Abstract
Purpose: When CEOs are publicly weighing in on sociopolitical debates, this is known as CEO activism. The steadily growing number of such statements made in recent years has been subject to a flourishing academic debate. This field offers first profound findings from observational studies. However, the discussion of CEO activism lacks a thorough theoretical grounding, such as a shared concept accounting for the heterogeneity of sociopolitical incidents. Thus, the aim of this paper is to provide an archetypal framework for CEO activism.
Design/methodology/approach: The authors used a multiple case study approach on 145 activism cases stated by CEOs and found seven distinct statement archetypes.
Findings: The study identifies four main structural design elements accounting for the heterogeneity of activism, i.e. the addressed meta-category of the statement, the targeted outcome, the used tonality and the orientation of the CEOs’ positions. Further, the authors found seven distinguishable archetypes of CEO activism statements: “Climate Alerts”, “Economy Visions”, “Political Comments”, “Self-reflections and Social Concerns”, “Tech Designs”, “Unclouded Evaluations” and “Descriptive Explanations”.
Research limitations/implications: This typology classifies the heterogeneity of CEO activism. It will enable the analysis of interrelationships, mechanisms and motivations on a differentiated level and raise the comprehensibility of research-results.
Practical implications: The framework supports executives in understanding the heterogeneity of CEO activism and to analyse personality-fits.
Originality/value: To the authors’ knowledge, this marks the first conceptualisation of activism developed cross-thematically. The work supports further theory-building on CEO activism.