Corporate Activism as PCSR Communication

The division of labor between non-profit and for-profit organizations has long been dissolving. As the most recent example, corporations have in recent years begun to engage in practices which the business community labels 'corporate activism'. These practices, as well as the label itself split the waters. Can corporations legitimately engage in political activities outside their own immediate realm of commercial interest? Can corporations ever legitimately make a claim to the notion of activism - the legacy of which is tied to contestation, protest and marginalization? Will the commercial motivation of corporations not always reduce their public political engagements to woke-washing?
Important as these questions are, this paper aims to set them aside in order to explore ways of theorizing the social phenomenon which has come to be termed 'corporate activism'. We propose to do this by bringing together management studies with social movement studies.