This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In 2016, when Amazon workers began organizing at a warehouse in Chester, Virginia, the company tracked where employees gathered, posted anti-union messaging in bathroom stalls and held town halls to discourage them. The National Labor Relations Board forced Amazon to admit, in writing, that it had illegally surveilled and threatened workers.
The union drive still failed. That sequence—anticipate, disrupt, escalate—isn't random, according to new research from Timothy Werner, professor of business, government and society and Wade T. and Bettye C. Nowlin Centennial Professor of Business Administration at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.
Rather, it's a systematic playbook that a wide variety of companies deploy far beyond the warehouse floor, Werner says. He calls it "organizational repression"—a term he borrowed from research on how governments suppress political dissent. He applies the expression to the ways companies manage collective pressure from stakeholders: nonshareholder groups with an interest in a company, such as employees, activists and communities.
The term covers companies' actions from union-busting to greenwashing under one strategic umbrella. "We were trying to find a more encompassing term that would capture all these different ways in which organizations, as opposed to states, could engage in this behavior," Werner says. "These things are more alike than scholars have previously recognized." Past research has assumed that companies are largely respectful of stakeholder activism, Werner says.
They might resist stakeholder pressure, but they might also collaborate or simply ignore it. "What we wanted to show with this paper was that there are actually ways in which firms can undermine that ability to organize in the first place," he says. The paper, "Organizational Repression of Stakeholder Collective Action" is published in the Academy of Management Review.
With Natalie Holzaepfel and Olga Hawn, both of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Werner built his framework around three phases that stakeholder movements typically go through. For each phase, the researchers identify matching corporate strategies that can prevent or discourage it. Emergence: Stop it before it starts.
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