Risk, Uncertainty and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from a Lab-in-the-Field Experiment

Fourth wave feminists are currently seeking to bring an end to The Sun’s Page 3, a British institution infamous for featuring a topless female model daily. This paper investigates the No More Page 3 (NMP3) campaign through which feminist activists have sought to disrupt the institutionalized objectification of women more generally, and endeavour to transform a corporate arena of citizenship (focused solely on organisational activities) constructed by British retailer The Co-operative into a public arena of citizenship (focused on issues of social good more generally). Building upon insights from the institutional work and political corporate social responsibility literatures, we document the manner in which feminist activists have used The Co- operative’s social media site to publicly disrupt entrenched gender norms. Through identifying symbiotic yet competing discourses we discover themes of disruption and maintenance amongst and between interlocutors, facilitated by The Co-operative’s arena of citizenship and its notion of suspended discourse. Our analysis contributes to the institutional work literature by demonstrating the mutual need for disruption to ‘meet’ or contest maintenance work in corporate practice, and to the political corporate social responsibility literature by demonstrating the more nuanced and de- centralised role of corporations in public arenas of citizenship and within society.