The Shifting Politics of Commercial Culture

Room – HBS G34

Roxan Degeyter (KU Leuven)

In recent years, corporations have increasingly taken political stances on divisive issues such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. The practice has been termed corporate political advocacy (CPA) (Baur and Wettstein 2016), corporate social advocacy (Abitbol et al. 2018; Dodd and Supa 2014), brand activism (Cammarota et al. 2023), or CEO activism (Branicki et al. 2021; Chatterji and Toffel 2019; Feix and Wernicke 2024). Academic debate focusses on defining the criteria for legitimate CPA emphasizing the need to avoid “woke-washing” (e.g. Vredenburg et al. 2020) and ensure integrity (e.g. Wettstein and Baur 2016).

Last months, a growing backlash against progressive CPA has emerged. Conservative figures like Robert Starbuck and investors like Vivek Ramaswamy have pressured major corporations, including Disney, Apple, and McDonald’s, to roll back ESG and DEI policies. What began as resistance to progressive engagement could escalate into demanding corporations to adopt overtly conservative positions, which has become more plausible now that business leaders like Elon Musk started to use openly endorse conservative policies and candidates.

As it becomes more prominent, conservative advocacy cannot be treated as an afterthought, as nothing more than a reactionary market correction excluded from CPA definitions. The shift raises key questions about how CPA legitimacy is assessed: if both progressive and conservative activism are ideological expressions of the same phenomenon, frameworks must evaluate CPA through procedural and deliberative criteria rather than ideological content.  This panel welcomes theoretical, normative, and empirical approaches from political theory, philosophy, law, economics, and communication studies that critically examine CPA beyond ideology and assess implications of both its forms for democratic governance.