The Shifting Politics of Commercial Culture

Deadline for abstract submission: April 21st, 2025

In recent years, corporations and their CEOs 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 corporate activity 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. 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The challenge posed by conservative activism to prevailing theories of CPA
• The differentiation between progressive and conservative forms of corporate activism  
• Developing frameworks for assessing the legitimacy of CPA independent of ideological bias  
• Comprehensive frameworks for evaluating the legitimacy of various forms of corporate involvement, including lobbying, CSR, and CPA 
• CPA and the traditional division of labor between politics and the market
• The impact of corporate political activism on democratic ideals and public discourse  
• Insights from the rise of conservative advocacy on political representation, political freedom, and stakeholder interests 
• Democratic analyses of conservative corporate activism (amplifying marginalised voices versus reinforcing dominant interests)
• The role of ownership structures and internal corporate democracy in legitimising CPA  
• The relationship between corporate purpose and CPA
• Empirical analyses on the reciprocal effects between consumer movements and corporate political activism on public attitudes and societal change 

Submission Guidelines

If you want to apply, please submit an abstract (approximately 500 words) along with 3-5 keywords and a short bio (approximately 300 words) by email to ([email protected]), by April 21st 2025. Decisions will be made by May 19th, allowing those who have been accepted to apply to MANCEPT for a bursary (the deadline for which is June 4th).

Upon acceptance, speakers will be asked to share their papers amongst participants two weeks before the workshop. We plan to allocate around 60 minutes to each paper, with presentations of 15 minutes and 45 minutes of Q&A.