Shaming the Corporation : Globalization , Reputation , and the Dynamics of Anti-Corporate Movements

Corporations have become common targets of activism, but social movement research has barely begun to unpack the dynamics of anti-corporate campaigning. To address this gap, we theorize how particular companies get constituted as social movement targets and examine this process using a unique longitudinal, firm-level dataset on the apparel and footwear industry and its intersection with the anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s. Firms on the leading edge of globalization are found to have an increased likelihood of becoming targets of “naming and shaming” campaigns. Yet the likelihood of becoming a target also depends on how “shamable” a company is based on its position and reputation in an organizational field. Characteristics that are usually treated as assets for business—such as a strong public image, a good reputation within the business community, and positive market performance—are found to attract social movement pressure. The analysis provides systematic evidence of how large, branded consumer products firms became arguably the central site of struggle over globalization and labor rights at the turn of the 21 century. Contemporary social movements routinely take aim at corporations. From environmental, animal rights, and public health campaigns attacking McDonalds, to attempts to attach the sweatshop stigma to Nike, to conservative Christian boycotts of “gay friendly” companies like Disney, activists have repeatedly put corporations in the political spotlight. In the process, they have reinvigorated debates about the responsibilities of corporations within and across borders. Influenced by the rise of retail-driven commodity chains (Gereffi 1994), the growth of “political consumerist” market segments (Micheletti 2003), an “eclipse of the state” ideology (Seidman 2007), and the growing sphere of transnational corporations’ influence, the strategy of “naming and shaming” the corporation is now common in many social movement fields (Bandy and Smith 2005; Baron 2003; Carmin and Balser 2002; Crossley 2002; King, Lenox and Barnett 2002; King and Soule 2007; Manheim 2001; O'Rourke 2005; Raeburn 2004; Rodríguez-Garavito 2005; Schurman 2004; Spar and LaMure 2003). Although corporations are frequent social movement targets, not all companies are equally at risk, even when a wide swath of firms or an entire industry is “guilty” of the practices activists are challenging. Why do some companies become prominent targets of anti-corporate campaigns, while others largely “fly under the radar? ” This process of turning particular organizations into focal points of social movement pressure—which we call the “constitution of targets”—has implications for movement trajectories, patterns of public attention, and the institutional environments of firms. Although it has received little systematic attention to date, it is ripe for sociological analysis. Occasionally, major catastrophes immediately and obviously thrust particular companies into the spotlight—as with Union Carbide after the Bhopal disaster or Exxon after the Valdez oil spill. More commonly, however, the problems that animate social movements are systemic and hidden, such that no responsible actor automatically comes to the fore. We argue that publicly linking particular actors to systemic problems is an important part of what social movements do. Movements matter not only because they influence public policy (Burstein and Linton 2002), generate new organizational forms (Rao, Morrill and Zald 2000), or forge civil society networks (Diani and McAdam 2003), but also because they force particular kinds of actors into the spotlight and make them focal points for the redress of grievances and the enforcement of rights. Traditionally, governments have been the sites of such claims-making, but as Davis and Zald (2005) note, corporations now appear similar to polities, “subject to challenges both from within (by the ‘citizens’ who work for them) and from without (by activists and consumers)” (p.347). We examine the constitution of corporate targets in the anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s—a site of intense corporate campaigning, a model for activism elsewhere, and a case for which detailed data on social movement campaigns is available. Sociologists have built a rich case study literature on anti-sweatshop campaigns (Armbruster-Sandoval 2005; Bartley 2005; Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000; Brooks 2007; Collins 2003; Esbenshade 2004; RodríguezGaravito 2005; Seidman 2007), but the insights of these studies have not yet been integrated into the mainstream of social movement theory and research. Furthermore, because the case studies typically focus on a small number of companies that have become targets, they are unable to assess whether particular factors differentiate targets from non-targets across an entire industry. Labor rights and anti-sweatshop groups targeted a number of apparel and footwear manufacturers and retailers over conditions in their supply chains during the 1990s, but not all firms were targeted equally. Nike faced such intense pressure that its CEO admitted that the company “has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse” (qtd. in Cushman 1998), but some of its competitors largely escaped this fate. While activists branded