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This paper highlights the potential of social activism – defined as a public act that aims to challenge the status quo by bringing alternative views or narratives to the debate – in transformative service research and proposes a future research agenda.

This paper builds upon a review of social activism in the management and communications literature to identify its potential for social change in service (eco)systems.

This paper outlines three ways in which social activism can influence companies (external activism, internal activism, and activism as practice) and illustrates how they can be used to advance transformative service research in selected priority areas.

This paper develops a future research agenda and suggests research questions that could guide scholarly inquiry at the intersection of social activism and transformative service research.

For managers and policy makers, this paper highlights how social activism can influence companies' attempts to drive social change.

This paper is among the first to link social activism and transformative service research and highlight novel research opportunities at their intersection.

Growing interest in the use of digital technologies and a Putnam-inspired debate about youth engagement has drawn researchers from outside of the study of social movements into research on the topic. This interest in youth protest participation has, in turn, developed into a substantial area of research of its own. While offering important research contributions, we argue that these areas of scholarship are often not well grounded in classic social movement theory and research, instead focusing on new media and/or the relationship between activism and other forms of youth engagement. This chapter seeks to correct this by drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a moderately sized southwestern city to examine whether traditional paths to youth activism (i.e., family, friends, and institutions) have changed or eroded as online technology use and extra-institutional engagement among youth has risen. We find that youth continue to be mobilized by supportive family, friends, and institutional opportunities, and that the students who were least engaged are missing these vital support networks. Thus, it is not so much that the process driving youth activism has changed, but that some youth are not receiving support that has been traditionally necessary to spur activism. This offers an important reminder for scholars studying youth and digital activism and youth participation more broadly that existing theory and research about traditional pathways to activism needs to be evaluated in contemporary research.

Following the traditions of stakeholder salience theory, this paper aims to contend that some institutional investor activists and tactics have more power, legitimacy and urgency than others.

The author undertakes an empirical test of a saliency table looking at the effects of institutional investor heterogeneity on portfolio firm responses using ordinal logistic regression.

This study found heterogeneity for institutional investor type to drive firm responses but not tactic type raising the importance of the attributes of each type of investor activist. The author found a rank ordering of public pension plans, hedge funds and then private multiemployer funds in saliency to portfolio firms. In addition, the use of proxy-based tactics did not help or hurt each investor type. Both findings challenge prior empirical work.

The rank ordering based upon the heterogeneity of institutional investor activists and their tactical interactions are tested providing empirical evidence of the most influential activist investors and tactics in one study, which is rare in the literature.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) activism, i.e. executives, publicly weighing in on sociopolitical debates, is an area of increasing interest in academia and business. This young research field provides valuable insights, but it still represents a scattered discussion in a variety of disciplines. Thus, this paper aims to present a guiding framework, integrate current knowledge, aggregate published findings and outline avenues for future research.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review building on a sample of 36 publications. In consequence, 1,146 lead themes were derived and studied in an in-depth qualitative analysis by deploying a pattern-inducing method.

Research on CEO activism can be placed on a time-oriented logic, giving insights into the realisation of activism, stakeholder reactions, moderators and perception effects. These four aggregate dimensions can be explained by 15 second-order themes and 48 more detailed first-order themes.

Considering the risks and benefits of CEO activism, top executives and communication professionals should be aware of its implications. This paper provides an integrated view of the different mechanisms and potential effects of CEO activism. Thereby, it proposes communicative planning from activism’s realisation to its perceptual results.

The study provides a holistic view of CEO activism as a starting point for further discussion. To the latest of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first integrated conceptualisation of the discussion of CEO activism. The proposed avenues for future research stem from a detailed examination of published knowledge.

“Shareholder activism works when shareholders understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn’t”. As complex the term shareholder activism may seem, it demonstrates a very simple phenomenon of how shareholder take control of a situation to turn it in their favor. The whole world has taken an activism “twist” where every person has a word to say. The same characteristic of the society is showcased in this paper where engagement of shareholder is questioned whether it helps to promote effective corporate governance. Given the fact that Mauritius has a rather low shareholder activism framework, this research aims to depict the international picture of the issue at different levels to reach a consensus with the local market. It was a major challenge as very little research has been conducted to accurately contrast shareholder activism with corporate governance. However, the international standards aim at giving a clear picture of how the shareholder activism actually functions.

The research has adopted a black letter approach by analyzing relevant laws and legislations governing corporate governance matters in Mauritius and the USA, Malaysia, France and South Africa. Thereafter, a comparative analysis was made between Mauritius laws and the aforementioned countries. Recommendations were then put forward on the subject matter which is shareholder activism.

Research has shown development in corporate governance alongside the increase in shareholder activism. However, these research studies fail to prove that the development is because of shareholder activism itself. In fact, it could be because of increase in corporate intellects, removal of trade barriers, sustainable corporate practices and many such changes that have affected the corporate market somehow. Hence, it is difficult to conclude, with certainty, that the driver of good corporate governance is, in particular, the phenomenon of shareholder activism. Nevertheless, many result of shareholder activism has demonstrated a rather positive impact on the ongoing of the corporate dealings and on a personal note, it can be said that shareholder activism is a domain where much research and development should be effected as it represents a promising improvement in the way corporations are governed.

The concept of shareholder activism is quite new to the Mauritius legislation. There has not been research done on whether shareholder activism, particularly, is the reason for corporate success or failure. In this light, this paper aims to analyze shareholder activism practices in other countries and puts forward recommendation in the Mauritius context which may be of use to stakeholders concerned.

This chapter offers an inquiry into the emerging phenomenon of corporate social advocacy, also known as CEO activism, in a non-Western sociocultural context. It addresses gaps in CEO activism research, including a dearth of non-Western contexts, dominance of modernist perspectives, and omission of female activist CEO voices. I apply alternative theoretical lenses of Caritas, Ubuntu, Africapitalism, and postmodernism to examine facets of CEO activism in Ghana. Data were collected through long interviews with 24 activist CEO men and women and data underwent hermeneutic phenomenological theme analysis. Findings suggest that CEO activism in Ghana is motivated by a range of factors previously not articulated in the literature on CEO activism. Brand activism typologies adequately describe the causes/issues advocated by activist CEOs in Ghana – as findings advance perspectives of non-Western society CEO activists. Hence, this chapter internationalizes the CEO activism phenomenon for the public relations literature while extending diversity, equality, and inclusion, sustainability, postmodern values, and insider activist perspectives to also include Caritas, Ubuntu philosophy, and Africapitalism.

This paper aims to examine how and why consumers respond to chief executive officer (CEO) activism on social media. The authors developed a conceptual model that proposes impression management as a mechanism for consumer response to CEO activism.

In Study 1a, the authors examined 83,259 tweets from 90 CEOs and compared consumer responses between controversial and noncontroversial tweets. In Study 1b, the authors replicated the analysis, using a machine-learning topic modeling approach. In Studies 2 and 3, the authors used experimental designs to test the theoretical mechanism.

On average, consumers tend to respond more to CEO posts dealing with noncontroversial issues. Consumers’ relative reluctance to like and share controversial posts is motivated by fear of rejection. However, CEO fame reverses this effect. Consumers are more likely to engage in controversial activist threads by popular CEOs. This effect holds for consumers high (vs low) in public self-consciousness. CEO fame serves as a “shield” behind which consumers protect their online image.

The study focused on Twitter (aka “X”) in the USA. Future research may replicate the study in other social media platforms and countries. The authors introduce “shielding” – liking and sharing content authored by a recognizable source – as a tactic for impression management on social media.

Famous CEOs should speak up about controversial issues on social media because their voice helps consumers engage more in such conversations.

This paper offers a theoretical framework to understand consumer reactions to CEO activism.

Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

When CEOs are publicly weighing in on sociopolitical debates, this is known as CEO activism. The steadily growing number of such statements made in recent years has been subject to a flourishing academic debate. This field offers first profound findings from observational studies. However, the discussion of CEO activism lacks a thorough theoretical grounding, such as a shared concept accounting for the heterogeneity of sociopolitical incidents. Thus, the aim of this paper is to provide an archetypal framework for CEO activism.

The authors used a multiple case study approach on 145 activism cases stated by CEOs and found seven distinct statement archetypes.

The study identifies four main structural design elements accounting for the heterogeneity of activism, i.e. the addressed meta-category of the statement, the targeted outcome, the used tonality and the orientation of the CEOs’ positions. Further, the authors found seven distinguishable archetypes of CEO activism statements: “Climate Alerts”, “Economy Visions”, “Political Comments”, “Self-reflections and Social Concerns”, “Tech Designs”, “Unclouded Evaluations” and “Descriptive Explanations”.

This typology classifies the heterogeneity of CEO activism. It will enable the analysis of interrelationships, mechanisms and motivations on a differentiated level and raise the comprehensibility of research-results.

The framework supports executives in understanding the heterogeneity of CEO activism and to analyse personality-fits.

To the authors’ knowledge, this marks the first conceptualisation of activism developed cross-thematically. The work supports further theory-building on CEO activism.