Community context shapes corporate response to violence in street protests

When violence takes place during street protests, how do corporate leaders respond?

According to new research by Forrest Briscoe, professor of organizational behavior at the ILR School, the answer depends on other community characteristics that people can use to help interpret the reasons for that violence. In particular, Briscoe focused on whether the community has a long history of protests turning violent regardless of the issue being protested - and, separately, whether the community has a history of events that validate the protestors' main grievance.

Examining announcements of corporate diversity actions during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Briscoe and his co-authors Mark DesJardine (Dartmouth) and Muhan Zhang (Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong) asked how reported violence in protests was associated with increased local corporate diversity action announcements. Communities with more reported protest violence saw increased corporate diversity action announcements if the community had a minimal history of violence in previous non-BLM protests.

Their findings were published in "Interpreting Violence: How Community Context Shapes Corporate Responses to Street Protests," appearing in the June issue of Administrative Science Quarterly.

"When we started studying corporate responses to BLM street protests, I was frankly unsure whether our findings would generalize beyond the unique time of those protests," said Briscoe, who holds the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professorship in Industrial and Labor Relations. "Yet activism and, unfortunately, violence are both on the rise globally, and business leaders are increasingly needing to respond one way or another.

"This suggests our study's key insight may apply more broadly - that is, when business leaders try to decide how to respond to violence in communities, they will ask themselves what they think is driving the violence and use community context to help answer that question."

In his research, Briscoe often explores how companies and institutions evolve to reflect a changing society and how social movements influence organizations.

Read more on the ILR website.
Julie Greco is the communications director for the School of Industrial and Labor Relations.