Corporate Activism as PCSR Communication

Nike’s campaign featuring the NFL player who kneeled during the national anthem to protest against police violence and racism has very quickly become almost iconic of a new type of politicized corporate campaigns which have evoked a renewed interest in exploring business engagement in political messages. In recent years, we are increasingly seeing corporations take a public stance on social, political, and environmental issues. It is an activism that aims at influencing political, industrial, commercial or cultural agendas and takes place in social arenas such as the media instead of parliamentary institutions. This paper approaches corporate activism as a manifestation of the logic described as PCSR. It draws on advertising spots as an example of corporate activism in the media to illustrate the ways in which corporations adopt responsibilities of societal critique from social movements. On the basis of this, it argues that a new version of a politics of the self emerges. This is a commercial politics of the self to be fulfilled through consumer loyalty to the company, which decouples values from formal structures of governance and, instead, construe their realization as an individualized consumer responsibility. This may not remove the potential of corporate activism for social change. Corporate activism both entails the potential for politicization of the corporate sphere and the risk of depolitization of the political sphere.