry hypothesis (IAH) argues that psychological differences between liberals and conservatives lead to different beliefs about the appropriateness of corporate activism in general. Second, reactions may be based on whether individuals' beliefs align with the specific stance taken by a given company. Because both theories predict the same pattern of polarization in response to liberal-aligned activism-and because most corporate sociopolitical activism has supported liberal causes-it has been difficult to distinguish these competing mechanisms. Through two experiments focused on consumers of prominent companies (BudLight and McDonald's) which adopted near-simultaneous but different opposing stances on two issues (transgender rights and the Israel–Palestine conflict), we analyze consumers' reactions to opposing sociopolitical stances while holding the company and issue domain constant. Our findings robustly support stance alignment rather than ideological asymmetry: consumers consistently penalize companies only for stances they oppose and there is no evidence of ideological asymmetry in how liberals and conservatives react to corporate stance-taking.
After this seminar, there is only one remaining this academic year (11am-12pm EST):
May 2 Hannah Schupfer (King's College, Ivey/ARCS PhD best paper award winner)
Please register for the seminar here: https://corporate-sustainability.org/online-seminar-series/
Best regards,
Olga Hawn, PhD
Associate Professor, Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Sustainability Distinguished Fellow
Faculty Director, Ackerman Center for Excellence in Sustainability
UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School
Associate Editor, Strategic Management Journal
Associate Editor, Management Science