Neutrality in situations of injustice. A critical exploration of corporate responses to Black Lives Matter

Owing to the expectations of increasingly socially conscious publics in recent years, companies are increasingly engaging in corporate activism by taking a public stance on controversial social issues. Accordingly, scholars have theorized corporate activism as a normative practice that aims to engender positive societal changes. Concurrently, the functionalist tradition of public relations scholarship has focused on how the strategic management of controversial social issues can advance organisational interests. In response to these divergent approaches, critical scholars have begun to call attention to the incongruity between social and strategic objectives of corporate activism. Taking these theoretical perspectives into account, this study critically examines how companies strategically manage social issues through the discourse of corporate activism, and the implications of this for achieving social change. Specifically, this study focuses on corporate responses to the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. An upsurge of corporate activism took place in response to this movement as companies raced to publish statements articulating their support for racial justice. Investigating how the social issue of racism was strategically managed in these statements therefore provides the analytical focus for this study. Accordingly, the study aims to answer the question: How do companies strategically manage the social issue of racism in corporate activist discourse? To conduct the investigation, this study employs the method of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyse statements addressing racism published to corporate websites. In particular, the study adopts a dialectical-relational approach to CDA in order to understand the societal impact of the corporate activism as discourse and social practice. By adopting the theoretical perspective of critical public relations as well as an emancipatory agonist approach, the study demystifies the dominant ideologies underlying corporate activist discourse and illuminates how these ideologies reinforce the hegemonic power relations between corporate elites and the marginalised groups they purport to advocate for. The results of the analysis identify an overarching strategy of depoliticisation in corporate activist discourse, driven by a neoliberal market ideology oriented towards improving the corporate bottom line. The findings of this study contribute to the emerging literature, by revealing how discursive and social practices of corporate activism reproduce social harms such as prejudice, marginalisation, and exclusion through processes of depoliticization. The study concludes by calling for further critical research on corporate activism, as theory and praxis, in order to move towards social emancipation.