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Four of SKAGEN Global's top five contributors in 2017 have been subjected to activist campaigns, with a couple of notable successes. One example is Samsung Electronics, which was the fund's top performer last year and so far this year. Photo: Bloomberg

In this article we explore:

Why investor activism has grown and the benefits of constructive shareholder engagement

How activism fits SKAGEN's investment philosophy and has benefitted our portfolios

The structural and cyclical factors that are creating opportunities for further activist success

Once the preserve of specialist hedge funds and usually confined to takeover situations, activists are increasingly prevalent as minority investors put pressure on companies to change their corporate governance, strategy, business or capital structure with the aim of realising shareholder value.

Many investors seeking corporate change prefer private, constructive dialogue with company management to the more aggressive, public form of activism which is more widely reported in the media. Whether acting publicly or privately, activists seek to unlock value in operations, financial management, corporate strategy or corporate governance. While public activism is predominantly a US phenomenon, activism in European and Asian companies is increasing (see chart). This geographical expansion has accelerated as activists have pushed for change at founder and family-controlled businesses which are more common in these geographies. Social media has also played a part with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter frequently used as a forum for debate and to gather support from private investors and other company stakeholders.

Activism has become increasingly effective in driving positive change. Often negatively perceived (and often painted by company management) as self-interested, short-sighted and value destructive, executed properly the strategy benefits all shareholders by upholding minority investors' rights as well as environmental, social and governance values. Employees, customers, suppliers and society in general should all gain from better-run companies that engage constructively with their multiple stakeholders. According to research firm Activist Insight, 58% of activist demands were at least partially met in 2016, up from 53% the two previous years, while companies subject to successful campaigns systematically outperform and benefit from a median share price increase of 5% per annum when shareholder demands are met.

Value creation

While SKAGEN is not primarily an activist, our value-driven investment approach often leads us to underperforming businesses with identifiable catalysts for improvement, which are also targeted by activists. Indeed, some of our funds' best performing stocks have been helped by activists appearing on the shareholder register and going public to bring about the changes we've also identified to release value.

Four of SKAGEN Global's top five contributors in 2017 have been subjected to activist campaigns, with a couple of notable successes. Samsung Electronics - a 4.6% holding and the fund's top performer last year and this - made concessions to activist Elliott Management in April by cancelling $35 billion of treasury shares and paying its first ever quarterly dividend. Stronger corporate governance has been a key part of our long-term investment case for the Korean electronics company and this year it has contributed +2.2% and +3.9%* to Global and Kon-Tiki, respectively.

Meanwhile Microsoft - currently a 5.2% position which was Global's second best 2016 performer and number three this year, contributing +1.3%* - has had board representation for several years from ValueAct, which invested $2 billion in 2013 and whose pressure led to the ousting of Steve Ballmer as CEO. The activist fund has helped drive the US tech giant's successful push into commercial cloud and enterprise computing that underpinned our investment thesis.

For SKAGEN Focus, one of the strongest year-to-date performers is Polish vodka producer Stock Spirits, where the largest shareholder Western Gate successfully gained board representation and has applied pressure on management to reduce costs. Similar success stories have been Adient, where activist Blue Harbour followed us onto the shareholder register and helped propel the auto seating supplier towards our target price by calling for growth in margins, dividends and buybacks, and Omega Protein, with activist investor Wynnefield Capital gaining seats on the board and pushing for the nutrition company to restructure ahead of its recent takeover. These three holdings have contributed combined returns of +2.5%* in 2017.

In each of these cases our funds' unitholders have benefitted from share price appreciation while avoiding the significant costs incurred by the activists in engaging with company management and planning and publicising a campaign. These costs are reflected in the high fees typically charged by activist funds, which can include a 20% performance fee on top of a 2% management fee.

Opportunities ahead

As activists grow in number and sophistication and enjoy greater levels of success, they are likely to play an increasingly important role across the corporate landscape, which companies will find harder to ignore. In addition to growing levels of capital available for activist investment, several structural forces suggest increasing opportunities ahead for its successful deployment.

Firstly, the continued rise of index funds should support activist engagement, given their voting influence and focus on long-term value creation. Passive investors are taking an increasingly active interest in corporate governance and how environmental and social factors fit into company strategy. They similarly have growing appetite to hold to account companies that fall short of the standards their clients demand. Activism also looks set to proliferate further internationally, particularly in Asia where governments are promoting sound corporate governance, foreign share ownership has increased and local activists have grown in number and profile as investment success rates have improved.

Cyclical factors also look favourable for activists. Except for 2013 when shareholder activism was undergoing structural growth, activity has historically been inversely correlated to stock market performance (see chart). Market instability often heightens corporates' sense of urgency and makes them more susceptible to implementing change while poor equity performance also exposes underachievement and strains shareholder support for management. With many benchmarks currently at record highs and several early warning signals of a correction starting to flash, the stock market conditions for activists to flourish may become increasingly fertile.

As engaged investors, we welcome the growth of shareholder activism. Given our focus on undervalued companies, we expect to continue investing alongside those pushing for corporate change and anticipate further growth in activist success rates as companies are increasingly held to account by stakeholders. With activism coming of age, our clients should take comfort that their money is being invested in companies with strong corporate governance that promotes positive ethical and social behaviour to ensure the delivery of sustainable, superior long-term shareholder returns.
* Absolute contribution figures based on NOK returns for the period 31 December 2016 to 31 October 2017.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
Except otherwise stated, the source of all portfolio information is SKAGEN AS as at 31 October 2017. Contribution figures based on NOK returns at fund level. Data has been obtained from sources which we deem reliable but whose accuracy is not guaranteed by SKAGEN. Statements reflect the writer's viewpoint at a given time, and this viewpoint may be changed without notice. This article should not be perceived as an offer or recommendation to buy or sell financial instruments. SKAGEN AS does not assume responsibility for direct or indirect loss or expenses incurred through use or understanding of this article. Employees of SKAGEN AS may be owners of securities issued by companies that are either referred to in this article or are part of a fund's portfolio.

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In this article we explore: Why investor activism has grown and the benefits of constructive shareholder engagement How activism fits SKAGEN's investment philosophy and has benefitted our portfolios The structural and cyclical factors that are creating opportunities for further activist success Once the preserve of specialist hedge funds and usually confined to takeover situations, activists are increasingly prevalent as minority investors put pressure on companies to change their corporate governance, strategy, business or capital structure with the aim of realising shareholder value.

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https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-rise-of-activist-employees_us_591b2001e4b086d2d0d8d2d6

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The employees of Newark Airport in New Jersey have campaigned fro a pay rise to put them on a similar wage to the other airports that service the area near New York City.

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Workers at the three Port Authority of New York and New Jersey major airports stand to receive at least $19 an hour, a higher minimum wage than in any city or state in the nation, following a long, union-led campaign to boost salaries.

The PA Board of Commissioners voted unanimously yesterday to raise the minimum wage for some 40,000 workers at the airports by 2023, opening a public comment period that could lead to final action to adopt the $19 minimum wage at the board's June 28 meeting.

This revised wage policy also would eventually bring wage parity to workers at Newark Liberty International Airport, who have earned less than their counterparts at JFK International and La Guardia for more than a year. Newark workers now make at least $10.45 an hour, while workers at the other two facilities get the New York state-mandated $13 minimum. Still, that $10.45-an-hour Newark airport workers currently make is more than New Jersey's $8.60 statewide minimum.

A higher minimum wage is something union members have been advocating for since 2012, holding marches, rallies and strikes. The Port Authority in 2014 approved a minimum wage higher than either state's at the time - $10.10 beginning Feb. 1, 2015 - but efforts to increase that further stalled due to opposition from former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

"We did this together, we fought for so long and we won!" said Gertrudes Lopez-Ortiz, a cabin cleaner at Newark Liberty International Airport, who was one of the union workers who cheered following the vote. "Now it is a dream come true for me and my co-workers!"

Gov. Phil Murphy shows up in support

New Jersey's new governor, Phil Murphy, showed his support for higher PA wages by attending yesterday's meeting and urging the board to adopt the higher wage. Murphy is calling for a $15 minimum wage in New Jersey; New York's is set to rise to that amount at the end of the year. California, the District of Columbia, and several cities across the United States also have enacted $15 minimum-wage laws set to take effect this year or in the near future. The PA's proposed $19 wage would top them all.

Under the phase-in approved by the PA yesterday, workers at Newark would get a $2 raise on September 1, to at least $12.45 an hour, while the minimum at the New York airports would rise to $13.60. On Sept. 1, 2019, all airport workers would have to receive at least $15.60 an hour, with additional annual increases following until the wage would reach $19 on Sept. 1, 2023. The total cost of the proposal was not specified, nor was how it will be paid for, though higher food and airline ticket prices are a safe bet. Many of the workers covered are contractors or subcontractors to the airlines, terminal operators, and concessionaires. They include ticket agents, baggage handlers, security and cleaning services, and those working in food services and retail. Most work in post-screening areas of the airport and about a third are represented by 32BJ SEIU.

PA officials said the wage boost will not only help the workers, but reduce turnover and improve productivity, security and service at the airports, which collectively served more than 132 million passengers last year.

It should reduce staff turnover

"This policy will not only be a financial boost to thousands of dedicated airport workers, but will result in significantly reduced staff turnover," said Port Authority executive director Rick Cotton. "Studies have shown that higher wages for airport workers decrease turnover by as much as 40 percent. This will enable more extensive security training, and better trained workers will be more effective in assisting overall security efforts as well as in emergency situations. "

Workers agreed.

"I have seen so many colleagues leave their airport jobs because they couldn't afford to support their families on such low pay. Now I think they will stick around and like me they'll be able to develop the experience and training to keep passengers safe and help them get to their destinations quickly and efficiently," said Canute Drayton, a security agent at JFK.

Kevin O'Toole, chairman of the PA board, said the workers' activism made a difference.

"This Board has heard the voices of airport employees who've shared their stories with us over the years," he said. "We know that higher wages won't only make a difference to them personally, but will have a significant impact in workplace morale and productivity that will directly enhance the experience of the traveling public visiting our airports."

'Historic victory' for union

Union workers packed the meeting room and cheered after the board approved the new wage plan. The union called it a "historic victory."

"This is an unprecedented win for 40,000 contracted airport workers in an ongoing campaign led by thousands of cabin and terminal cleaners, wheelchair attendants, baggage handlers, security and other contracted service workers ... They are part of a national movement of workers across this nation that are rising to demand their fair share and turn low-wage contracted jobs into family-sustaining jobs," said 32BJ President Héctor Figueroa. "Airport workers are on the front lines of ensuring safety improving services at our airports. They greet passengers, clean the terminals and airplanes and load bags into planes. In emergencies passengers often turn to these workers for help. That is why it is so important that we invest in them and in their training and retention."

The union had pressed not only the PA commissioners, it also lobbied lawmakers in both states seeking an $18 per hour minimum. More than two dozen New Jersey Democrats sponsored legislation, S3326/A4870, that would have boosted wages for workers at Newark Airport, as well as Newark Penn Station and Hoboken Terminal. The measure cleared both houses last year, mostly on party line votes, but Christie vetoed it.

No more 'poverty wages'

"The men and women employed at Newark Airport and other Port Authority facilities in New Jersey should not have to work for poverty wages," said Sen. M. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), one of the sponsors of the measure. "Employees at Port Authority-operated airports in New York already got a raise as a result of the increase in the minimum wage in New York. The Port Authority's action will now see that New Jersey employees, who are doing the same work as their counterparts in New York, also get the wages they deserve. This is about fairness and providing employees who work hard every day with a livable wage." Assemblywoman Annette Quijano (D-Union), another sponsor, also applauded the PA's action.

"Today is an important day in the lives of the many families who live in my district and work at the airport and I am proud to have stood on the front lines of this issue and marched numerous times in support of airport employees," she said. "Residents in towns like Elizabeth, Hillside, Roselle, and Union who are near the airport can celebrate this small victory in the fight to ensure NJ workers are earning more than just minimum wage. And that they continue to be paid fair wages comparable to the cost of living in this state."

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Newark Airport Workers Cheer as Port Authority Votes for $19 Minimum Wage

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Workers at the three Port Authority of New York and New Jersey major airports stand to receive at least $19 an hour, a higher minimum wage than in any city or state in the nation, following a long, union-led campaign to boost salaries.

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An independent bookshop owner in Berlin gathered people for a protest against neo-Nazis through emailing people on the book distribution list and arranging meetings in the bookstore to discuss the issue

“The book industry has always reacted with great sensitivity to the political climate,” she said, “and bookstores are always a place where social change occurs.”

http://app.nytimes.com/?action=click&contentCollection=todayspaper&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=0&pgtype=collection

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https://www.google.se/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0ahUKEwj4tt7Xp63aAhXShqYKHbsiANsQFghIMAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kornferry.com%2Finstitute%2Fdownload%2Fdownload%2Fid%2F17773%2Faid%2F1274&usg=AOvVaw2wx3xN8YPsWva3XWYZvZjR

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In the wake of #MeToo, people are now realising the culture of harassment and assault that exists in the workplaces and combat the problem!

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Gender discrimination has long been a problem that seems to flourish in darkness. Sexual harassment, hostile work environments, pay gaps, and other acts of gender discrimination tend to multiply rapidly when those in power abuse their position and when those who observe discrimination don't report it or intervene.

Bystander inaction isn't illegal, but managers or supervisors who do not report inappropriate behavior can create liability for their company. Whether small or large, hidden acts of discrimination, negligence or aggression spin webs around our lives-paralyzing, silencing, and creating confusion and harm.

In the wake of #MeToo and #TimesUp, men and women are shouting, "Yes! This needs to end and end now." But then everyone turns to each other and asks, "Okay, what now?"

Define the Problem First

The first step is to deconstruct the problem. Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying, "If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution."

So, how do we define the problem? The issue of sexual harassment has appeared in four main ways:

1. Physical or verbal harassment

2. Victims of physical or verbal harassment feeling intimidated or afraid to speak up

3. Leadership covering up or failing to report incidents of sexual harassment or discriminatory acts, creating liability for their company

4. Those engaging in the offensive behavior failing to acknowledge or take responsibility for their roles, even when directly confronted

The Flood Lights Are On ... All the Way On

We are experiencing an unprecedented moment of illumination in the history of humanity. Over the past several months, women and men have come forward by the thousands and used their personal stories to shine light into the darkest corners of gender discrimination and sexual harassment.

Most recently, we have seen a great wave of activism among women and men in the media and entertainment industry. People worldwide are joining them and leading a charge-with growing impatience-to push for real change.

This exposure could be part of a solution to stopping harassment by removing the fear and stigma of coming forward. Companies in all industries have stepped forward and responded, declaring zero-tolerance policies, including the venture capital community .

Zero Tolerance of What?

But while these declarations come from a good place, in reality we haven't yet answered the question, zero tolerance of what? And in the absence of clear definitions, people are nervous that a simple hug or inappropriate joke might ruin their career.

This has exposed a fifth way that the problem has loomed: Not everyone fully understands what sexual harassment is.

Sexual harassment has lived in the dark for so long that many of us cannot fully articulate the difference between unlawful and unwelcome behavior-and everything in between.

As a result, it's no surprise that questions arise about how to define, categorize, and eradicate these acts. Words do matter, but while some acts might be offensive or annoying, they aren't sexual harassment. Although there is a legal definition of sexual harassment, what was clear was that it isn't very clear.

The Risk of a Backlash

Deborah Kelly, a partner with the firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, specializes in all aspects of employment law and acknowledges that while reawakened attention to sexual harassment is to be applauded, unless the "what is it" is properly understood, a backlash could wipe out any gains made.

"The answer to sexual harassment is not more gender discrimination," she says. "It is not a solution to say 'it's too complicated and subjective so to avoid even an appearance of impropriety, our company won't allow men to travel with, dine with, or attend corporate social events with women-and we will have only same-sex mentoring too.'"

"That is not an abundance of corporate caution-it's flat out gender discrimination. In these situations, you should ask yourself-if I substituted 'woman' for 'black' or 'Jewish,' would that be appropriate? Of course it wouldn't; and race, religion and gender are all equally protected under the law."

As leaders, it is our role to promote the benefits of diversity at all levels and ensure that men and women are working collegially-and not avoiding contact or interaction.

Filling the Gap in Understanding

Based on what we have learned, Mercer created a chart that we hope will help companies to discern the difference between behaviors that might be obnoxious and those that are unlawful.

The ultimate goal is for everyone-all genders-to feel safe, comfortable, and accepted at work. By working on this problem with empathy and from a common place of understanding, we can untangle the web of gender discrimination and create a proper culture that helps to attract, retain, develop, and value women as equals.

We are at an inflection point in society-let's take advantage of this to create equality for all!

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Workplace Harassment-How Do We Define it?

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Gender discrimination has long been a problem that seems to flourish in darkness. Sexual harassment, hostile work environments, pay gaps, and other acts of gender discrimination tend to multiply rapidly when those in power abuse their position and when those who observe discrimination don't report it or intervene.

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Movement to save labour of handmade products

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Movement to save labour of handmade products

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New forms of social organisation to sustain handloom

In late September, young women from the small village of Heggodu, Karnataka joined a padyatre that ended in Arsikere in Hassan district, fighting the inclusion of handloom and handicrafts under the Goods and Services Tax. Workers from different states, environmental activists, and unusually, even consumers came together in what they call the Tax Denial Satyagraha. The padyatre was one among the many protest demonstrations that the community of rural artisans and consumers have put forth to the state and central governments ever since the announcement of the GST rates.

Great contradictions between the government's pompous projections and their policy implications can be found even without looking closely. While the talk is big on 'Made in India', there has been no change in how small producers across sectors receive minimal support. In fact, before the revisions recommended by the GST Council in November 2017, the rise in prices would adversely affect handloom producers.

Susheela who has worked for over two decades in Charaka Women's Multipurpose Cooperative Society based in Sagara Taluk, Karnataka, speaks about the cost of production that was predicted by the cooperative. "From about 2 lakh rupees that we used to invest every year earlier, we would have to invest 5 lakh annually," she explains. "And when compared to large scale powerloom production, what chance do we stand when the prices of the products sore up?" she asks.

Since mid 2017, one of the founders of Charaka and prominent theatre practitioner Prasanna, along with the Grama Seva Sangha (GSS), a group constituting mainly urban consumers, are leading the Tax-Denial Satyagraha. At the Arsikere protest the workers of the Charaka Cooperative Society sold their handloom products, publicising that the sales would take place without imposing GST on customers.

"We made 25,000 rupees worth of sales without GST that day and Prasanna sir was arrested," shares Soumya, one of the participants at the rally and a worker at one of the Charaka units in Sagara. "The larger movement is on-going. The demand is that all handmade, organic items like baskets, pots, handloom cloth should be exempted from GST," she says. In the wake of the newest changes brought in by the GST Council, 29 handicrafts items are put in the 0% tax slab, perhaps a great milestone for the movement.

Abhilash C.A., Convener, GSS, shares the beginnings of the group, how it was founded to mobilize members of different sectors on to one platform. The group set out to find ways to bridge the gap between people behind the constructive work at the rural end and the urban consumers. "The GST is only a current matter we are addressing to take our main objective forward. It's a political issue to come together to raise economic concerns," he says.

Social movements have long been seeing different groups of people with diverse backgrounds coming together for a common cause. This New Social Movement to save handloom is witnessing rural working and middle classes and urban middle class citizens working in different capacities if not equal ones. The workers groups not only constitute communities from across the state of Karnataka whose caste occupation is weaving, but also women for whom the skill of weaving is an alternative, full time wage possibility. These women, shareholders in the Charaka cooperative society, have been participating in rallies and national conventions for years to draw the attention of the larger citizenry on how handloom can be a sustainable model of production.

Although initially trained under an old employment scheme by the Textiles Department, the women in the villages of Sagara Taluk had been working on personal looms in their own houses, making negligible or no profit, with the government functioning as both supplier of yarn and lone buyer of woven fabric. What the founders of Charaka and a few women from the village managed to do was organise the women into one workforce, gradually into a cooperative.

The garments tailored at Charaka from the cloth that is woven in various units across the state of Karnataka, are sold under the brand 'Desi'. The nominal rates of the clothes and the nature of minimal marketing are in contrast with big handloom brands across the country that have a market both online and offline. These big sellers, the centres of the handloom universe, tend to frame for the consumer the identity of the invisible worker who is perhaps at the margins of the same universe.

At Charaka, the women are in consistent interaction with urban consumers as visits to the units are common. "It builds our confidence when people from cities want to come here and learn how we make the clothes everyone wears, we can explain to anyone... even if we don't speak each other's language," says Kavita, who works in the tailoring section.

Class distinctness or the consciousness of it certainly does not go away with these interactions. But they function as a kind of feedback mode. They also ensure that the workers are not completely alienated from the produce and their own market. In most households, gaining employment in the processing units within the villages is a sign of pride. A chance for upward economic mobility through a job which does not require migrating to nearby towns or cities.

Many young women working in Charaka speak of financial independence of a kind other interventions seem to have been unable to create. Revati who is part of the quilt making unit at Charaka believes that Self Help Groups (SHGs) are simply traps and no longer provide training or assistance for skill development. "My mother has been part of a SHG but I don't want to be a member of such sanghas. We may just get stuck in a cycle of debt," she says.

Where SHGs have failed to stabilize women's finances, an assured monthly salary has made approaching private banks a preferred option for young women in the region. This kind of basic access to credit is an important outcome of the interventions by Charaka and a number of similar ventures that have taken birth after it. Such cooperatives seem imperative, given the vulnerable condition of labourers in the larger context of a neoliberal economy. But instead of the necessary encouragement by the state in material terms, the GST affects private cooperatives with annual turnovers of more than 20 lakhs rupees, implying that only unorganised artisans are exempt from GST.

Even as PM Modi, in his widely heard Mann Ki Baat, spoke of the unprecedented growth in Khadi sales during the 2017 Diwali, the picture is quite the contrary for private sector handloom producers. In fact, they experience a setback as government bodies, on the indications of the PMO, place orders with public sector entities alone. Many manufacturers of handloom fabric, shawls, sarees, continue to remain in the unorganised sector, away from the possibility of such bulk orders that can help improve situations. The demands by GSS for policy change are posed in this context: to raise the cap to 50 lakh rupees for all producers and to exempt rural federations and cooperatives entirely from GST.

Systems such as Charaka are emblematic of entrepreneurship, indeed of a new form of labour organisation. However, here lies the danger of tying handloom with tradition and culture. As distanced urbanites, saving handloom might well be an act of empathy towards livelihoods. But it would never fall upon the urban activist to carry on a labour intensive system. It is hence all the more important to further the association between workers and urban middle class consumers to seek a sustainable model. A model that does not reproduce old identities of the struggling handicrafts worker or one that does not rest on the exploitation of such a worker.

Abhilash brings clarity to the fact that the Tax Denial Satyagraha is mainly a consumers' movement. "We are taking the help of artisans and workers to understand what they want. If they completely enter the protest mode, we know that the production will take a hit," he admits and adds: "The idea is to not burden the rural further."

This kind of social association has the ability to assert claims for increased support from the state. But can we also expand our understanding of entrepreneurial endeavors to include alternative occupation initiatives? Can we, in our demands, create a shift in the nature of labour in handmade production where the workers have not just incentives but also greater claim on their products? Perhaps only when new technologies are sought with a view to remove the burden of sustainability from the marginalised, can the centres and margins of the handloom world truly converge.

(Names of some of the sources have been changed to protect their identity).

(Shraddha N.V.Sharma is with the Advanced Centre for Women's Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai).

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New forms of social organisation to sustain handloom In late September, young women from the small village of Heggodu, Karnataka joined a padyatre that ended in Arsikere in Hassan district, fighting the inclusion of handloom and handicrafts under the Goods and Services Tax.

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https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-rise-of-activist-employees_us_591b2001e4b086d2d0d8d2d6

Study in the U.S suggesting a a rise in activist employees. For example stating that

Nearly 24,000 employees say their company’s actions on important societal issues impacts their employment decisions;

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Frustrated teachers turn activism into candidacies for local office

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Frustrated teachers turn activism into candidacies for local office

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A decade of budget cuts to school funding in the United States is causing teachers to turn to activism across the country.  Along with statewide teacher walkouts to help spread awareness of the problems to legislators, some teachers are even beginning their campaigns for local and state offices.  One elementary school principal who is running for her House district in North Carolina, urges teachers to take matters into their own hands: "I'm going to step up, and I'm going to take those reins and I'm going to do what I need to do in order to advocate for what is right."

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Amid statewide teacher walkouts forcing Oklahoma and Kentucky schools to shut down, some public school teachers are taking their protests to the ballot box -- running to unseat state lawmakers they believe are failing to deliver adequate funding for schools.

Cyndi Ralston, a 30-year public school educator who now teaches in northeast Oklahoma, is running as a Democrat for the state House of Representatives in District 12. She is challenging Republican Rep. Kevin McDugle, who she says "won't fight for teachers and students."

"For years, my profession has been under siege by our legislature," Ralston said in a Facebook post announcing her campaign. "Budget cut after budget cut have forced us to do ever more with ever less, and it cannot continue on this path."

The walkouts are fueled by a decade of budget cuts to school funding -- and they are spreading across other Republican-controlled states like Kentucky and Arizona.

After the 2008 recession, money for education funding was never reinvested in schools in some states, according to Lisette Partelow, director of the K-12 strategic initiatives at the liberal group Center for American Progress. In 29 states -- including Arizona, Kentucky and Oklahoma -- the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that public schools are receiving less overall state funding per student in 2015 than in 2008.

In 12 states -- Arizona, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and West Virginia are among them -- state education funding is still far below 2008 levels in the current 2017-2018 school year, and seven of those deepest-cutting states reduced per-student funding even further this year.

After 10 years of "no reinvestments in America's students," Partelow said, "it's not surprising that running for office is one more way teachers would try to make change."

Teachers in states that have seen decreases in funding are bringing the fight straight to the doorsteps of their respective state capitols. The multi-day Oklahoma City walkout is only growing in numbers with each passing day, Ralston said.

"We didn't ask for a raise. We want education funding for our kids. We want resources for our classrooms so that we can do our jobs," she told ABC News. "We walk for the students."

But these educators are also facing considerable backlash for walking out. After Oklahoma teachers and administrators descended on the state capitol Monday, Rep. McDugle chided the educators for leaving their classrooms in a Facebook live video Tuesday.

"I voted for every teacher measure to fund them all last year," he lamented. "I'm not voting for another stinking measure when they are acting the way they are acting."

After McDugle's video, Ralston, who is a teacher in his district, announced her campaign to unseat him.

At the time of her announcement, she wrote, "Disrespect was given a name and a face this morning when Representative McDugle posted his video. I cannot, I will not stand idly by any longer."

McDugle did not respond to ABC News' requests for comment.

Harnessing her experience as an advocate for teachers and students, Ralston wants to be an advocate for her district.

"I know how to be an advocate. I can read these bills. I know what we need in education and they're not doing it," she said in an interview Wednesday while returning to Tulsa after a long day at the capitol. "I can go up there and try to solve this problem and get what our students deserve."

"We're very excited about [Ralston's] campaign," Oklahoma Democratic Party Chair Anna Langthorn said.

At least 20 Oklahoman teachers ran for office in both parties last cycle, according to Langthorn, but "it wasn't on the heels of the walkouts that we're seeing [last] week."

"This year we're building and improving on what happened in 2016," she said. "It's growing momentum."

In Kentucky, where teacher walkouts also continue, there is an "unprecedented" number of candidates pursuing political office, according to David Allen, a retired Kentucky school teacher and former president of the Kentucky Education Association.

The 40 educators who filed to run for office by the Jan. 30 deadline, and the five more who announced their intention to run as write-in candidates in the Bluegrass State, represent the highest number of educators running in Kentucky history.

"It's a very diverse group of teachers and administrators," Allen said.

They consist of both active and retired educators spread across K-12 and higher education running as both Republicans and Democrats, he added.

One of those educators, Matt Kaufmann, is a teacher in the Jefferson County public school district and is running to unseat state Sen. Ernie Harris in District 26.

Kaufmann was in Frankfort on Monday -- leading chants alongside his colleagues -- to stand up not only for teacher benefits but also for the "the institution of education."

"Education is the great equalizer in our democracy," he said. "We want to grow it, not cut it."

Kaufmann filed his candidacy on Jan. 29 after he says he felt that "the best of the best are not in leadership" in Kentucky. "I didn't have a choice."

"We need to stand up for education," he continued. "I'm going to stand up and fight for my kids and fight for my school."

Oklahoma and Kentucky are not the only states where political novices are emerging from the classroom to run for office. Christine Marsh, a public school teacher and the 2016 teacher of the year, is running for Arizona state senate in District 28, because she said, "there was nothing else to do from the outside."

"As a 26-year teacher, I've let down this newer generation of teachers by not paying closer attention and fighting for what was best for schools, and kids, and teachers," Marsh said. "I'm going to do everything in my power to make that right again."

Marsh said she knows of six or seven teachers in Arizona running for office, but added that her race could be a "game-changer" for the Arizona state legislature since Republicans hold only a two-seat majority in the state senate. While her students were the "catalyst" for her decision to run, the potential to bring the state senate to a tie is what "brought me out of the classroom," Marsh said.

In North Carolina, elementary school principal Aimy Steele, who is running for house District 82, echoed Marsh's call for teachers to be "the ones to make decisions about what should be done in a classroom."

"I'm not going to take a step back to watch again for someone else to be my superhero," Steele said. "I'm going to step up, and I'm going to take those reins and I'm going to do what I need to do in order to advocate for what is right."

"Teachers literally impact and touch every single person in the world, so why not a teacher?" she asked rhetorically.

This growing number of teachers running for office, much like the walkouts, is likely to spread.

"We have more educators running across the country in red, blue and purple states at the local and state level than I've seen than ever before," Carrie Pugh, the national political director for the National Education Association, told ABC News.

"Win or lose, we are creating a pipeline of educators to be part of the decision-making in places where people have been deciding on budgets, class size, and textbooks for years," Pugh added.

Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University's Teachers College, points out: "National movements need a local constituency."

"That's an arena where teachers always had something of a leg up," Henig asserted.

As a result, he believes that the 2018 midterms offer teachers a unique opening to challenge the unchallengeable and potentially win.

"I don't think you're going to see this huge wave of teachers in office," Henig said. "But I think you may see teachers being among the kinds of candidates who are able to garner enough enthusiasm to win in places that they might not have been able to win four, five or eight years ago."

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Frustrated teachers turn activism into candidacies for local office

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Amid statewide teacher walkouts forcing Oklahoma and Kentucky schools to shut down, some public school teachers are taking their protests to the ballot box -- running to unseat state lawmakers they believe are failing to deliver adequate funding for schools.

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Our findings about the dynamic relationship between the "passion" and the "umbrella" reveal some distinctive qualities of workplace activism that add to the social movements literature. Activists' knowledge of the workplace gives them a sophisticated working knowledge of how to mobilize resources and how to pick battles.

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“Our jobs as CEOs now include driving what we think is right,” Bank of America’s CEO, Brian Moynihan, told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s not exactly political activism, but it is action on issues beyond business.”

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When we first started studying CEO activism, three years ago, we never imagined how significant this phenomenon would become. At the time a small but growing band of executives were taking public stands on political and social issues unrelated to their companies' bottom lines. Since then, controversies over laws affecting transgender people in North Carolina, police shootings in Missouri, and executive orders on immigration have drawn increasing numbers of CEOs into contentious public debates. More recently, the White House's withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, response to the clash between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, and decision to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals have galvanized many U.S. corporate leaders to speak out and take action.

Of course, corporations have long played an active role in the U.S. political process. They lobby, make contributions to candidates, and fund political action committees and campaigns on various issues in an effort to shape public policies to their benefit. But CEO activism is something new. Until recently, it was rare for corporate leaders to plunge aggressively into thorny social and political discussions about race, sexual orientation, gender, immigration, and the environment. The so-called Michael Jordan dictum that Republicans buy sneakers too reminds executives that choosing sides on divisive issues can hurt sales, so why do it? Better to weigh in on what traditionally have been seen as business issues, such as taxes and trade, with technocratic arguments rather than moral appeals.

But the world has changed. Political partisanship and discourse grow ever more extreme, and the gridlock in Washington, D.C., shows no sign of easing. Political and social upheaval has provoked frustration and outrage, inspiring business leaders like Tim Cook of Apple, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and Marc Benioff of Salesforce-among many others-to passionately advocate for a range of causes. "Our jobs as CEOs now include driving what we think is right," Bank of America's CEO, Brian Moynihan, told the Wall Street Journal. "It's not exactly political activism, but it is action on issues beyond business."

The world is taking notice. CEO activism has gotten lots of media attention lately, and public relations firms are now building entire practices around it. While this phenomenon has largely been confined to the United States, there's little reason to doubt that it could develop into a global force. We believe that the more CEOs speak up on social and political issues, the more they will be expected to do so. And increasingly, CEO activism has strategic implications: In the Twitter age, silence is more conspicuous-and more consequential.

All this activity raises big questions that we will attempt to address: Does CEO activism actually change hearts and minds? What are the risks and potential rewards? And what is the playbook for corporate leaders considering speaking out?

Why CEOs Speak Up

CEOs are weighing in on controversial topics for several reasons. Some point to their corporate values to explain their advocacy, as BOA's Moynihan and Dan Schulman of PayPal did when taking a stand against a North Carolina law requiring people to use the bathrooms corresponding with the gender on their birth certificates, which became a referendum on transgender rights.

Other CEOs argue that companies should have a higher purpose beyond maximizing shareholder value-a concept that has been gaining traction in the business world. As Benioff told Time, "Today CEOs need to stand up not just for their shareholders, but their employees, their customers, their partners, the community, the environment, schools, everybody."

And for many leaders, speaking out is a matter of personal conviction. David Green, the founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby, a family-owned chain of crafts stores, cited his religious beliefs when opposing the Obamacare requirement that health insurance for employees include coverage for the morning-after pill among all other forms of birth control.

Some leaders have commented that a greater sense of corporate purpose has become important to Millennials, whether they be employees or customers. Indeed, research from Weber Shandwick and KRC Research finds that large percentages of Millennials believe that CEOs have a responsibility to speak out on political and social issues and say that CEO activism is a factor in their purchasing decisions.

Sometimes leaders point to multiple motivations. "I just think it's insincere to not stand up for those things that you believe in," Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of GE, has said. "We're also stewards of our companies; we're representatives of the people that work with us. And I think we're cowards if we don't take a position occasionally on those things that are really consistent with what our mission is and where our people stand."

The Tactics of CEO Activists

Though they're motivated by diverse interests-external, internal, and deeply personal-activist CEOs generally employ two types of tactics: raising awareness and leveraging economic power.

Raising awareness.

For the most part, this involves making public statements-often in the news media, more frequently on Twitter-to garner support for social movements and help usher in change. In such statements business leaders are communicating to stakeholders where they stand on a whole slate of issues that would not have been on the CEO's agenda a generation ago. For example, Goldman Sachs's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, and Biogen's former CEO George Scangos have spoken out publicly on government policies that affect the rights of LGBTQ individuals. On the socially conservative side of the spectrum, Chick-fil-A's CEO, Dan Cathy, has denounced gay marriage.

In some cases, several CEOs have worked together to raise awareness. For example, days before the United Nations climate-change-agreement negotiations took place in Paris in late 2015, the CEOs of 14 major food companies-Mars, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone Dairy North America, Hershey, Ben & Jerry's, Kellogg, PepsiCo, Nestlé USA, New Belgium Brewing, Hain Celestial, Stonyfield Farm, and Clif Bar-cosigned an open letter calling on government leaders to create a strong accord that would "meaningfully address the reality of climate change." Similarly, nearly 100 CEOs cosigned an amicus brief to encourage federal judges to overturn Trump's executive order banning citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.

TRADITIONAL

NONCONFRONTATIONAL
Lobby behind the scenes
Contribute to campaigns
Communicate internally with employees
Do nothing

ACTIVISM

RAISING AWARENESS
Issue a statement or tweet
Write an op-ed
Seek to spur public action via trade associations

EXERTING ECONOMIC INFLUENCE
Relocate business activities
Pause business expansion
Fund political and activist groups

Collective action can have greater impact than acting alone. Take what happened with Trump's economic councils. Though Merck's CEO, Kenneth Frazier, received a lot of press when he resigned from the president's American Manufacturing Council in response to Trump's remarks blaming white supremacists and counterprotesters equally for the violence in Charlottesville, it was only after CEOs jumped ship en masse from that group and from Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum that the president disbanded both councils-a move that was widely viewed as a defeat for Trump.

Leveraging economic power.

Some of the more powerful cases of CEO activism have involved putting economic pressure on states to reject or overturn legislation. For example, in response to Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which some viewed as anti-LGBTQ, Bill Oesterle, then the CEO of Angie's List, canceled its planned expansion in Indianapolis, and Benioff threatened to halt all Salesforce employee travel to the state. Other leaders joined the protest, including the president of the National College Athletic Association, Mark Emmert, who suggested that the bill's passage could affect the location of future tournaments and that the association might consider moving its headquarters out of Indianapolis. Under pressure, then-governor Mike Pence approved a revised version of the law, which forbade businesses from denying service to customers because of their sexual orientation.

In response to North Carolina's bathroom law, Schulman canceled PayPal's plans for a new global operations center in Charlotte, which would have created more than 400 skilled jobs. As many other CEOs followed suit, the potential damage mounted: The Associated Press has estimated that the bathroom law controversy will cost the state more than $3.76 billion in lost business over a dozen years.

Companies and their leaders also wield economic power by donating to third-party groups that promote their favored causes. To help fight Trump's immigration ban, for example, the car-sharing company Lyft pledged $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging the ban in court. In response to the Charlottesville protest and Trump's reaction to it, James Murdoch, the chief executive of 21st Century Fox, donated $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League, a group that fights bigotry.

How effective are these approaches? The trend of corporate leaders taking a public stand on issues not necessarily related to their businesses is relatively new, so there's little empirical evidence of its impact. But we do have limited anecdotal evidence that it can shape public policy-as it did in the case of Indiana's RFRA. When legislators passed a similar religious freedom bill in Georgia, threats to stop filming in the state from leaders of many studios and networks-including Disney, CBS, MGM, and Netflix-and similar kinds of warnings from Benioff and other CEOs were seen as instrumental in moving the governor to veto it. And leaders of the National Basketball Association, NCAA, and Atlantic Coast Conference have been credited with forcing North Carolina to revise its bathroom law.

To move beyond anecdotal evidence, we set out to investigate in a scientific, rigorous way whether CEOs can help win public support for policies, thus affecting legislators' votes and whether governors sign or veto bills. Our findings demonstrate that CEOs can indeed play an important role in shaping the public's views on political and social issues. (See the sidebar "Our Research: Does CEO Activism Influence Public Opinion?") Moreover, as we'll discuss, we find that when CEOs communicate a stance on such issues, it can spur like-minded consumers to purchase more of their products.

Some of the experiments we conducted investigated whether and how CEO activism might affect public opinion. In one, we developed a survey asking people if they supported or opposed Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), at a time when the controversy over it was still very much in the news. In some cases, we first told them that many were concerned that the law might allow discrimination against gays and lesbians. In other cases we attributed those concerns to Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; to Bill Oesterle, who was then CEO of Indiana-based Angie's List; or to the mayor of Indianapolis.

The market research company Civic Science deployed our survey on the hundreds of third-party websites (newspapers, entertainment sites, and so on) with which it partners, gathering 3,418 responses from across the United States. Among those in the baseline condition, who were not told of any discrimination concern, 50% of respondents favored the law-evidence of how split the country is on such legislation. Support for the law dipped to about 40% among respondents who answered the question after being presented with discrimination concerns, regardless of who expressed them-a CEO or a politician-or even if they weren't attributed to anyone in particular.

These results imply that public opinion, at least in this study, was shaped more by the message than by the messenger. There are two ways to interpret this: You can infer that CEOs have no special ability to influence public opinion. After all, their statements had no more effect than politicians' or unattributed statements. On the other hand, the results show that CEOs can be as persuasive as political leaders. CEOs can attract media attention, especially when they speak out on contentious social and environmental issues that are not obviously connected to their bottom lines, which heightens their authenticity. Given that CEOs can sway public opinion, we assume that they can shape public policy, too.

Our study went a bit further to see whether CEO activism would affect people differently depending on their preexisting policy preferences. We found that Cook's discrimination remarks further eroded (already-low) RFRA support among same-sex marriage advocates but had no impact on the much more pro-RFRA views of same-sex marriage opponents. It's important to be aware of whose opinions CEO activism is likely to shift-and whose are likely to be unmoved. In fact, recent research has found that CEOs' political endorsements can significantly affect the campaign contributions of their employees, which suggests that CEO activism might be especially influential with a CEO's own employees.

The Risks and Potential Rewards

In today's politically charged atmosphere, mere affiliations with political leaders or causes can be risky. A few weeks into Trump's term, Under Armour's CEO, Kevin Plank, faced criticism after referring to the president as "a real asset for the country" in an interview. One of his star pitchmen, the Golden State Warriors player Stephen Curry, expressed his displeasure publicly. The hashtag #BoycottUnderArmour began appearing on Twitter, and other Under Armour endorsers, including ballerina Misty Copeland, echoed Curry. The company had to take out a full-page newspaper ad clarifying Plank's comments and stating his opposition to Trump's immigration ban. But that response did not stop Under Armour's stock from being downgraded as one analyst wondered whether the gaffe would "make it nearly impossible to effectively build a cool urban lifestyle brand in the foreseeable future."

CEO activism has sometimes led to charges of hypocrisy. For example, a few conservative websites have criticized Benioff and Cook for denouncing religious freedom laws while Salesforce and Apple continue to do business in countries that persecute LGBTQ individuals. And some activism efforts have come off as clumsy: Consider the widespread ridicule that greeted Howard Schultz's Race Together campaign, in which Starbucks baristas were instructed to write that phrase on all drink cups in an effort to combat racism.

On the other hand, activism can burnish a corporate leader's reputation. In the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, the CEOs who resigned from Trump's economic councils (a group that included Plank) were widely praised. The applause for Merck's Frazier, the first to step down, was particularly effusive. "Mr. Frazier, thank you for your courageous stand," tweeted U.S. representative Keith Ellison. The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect was even more emphatic, tweeting "A HERO: Ken Frazier."

This controversy also highlighted the risk of silence, which may be viewed as a sign of tacit approval. The New York Times and CNBC published lists of which CEOs remained on the president's various economic councils, with CNBC noting that "with each new resignation, those left on the council faced increased scrutiny." Oracle's CEO had similarly been put on the spot when a group of workers from that company launched a petition urging their employer to join numerous other companies in opposing Trump's immigration ban. Their effort attracted national attention, with USA Today observing, "More than 130 tech companies-from Apple to Zynga-have signed the amicus brief. Oracle and IBM have not."

Still, CEOs should keep in mind that reactions to activism can cut both ways. While Benioff's advocacy has been widely praised, he admitted to CBS News that Colin Powell, the former secretary of state and a retired four-star general-and now a Salesforce director-warned him: "The farther you go up the tree, the more your backside is going to be exposed, and you'd better be careful." After Chick-fil-A's Cathy spoke out against gay marriage, the chain faced consumer picket lines and a boycott-but also a countervailing "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day," which attracted large crowds of customers. Indeed, in a Weber Shandwick survey 40% of respondents said they would be more likely to purchase from a company if they agreed with the CEO's position, but 45% said they'd be less likely to if they disagreed with the CEO's view.

We conducted our own experiment to assess the influence of CEO activism on U.S. consumers' behavior. In it, we asked a nationally representative group of respondents about their intent to buy Apple products in the near future. To some, we first provided a statement describing CEO Tim Cook's opinion that Indiana's religious freedom bill was discriminatory against LGBTQ individuals; to others, we provided a generic statement about Cook's management philosophy. To the rest, we provided no statement at all; we simply asked about purchasing intent. We randomly deployed these three conditions and received 2,176 responses. The people in the group exposed to Cook's activism, we found, expressed significantly higher intent to buy Apple products in the near future than those in the other two groups. Learning about Cook's activism increased intent to purchase among supporters of same-sex marriage but did not erode intent among its opponents. These results indicate that CEO activism can generate goodwill for the company but need not alienate those who disagree with the CEO. But this most likely does not apply to all companies. Apple products are especially sticky, so while Cook's remarks might not provoke a backlash against iPhones, other business leaders should consider whether the political makeup of their consumers and the nature of their products might lead to a different result. It's critical for every CEO to proceed thoughtfully.

The CEO Activist's Playbook

Drawing on our empirical research and interviews with CEO activists and their stakeholders, we have developed a guide for leaders who are deciding whether to speak out and how.

What to weigh in on.

Smart CEO activists typically choose their issues; the issues do not choose them. To avoid being blindsided by a news story or awkwardly weighing in on a topic they know little about, CEOs should sit down with their executive teams, including their chief communications officers, and decide what issues matter to them and why. This discussion should include reflection on why championing the selected causes would have greater social impact than championing other causes. (On occasion, however, there's no time for this kind of deliberation, such as when corporate leaders felt they quickly needed to make it clear they had no tolerance for racism after Charlottesville.)

Corporate Leader

Issue

Action Taken

Same-sex marriage
In 2012, Cathy publicly opposed same-sex marriage on a radio show; his corporation's foundation also donated to anti-LGBTQ organizations.

PETER LEWIS
Late chairman, Progressive Insurance
Marijuana decriminalization
In 2011, Lewis wrote an opinion piece for Forbes supporting decriminalization; he also donated $3 million to marijuana legalization campaigns.

Health care
In 2009, Mackey wrote an editorial criticizing the Affordable Care Act.

Refugee crisis
In 2014, Ulukaya pledged to donate $2 million to refugees. He also hired refugees to work at Chobani's manufacturing plants and wrote an op-ed for CNN in support of refugees.

Source MICHAEL W. TOFFEL, AARON K. CHATTERJI, AND JULIA KELLEY, "CEO ACTIVISM (A)," HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL CASE 617-001, MARCH 2017

Executives must balance the likelihood of having an effect and other potential benefits-such as pleasing employees and consumers-against the possibility of a backlash. As part of this assessment, CEOs should explicitly consider how their statements and actions will be received in a politically polarized atmosphere. A 2016 Global Strategy Group report shows that when companies are associated with political issues, customers view this connection through the lens of their party affiliation. According to the study, twice as many Democrats viewed Schultz's Race Together campaign positively as viewed it negatively, but three times as many Republicans viewed it unfavorably as viewed it favorably. Cook's advocacy for gay marriage produced similar responses. Championship of less divisive issues, such as parental leave and STEM education, however, is more likely to improve the brand image of the CEO's company among both Democrats and Republicans, the study showed.

CEOs should also consider the extent to which the public believes a CEO voice is appropriate on a given topic. The Global Strategy Group study found that Democrats and Republicans both thought it was fitting for companies to take public stances on economic issues like minimum wage and parental leave. However, there was much less consensus about the appropriateness of weighing in on social issues such as abortion, gun control, LGBTQ equality, and immigration.

Immigration has proven a particularly complex issue, as the experiences of Chobani's CEO, Hamdi Ulukaya, and Carbonite's CEO, Mohamad Ali, illustrate. Immigrants to the United States themselves, both publicly opposed the Trump administration's restrictions. Both have been praised for their stances, but Ulukaya was also threatened and his company faced a boycott, while Ali's remarks prompted no discernible backlash. This difference could be attributed to Ulukaya's focus on the moral need to provide job opportunities for refugees, whereas Ali placed more emphasis on immigrants as job creators whose work also benefits native-born citizens. It's important to note, however, that while speaking out on controversial topics might provoke an adverse reaction, it is also likely to attract media coverage, which increases the opportunity for a CEO's views to be heard in the first place.

To influence public policy, the message has to be authentic to both the individual leader and the business. There should be a compelling narrative for why this issue matters to this CEO of this business at this time. The issue selection is also a crucial time to "get smart" about the underlying details. CEOs can quickly get in over their heads if they start speaking publicly about complex issues and are pressed by knowledgeable journalists and commentators. Because the credibility of business leaders rests on the perception that they make decisions after careful analysis, CEO activists can be effective only if they really understand the issue under debate.

When to weigh in.

Once the issue is selected, the CEO activist has to understand if there are key moments when speaking out might actually make a difference. Is it while a piece of legislation is being considered, or is it afterward?

We have observed that a CEO activist's chances of blocking a particular policy are typically better than his or her chances of reversing legislation that has been enacted. As we have seen with the Republican Party's efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in recent months, the U.S. legislative system was designed to be slow moving and deliberative. This institutional feature makes it difficult not only to pass sweeping new legislation but to repeal existing laws as well.

Also, consider the news cycle. As we noted earlier, being the first CEO to quit one of the president's economic councils earned Frazier (and Merck) significant positive media coverage. When other CEOs quit in rapid succession over the next 48 hours, their stories were lumped together. Frazier's actions will likely be remembered more than those of the CEOs who followed him. Of course, there was a downside to all the attention: President Trump struck back directly at Frazier, tweeting an insult and citing Merck's responsibility for high drug prices. To date, there's no evidence that this has hurt Merck's business.

How to weigh in.

CEO activism differs from traditional corporate engagement in politics precisely because it is visible and high profile. The CEO needs to decide whether he or she wants all that attention or if the cause would be better advanced by a coalition of CEOs. More than 160 CEOs and business leaders chose to sign a letter by the Human Rights Campaign opposing the North Carolina bathroom law. In taking this approach, they mitigated the risk of consumer backlash and amplified the newsworthiness and thus the impact of their activism. Collective action can also make it more difficult for critics to target individual corporate leaders and thus can be perceived as less risky. But it is slower by design and is likely to be less effective in associating a particular leader and corporate brand with a particular cause.

CEOs also may choose not to weigh in at all. Some leaders may feel that they do not understand the issue well enough, hold an unpopular view, or simply want to focus on other areas. All of those are credible reasons to hold back. But executives should expect that employees, the media, and other interested parties may ask why the CEO has not spoken out, and should be ready to explain the rationale.

The inside game.

It's a good idea to make sure that internal stakeholders are aligned with CEO activism-or at least aware of it ahead of time. When Frazier was considering resigning from Trump's economic council, he reached out to his board members, who subsequently defended his decision and praised his courage and integrity. Our interviews suggest that not all CEOs consult with their directors or employees before taking public stands, which may imperil their efforts.

CEO activism may be giving businesses and their leaders even more influence in a political system in which their money can already buy access to power. Some people, including North Carolina's lieutenant governor, who supported the bathroom bill while facing an onslaught of CEO activism, have gone further, characterizing it as corporate bullying. One Georgia state senator, who sponsored that state's religious freedom bill, lamented, "Marc Benioff is the ringleader for big-business CEOs who use economic threats to exercise more power over public policy than the voters who use the democratic process." From this perspective, CEO activism can be viewed as endangering democracy's ideal that each citizen should have an equal say in influencing policy outcomes.

There is of course another angle on this that considers CEO activism within the current environment of political influence. As we've noted, CEO activism is an unusually transparent way for corporate leaders to try to affect policy-in contrast to behind-the-scenes efforts to work with legislators, trade associations, and think tanks. Because CEO activism is highly visible, employees, customers, and the media can decide how to respond to it. There is also a political divide here. (To be sure, certain controversies transcend politics.) Some progressives have been appreciative of recent CEO activism while decrying the activities of business leaders like the Koch brothers. As a result, many conservatives see a double standard at play. Most of the CEO activists have been espousing liberal views, but it remains to be seen how widespread activism from conservative business leaders would be received.

Though CEOs first have to decide whether they're speaking for themselves or their organizations, they should recognize that any statements they make will nonetheless be associated with their companies. We have seen almost no CEOs successfully separate themselves from their firms in this way. Given that, we advise setting up a rapid response team composed of representatives from the board, investors, senior management (including the chief communications officer), and employees to act as a kitchen cabinet on CEO activism. Seeking broad consensus across the organization could prevent CEO activism from being timely, which is often critical to attract attention to a message, but if the CEO can at least inform his or her cabinet about what to expect and why, it should greatly reduce the risk that key stakeholders will be unprepared for any backlash.

Predicting the reaction and gauging the results.

CEO activists should prepare thoughtful responses to those who disagree with them. After Target modified its bathroom policy to accommodate transgender customers, hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition in protest. The literature tells us that when easy alternatives to a product or service are available, boycotts are more effective. Target is particularly vulnerable in this regard. Thus it's not surprising that the retail chain, which has many stores in politically conservative areas of the United States, has taken action to assuage the criticism by spending $20 million creating single-occupancy bathrooms in its stores. On the other hand, Nordstrom's customer base of affluent urban women did not threaten to abandon the upscale department store chain when President Trump attacked it for distancing itself from Ivanka Trump's apparel line.

Companies generally lack good data on the political beliefs of their customers, but this information would be useful in assessing potential reactions to CEO activism. CEOs and their companies are likely to know more about the political beliefs of their employees and can better predict their responses, however. Will employees rally to the cause or go public with their disapproval-as more than a thousand IBM employees did after CEO Virginia Rometty met with President Trump?

CEO activism also risks a backlash from politicians. Trump has tweeted his disagreement with numerous companies and their management decisions, marshaling millions of Twitter followers and creating public relations headaches. CEOs and their teams should be gaming out the likely response from supporters and critics in their own organizations, the media, and the political sphere.

It's imperative to hold postmortems, too, and answer the question: Did I make a difference? Metrics to assess the impact of activism should be established ahead of time, whether they be retweets, media mentions, public opinion polls, or actual policy shifts. Big swings in public opinion are rare, so it makes sense to set realistic goals, track intermediate outcomes, and measure progress over time.

CONCLUSION

CEO activism could become a first-order strategic issue. As more and more business leaders choose to speak out on contentious political and social matters, ceos will increasingly be called on to help shape the debate about such issues. Many will decide to stay out of the fray, but they should still expect to be peppered with questions from employees, the media, and other stakeholders about the hot-button topics of day.

We believe CEOs need a playbook in this new world. To effectively engage in CEO activism, they should select issues carefully, reflect on the best times and approaches to get involved, consider the potential for backlash, and measure results. By following these guidelines, CEO activists can be more effective on the issues they care about most.

A version of this article appeared in the January-February 2018 issue (pp.78-89) of Harvard Business Review.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When we first started studying CEO activism, three years ago, we never imagined how significant this phenomenon would become. At the time a small but growing band of executives were taking public stands on political and social issues unrelated to their companies' bottom lines.

# data[].attributes.headline
Shell predicted dangers of climate change in 1980s and knew fossil fuel industry was responsible

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Shell predicted dangers of climate change in 1980s and knew fossil fuel industry was responsible

# data[].attributes.body
Not an example of activism in the workplace, perhaps rather an example of the lack of it and perhaps the difficulty of achieving it.

As far back as 1988 Shell, the oil and gas company, were aware of climate change and the effects that fossil fuels has on it. They had made calculations that their products alone were responsible for 4 per cent of total global carbon emissions in 1984. They predicted changes to sea levels and weather and global temperature. According to an internal report 1988, a Shell scientist warned that “by the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilise the situation”. And even stating that “With the very long time scales involved, it would be tempting for society to wait until then before doing anything."

We know this now because of several documents being revealed. Another document shows a shift in Shell’s outlook.
It emphasises uncertainties in climate science, stating that “any policy measure should take into account explicitly the weaknesses in the scientific case”

Shell has responded, saying:
“We strongly support the Paris Agreement and the need for society to transition to a lower carbon future, while also extending the economic and social benefits of energy to everyone. Successfully navigating this dual challenge requires sound government policy and cultural change to drive low-carbon choices for businesses and consumers. It requires cooperation between all segments of society.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/shell-predicted-climate-change-fossil-fuel-industry-1980s-global-warming-oil-a8294636.html

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Patagonia has program in which employees can participate in activism.

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Patagonia gives employees throughout our worldwide operations a number of interesting opportunities to support environmental work. Learn more.

# data[].attributes.body
This article discusses how corporations reasoning for taking stances on social issues is limited and motivated by their bottom line. If it does not benefit profitability than most likely the corporation will not take a stand.

https://psmag.com/economics/the-limits-of-corporate-activism

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Employees stepping up to demand social equity and gender equality in their workplaces

# data[].attributes.subject
Employees stepping up to demand social equity and gender equality in their workplaces

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Industrial workers are putting pressure on their superiors to make sure women subordination in their work-space is targetted.

http://da.se/2018/03/jamstalldhetskampen-borjar-pa-arbetsplatsen/

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When 'sustainable' multistakeholder initiatives try to induce change but prefer economic development instead of a sustainable appraoch

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When 'sustainable' multistakeholder initiatives try to induce change but prefer economic development instead of a sustainable appraoch

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The dutch and german Partnerships for Sustainable textiles are two organisational monsters, composed of actors from the economy, the government, labour unions, NGOs and civil society with the aim to change the textile industry to be more sustainable.
http://www.fibre2fashion.com/news/textile-news/german-dutch-partnership-focuses-on-sustainable-textiles-240363-newsdetails.htm

But what is really happening behind the stage? How important are restricting power structures and the interest in economic growth?:

https://www.ispo.com/en/companies/id_77555322/dispute-in-the-textile-alliance-can-primark-be-sustainable-.html

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Interesting article which discusses whether CEO's have their fingers on the pulse of employee attitudes.
"Transformational change is coming to the workplace"
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-rise-of-activist-employees_us_591b2001e4b086d2d0d8d2d6

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This article offers a short introduction into the role of unions in supporting the voice of employees raising the question about labor unions as actors in workplace activism
http://theconversation.com/unions-part-of-the-solution-or-part-of-the-problem-37365

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"Filmed in the southeastern part of the country, WE THE WORKERS is a vérité documentary that closely follows people organizing workers and fighting for collective bargaining rights. They find themselves up against factory employees who don't understand their rights and fear the consequences of organizing, police and government officials who see them as dangerous troublemakers, and foreign owners who ignore what lax regulations do exist."

https://youtu.be/ndY1294mVDk
http://icarusfilms.com/df-wethe

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We can now see all over a deeper and stronger awakening in people's awareness of social injustices and environmental ones and people are taking care of things by their on hands creating more and more social movements everywhere calling for more people to take action

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News - Employee Activism: The Next Frontier of Employee Engagement - Weber Shandwick

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Our research reveals six segments of employees, one of which is a segment of highly engaged employees who have all taken positive actions on behalf of their employers. These "ProActivists" comprise 21% of the workforce. Another 33% has a high potential to be employee activists, while other segments are more critical of their employers and take negative actions.

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Saul Alinsky, the "father of community organising" outlines how different community actors (within structures they interact with, like work) can create change!
This is an article summarizing his book on this "Rules for Radicals." Its kind of long, but if you scroll to the middle there is an outline of his approach.

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Saul Alinsky, community organizing and rules for radicals. Saul Alinsky's work is an important reference point for thinking about community organizing and community development. His books Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971) were both classic explorations of organizing and remain popular today. Mike Seal examines Alinsky's continuing relevance to the activities of informal educators, community organizers and animateurs.

Only two kinds of people can afford the luxury of acting on principle, those with absolute power and those with none and no desire to get any...everyone else who wants to be effective in politics has to learn to be 'unprincipled' enough to compromise in order to see their principles succeed. (Rogers 1990: 12)

Liberals in their meetings utter bold words; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement 'which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.' They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit. (Alinsky 1971: 4)

The Radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks. He hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people. (Alinsky 1946: 23)

Saul David Alinsky (1909-1972) was both a committed organizer and activist (founding the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago) and an influential writer. His books Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1972) were, and remain, important statements of community organizing. Alinsky's ideas bear careful exploration and have a continuing relevance for informal educators and all those whose role involves trying to effect change in communities. They are particularly useful for those who have to engage with local or national power structures and workers who wish to engage alienated or disparate communities and seek common cause between them.

His thoughts on the nature of work with communities are challenging, and yet relevant. In this article I want to expand on three areas. On:

the place of principles and morality in community work;

what it is to be a liberal or a radical; and

rules for how to engage with power structures effectively.

The three quotes above are meant to encapsulate his thinking on these subjects. I will go on to expand on the ideas that stem from them.

Saul Alinsky's life and work

Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago on 30 January 1909, the child of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Saul Alinsky's parents divorced when he was 13 years old, and he went to live with his father who had moved to Los Angeles. At an early age he was interested in the dynamics of power and the interaction between those who are denied resources and those who deny. 'I never thought of walking on the grass,' he recalls, 'until I saw a sign saying 'Keep off the grass.' Then I would stomp all over it.'

He earned a doctorate in archaeology from the University of Chicago in 1930. However, it was spending a summer helping dissident miners in their revolt against John L. Lewis's United Mine Workers that influenced his future direction. Upon graduation he won a fellowship from the university's sociology department which enabled him to study criminology. He went to work for Clifford Shaw at the Institute for Juvenile Research and soon found himself working at the State Penitentiary (at which he stayed for three years). At this time he married Helene Simon, with whom he had a son and a daughter. He had met Helene while studying at the University and they married in 1932. As Horwitt (1989: 17) has commented, the Depression and the growing turbulence of the 1930s politicized both of them. Helene, a social worker, was a strong organizer and gained a considerable reputation in the labour movement.

In 1936 Saul Alinsky left his work at the Penitentiary to return to the Institute in Chicago. He appeared set for a career as a criminologist, however a growing concern to counter the threat of Fascism, and the development of more militant labour organizing (especially that linked to the development of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) grew in their appeal. Alinsky was particularly struck by the way in which John L. Lewis led the CIO (Horwitt 1989: 17). Clifford Shaw and Saul Alinsky were both convinced that it was the 'social milieu' that caused delinquency rather than some particular quality of individuals. It was the study of this - and in particular gang life - that took Alinsky to South Chicago and then to the Back-of-the-Yards (the slum area that Upton Sinclair had earlier written so movingly about in The Jungle). There Saul Alinsky found a number of people who wanted change. Joe Meegan, who had grown up in the area worked his way through De Paul University, and had become a teacher became a key ally and together they set up the Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council. While historically an Irish-Catholic community, they were able to identify common interests that brought together previously hostile ethnic groups of Serbs and Croatians, Czechs and Slovaks, Poles and Lithuanians in the community and brought them into the organization. Alinsky also worked closely with local Catholic priests to build the council. The way they built the coalition meant that the council had great success in stabilizing the Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood and in advocating for that community.

In 1939 Saul Alinsky established the Industrial Areas Foundation to bring his method of reform to other declining urban neighborhoods. He left the Institute to work for the Foundation. His approach depended on uniting ordinary citizens around immediate grievances in their neighborhoods and in protesting vigorously and outside of the 'established' ways of expressing dissent (see below). He concentrated on recruiting and training indigenous 'organizers' to take a lead in the communities. His first book Reveille for Radicals outlines the principles and practice of community organizing and just one month after its publication in 1946 it made the New York Times best-seller list (Horwitt 1989: 176).

Alinsky was busy - and often on the road - and things looked promising. But in 1947 Helene drowned while on holiday with the children - and it hit him hard. He found it difficult to focus for many months; furthermore the financial position of the Foundation was not good. Saul Alinsky took on writing an 'unauthorized biography' of John L Lewis (which appeared in 1949) in part to stabilize his own finances. He also began working with Fred Ross around organizing Mexican-Americans in California. Significantly though, Saul Alinsky was not a casualty of the hysteria surrounding radicals and supposed communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s (Horwitt 1989: 240). He continued to have significant support from key figures in the Catholic Church and the press - and his combative style might well have backfired on any congressional investigation committee that called him before them ( op. cit.).

Saul Alinsky had looked around for new writing projects (including proposing a joint book with C Wright Mills) - and although he started work on a biography of Monsignor John O'Grady it was not completed. The community organizing work - with the exception of the Back-of-the-Yards (under Joe Meegan) and California (Fred Ross) - was not developing. In 1952 Alinsky married Jean Graham (who had a debutante background and was divorced from an executive of Bethlehem Steel) (Horwitt 1989: 256). Jean did not have a strong interest in Alinsky's social and political work - but had rebelled against her family's upper-class elitism ( op. cit.: 257). Sadly, though she was to become ill with multiple sclerosis not long after they were married. New areas of work opened up including working in Woodlawn and beyond with Puerto Ricans (with Nicholas von Hoffman and the Catholic Church). He also looked to New York and began to develop work there with various organizations with mixed results. This took him away from home (and Jean).

The Industrial Areas Foundation gained a significant amount of money from the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1957 to undertake a study of the changes in local communities resulting from population shifts (in particular the growing African American) - and the tensions and discrimination involved. As part of the study a number of priests were to be trained in community analysis and organization. Saul Alinsky also worked to bring the first major modern civil rights effort to Chicago, which as Horwitt (1989: 363) has commented was the most segregated city in the North. He also continued be active in more general community organizing - especially around Chicago. The work in Woodlawn, in particular, attracted attention with its focus on local organizing and its critique of 'welfare colonialism'. As Charles Silberman noted in his best-selling study Crisis in Black and White (which appeared in 1964), Alinsky's approach (through the work of the Temporary Woodlawn Association - TWO) was of great significance. It looked to put much more control in the hands of local people. Silberman recognized that large scale state intervention was needed in terms of schooling, job creation and health - but how these were to be brought about, 'at whose direction and initiative, was critically important (Horwitt 1989: 449).

Press and media attention to Saul Alinsky grew significantly following the publication of Crisis in Black and White. He became something of a celebrity - for example featuring in a series of interviews in Harper's. On the domestic front his relationship with Jean his wife had deteriorated. She was living in California for most of the time while Saul Alinsky worked out of Chicago. In 1966 Alinsky met and developed a relationship with Irene McInnis. Jean and Saul Alinsky divorced, amicably it is said, in 1969 - and he married Irene in 1971 (Horwitt 1989: 536).

Saul Alinsky became more critical of both the approach and the tactics of the 1960's young radicals. 'A guy has to be a political idiot,' he told them, 'to say all power comes out of the barrel of a gun when the other side has the guns.' He was very distrustful of the charismatic elements of some of the new radical movements. For him both action and direction had to be rooted in the practical concerns of the masses. America's War on Poverty saw the expansion of Saul Alinsky's organisation and its influence. In New York he successfully organized local African American residents to pressure the city's largest employer, the Eastman Kodak Company, to hire more African Americans and also to give them a role in recruitment.

However, he soon fell out further with both the establishment and more 'radical elements'. He called President Johnson's War on Poverty 'a huge political pork barrel' and found it increasingly difficult to work with local African American groups influenced by 'Black Power' who understandably did not want to function under white leadership. He remained active till his death, organizing white worker councils in Chicago, steelworkers in Pittsburgh, Indians in Canada, and Chicanos in the Southwest, where he influenced Cesar Chavez, who was later to found the first successful labor organization among California farm workers. Alinsky's second book, Rules for Radicals: A Political Primer for Practical Radicals, published in 1971 was a reflection on the lessons he felt he had learned in this later period. It, like Reveille for Radicals was a publishing success - and has had a long-term appeal.

Saul Alinsky died on June 12, 1972 in Carmel, California. He had been to visit Jean, gone to a bank, and then collapsed outside of a heart attack.

Alinsky on means and ends

Saul Alinsky had a particular take on the subject of means and ends, or in the terminology of informal education, on process and product. He was specifically impatient with people who would not take action for reasons of principle. As he says in his chapter 'Of Means and Ends' in Rules for Radicals.

He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of 'personal salvation'; he doesn't care enough for people to 'be corrupted' for them. (Alinsky 1972: 25)

He thought that the morality of action needed not to be judged in or of itself but weighed against the morality of inaction. As Saul Alinsky states at the outset of the chapter:

The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work. To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. (Alinsky 1972: 24)

Alinsky then proceed to develop a set of rules regarding the ethics of means and ends. Given his take on morality the idea of a set of rules about them seems ironic and this was part of his idiosyncratic style. Saul Alinsky can seem very amoral in his statements. I think that it is helpful to treat them as questions upon which to reflect when considering the morality of means and ends. For him the point was not to dwell on the morals people should hold, but to understand the morals which guide people in practice.

Here I want to highlight the key elements of his approach - as outlined in Rules.

1) One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue, and one's distance from the scene of conflict (Alinsky 1972: 26). Saul Alinsky was critical of those who criticized the morality of actions they were not involved in, were dispassionate about or were not touched by. For him, the further people are away from the conflict, the more they fuss over the moral delicacies. Furthermore, such moralising and distancing denies one's own culpability. He agreed with Peck that the demonizing of and moralising about the soldiers in the Mai Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War (where soldiers massacred 400 civilians) was hypocritical. For Alinsky the questions were how do people got to the point of committing atrocities, how people were socialised into the army, its cultures of responsibility, who becomes a soldier and ultimately why the war was being fought. Sadly such concerns are still relevant today.

2) The judgement of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgement (Alinsky 1972: 26-9).

Our cause had to be all shining justice, allied with the angels; theirs had to be all evil, tied to the Devil; in no war has the enemy or the cause ever been gray. (Alinsky 1972: 3)

Yet nowadays, with the need for propaganda over, the declaration is still taken to be self evidently true. For Saul Alinsky, both parties in a dispute will claim, and need to claim, that the opposition's means are immoral and their own means are ethical and rooted in the highest of human values. This seems to be true of the wars in the Falklands, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq etc. We portray ourselves as fighting for reasons such as freedom, democracy, protecting the innocent and portray the 'insurgents' as displaying the opposite moral characteristics.

3) In war, the end justifies almost any means (Alinsky 1972: 29-30). For Saul Alinsky people are expedient in the moment, and then find ways to justify this as consistent and moral after the fact. For example, Churchill was asked how he could reconcile himself to siding with the communists, given his stated opinions. He responded, 'I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby.' Yet prior to the war he said 'One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievements. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations' - (Great Contemporaries: 1937). During the war the allies, and Britain in particular supported the communist led resistance in Greece. Yet after the war Churchill turned British guns on communist partisans who had fought with the allies in the second world war in the Greek Civil war and supported the return of a monarchy for Greece.

Saul Alinsky uses the example of the American Declaration of Independence to elaborate on this statement: To the Colonists who drafted it, the Declaration was self evidently true; to the British, it deliberately ignored the benefits of the British presence. The colonists recognized at the time that the document was not balanced and was to some extent propaganda.

4) The judgement of the ethics of means must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point (Alinsky 1972: 30-2). Saul Alinsky uses the example of the Boston Massacre to illustrate his point. Patrick Carr, one of the townspeople shot dead by the British, stated on his deathbed that the townspeople had been the aggressors and that the British fired in self-defence. This admission threatened to destroy the martyrdom that the Revolutionary Leader, Sam Adams, had invested in the townspeople. Adams thereby discredited Patrick Carr as 'an Irish papist who had died in the confession of the Roman Catholic Church.' For Alinsky it would be easy to condemn Adams, but as he says, we are not today involved in a revolution against the British Empire. Alinsky says we have to judge the act through the lens of the times.

5) Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available (Alinsky 1972: 232-34). Saul Alinsky said that moral questions may enter the equation when one has alternate means. If one lacks this choice, one will take what options one has. He was talking at a time when there was condemnation of the tactic of the Viet Cong of sending children to plant bombs in bars frequented by American soldiers. He would have probably have understood the actions of suicide bombers, or at least would have said the question is not 'how could anyone do this'? but what drove them to see these actions as their only effective tactics.

6) The less important the end, the more one engage in ethical evaluations about means (Alinsky 1972: 34). This is similar to Saul Alinsky's first point, the question being how people's moralizing changes according to how important the end is to them. As a parallel, many informal educators I have worked with moralise very differently about, for example, the young people they work with compared to their own children. With the young people they work with, they recognise that they will experiment with drugs, alcohol and sex as a part of their 'means' of growing up; and have ways of reacting to the young people when they do these things. However they react to their own children using drugs and alcohol and having sex quite differently! Such 'means' are not an options for them.

7) Success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics (Alinsky 1972: 34).

Yesterday's immoral terrorist is today's moral and dignified statesman of high standing - because he was successful. Yesterday's moral statesman is sitting in front of a 'war crimes tribunal' today - because he lost. (Connachie 2001)

Saul Alinsky saw this as an extension of the old adage that history favours the winners. I am sure Churchill would be remembered very differently had we lost the war. He also identified 'winners' as those in power, not necessarily in a complimentary way, but simply in recognition that at present, those with power are winning. From this perspective, whether groups are defined as terrorists or freedom fighters, is normally determined by those in power.

8) The morality of a means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory (Alinsky 1972: 34-5). This relates to point five and says that we should judge different acts differently at different points. If a person cheats because they are desperate, we should judge it differently than if they cheat when they are winning. Similarly if a person steals to feed their children, it is different from theft by someone who already has a lot of money. Interestingly, at present, for a first offence or a small amount, both are likely to receive a fine in the UK. This seems the opposite of Alinsky's principle in that the poor person would be less able to pay the fine, and have a greater (admittedly only financial) impact on them than on the richer person.

9) Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical (Alinsky 1972: 35-6). Alinsky sees one of the tactics of those in a battle is to judge the other side as being immoral. We will find ways to judge their methods as unethical even if they are also used by our side. We will, of course, be using them is a slightly different, more moral, way. As a youth worker I remember having a battle with a certain management committee about the use of the building, in particular about whether we needed the full-size snooker table that dominated one room - and which no young people used. At first they questioned whether I was being truly representative of the young people in their views about the table, despite this being my role in the meeting. When I brought the young people to express their own views to the management committee they said I had put them on the spot in a meeting, which was not appropriate, despite them having invited them. When the young people wrote in to express their views, the management committee said that while they were the young people in the club, they questioned whether they were representative of the young people 'in the community'. The snooker table stayed.

10) You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments (Alinsky 1972: 36-45). Interestingly while this may seem the most morally redundant, Saul Alinsky uses the example of Mahatma Gandhi's concept of 'passive resistance' as an illustration. He points out that, perhaps 'passive resistance' was simply:

... the only intelligent, realistic, expedient program which Gandhi had at his disposal; and that the 'morality' which surrounded this policy of passive resistance was to a large degree a rationale to cloak a pragmatic program with a desired and essential moral cover.... Confronted with the issue of what means he could employ against the British, we come to the other criteria previously mentioned; that the kind of means selected and how they can be used is significantly dependent upon the face of the enemy, or the character of his opposition. Gandhi's opposition not only made the effective use of passive resistance possible but practically invited it. His enemy was a British administration characterized by an old, aristocratic, liberal tradition, one which granted a good deal of freedom to its colonials and which always had operated on a pattern of using, absorbing, seducing, or destroying, through flattery or corruption, the revolutionary leaders who arose from the colonial ranks. This was the kind of opposition that would have tolerated and ultimately capitulated before the tactic of passive resistance. (Alinsky 1972: 38, 41)

It is an interesting question whether Gandhi's passive resistance would have stood a chance against a totalitarian state. What we do know, as Saul Alinsky points out, is that eight months after securing independence, the Indian National Congress outlawed passive resistance, making it a crime. In conclusion on the subject of the morality of means and ends, as Alinsky writes: 'Means and ends are so qualitatively interrelated that the true question has never been the proverbial one, 'Does the End justify the Means?' but always has been 'Does this particular end justify this particular means?' (Alinsky 1972: 47).

Alinsky on liberalism and radicalism

As we can see from the opening quote, Saul Alinsky was contemptuous of the kind of liberal thinking that led to inaction. Indeed, he devoted a significant part of Reveille for Radicals comparing the radical and liberal orientations. He was also equally contemptuous of what he termed 'suicidal' or 'rhetorical' radicals. He starts the prologue to Rules for Radicals by addressing what he sees as the new generation of radicals, and the folly of some of their approaches.

The Revolutionary force today.. are reminiscent of the idealistic early Christians, yet they also urge violence and cry, 'Burn the system down!' They have no illusions about the system, but plenty of illusions about the way to change our world. It is to this point that I have written this book. (Alinsky 1972: xiii).

He then goes on to analyse how the radicals of his generation, to a large extent, either did not survive, or did not move beyond the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism, a set of beliefs that he also thought had had their day. He also had sympathy for the new radicals, and the rejection of the lifestyles they had settled for that lead their parents to tranquillizers, alcohol, long-term-endurance marriages, or divorces, high blood pressure, ulcers, frustration and the disillusionment of the 'good life,'. He then gives some quite poignant analysis of the 'generation gap' between radicals, and how they fail to communicate with each other. He has some sympathy with why the new radicals have rejected the standpoint of their older comrades. However, he is also scathing of some of the tactics employed by some of the new radicals as alternatives.

.... Some panic and run, rationalizing that the system is going to collapse anyway of its own rot and corruption and so they're copping out, going hippie or yippie, taking drugs, trying communes, anything to escape. Others went for pointless sure-loser confrontations so that they could fortify their rationalization and say, 'Well, we tried and did our part' and then they copped out too. Others sick with guilt and not knowing where to turn or what to do went berserk. These were the Weathermen and their like: they took the grand cop-out, suicide. To these I have nothing to say or give but pity - and in some cases contempt, for such as those who leave their dead comrades and take off for Algeria or other points. (Alinsky 1972: xvii).

He particularly lamented their lack of communication, and alienation of the bulk of the masses who might otherwise have supported them. At the time there was trend for burning the American flag, something he saw as going outside of, and alienating the bulk of the masses. 'The responsible organizer would have known that it is the establishment that has betrayed the flag while the flag, itself, remains the symbol of America's hopes and aspirations,. He takes the analogy further saying that the radical needs to work within the experience of his or her community. He built this, and other ideas into his 'rules for radicals' saying that while 'there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness .... there are certain central concepts of action in human politics that operate regardless of the scene or the time' (Alinsky 1972: xviii). Before I expand on these rules, it is worth noting that, for Saul Alinsky it is important that the radical, at least in the first instance, works within the system. This is important as it was a challenge to many radical groups who were quite separatist at the time, advocating communities, or even just the active militants in a community, withdraw and organize internally. He again liked the approach to the distinction between being a realistic and a rhetorical radical.

As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be - it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system. (Alinsky 1972: xix).

He postulated that for radical change to happen the great mass of people need to be in favor, even passively of change. However he also thought people are naturally fearful of change and that unless they feel 'so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future', revolution will not happen. He called for alliances between radicals and 'blue collar', or 'hard hat' workers, who may still have an investment in the system, even if this meant a compromise on ones goals. Otherwise,

They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default. (Alinsky 1972: xx).

Furthermore, he felt that people should not underestimate the room to manoeuvre in democratic systems. Saul Alinsky did not deny government harassment, but still felt that the system had potential to be reformed. More to the point unless the masses thought that these avenues had been exhausted, they would not embrace change. He felt that many of the new radical movements, erroneously, wanted to skip the organising phase and go straight for revolution, turning potential allies, and even those communities they were meant to be representing, against them. For Alinsky, to take such a suicidal approach means 'there is no play, nothing but confrontation for confrontation's sake - a flare-up and back to darkness' (op. cit.). He saws the involvement and active participation of citizens in issues where they had real concerns, as the key, both to radicalism and democracy. He was cynical about easy sloganeering, especially when some of the heroes of the day were cited.

Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport. (Alinsky 1972: xxv).

Tactics for radicals

The bulk of the rest of Rules for Radicals is concerned with tactics, which he sometimes also refers to as the rules of power politics. I will expand on each in turn. I will also give examples from Mark Thomas, a UK-based socialist comedian who I think uses these techniques in his show.

1) Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have (Alinsky 1972: 127). In the book he says that if one has mass support, one should flaunt it, if one does not one should make a lot of noise, if one cannot make a big noise, make a big stink. Mark Thomas uses this technique frequently. When complaining about the tube privatization he formed a band of famous names and asked them to perform on the tube singing protest songs about it.

2) Never go outside the experience of your people (Alinsky 1972: 127). Mark Thomas makes extensive use of such techniques as getting the public to ring up their elected representatives or have mass letter writing campaigns. He will also put familiar mechanisms to other uses. When complaining about the use of organophosphates he put up yellow appeals for witness signs to draw attention to the public. When investigating Crown immunity to murder, when a person was run over by an army Landrover he put up tiredness kills signs all over the front of the army base.

3) Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy (Alinsky 1972: 127). Mark Thomas would continually try and dumbfound people. When complaining about the building of a dam that was to displace 15,000 people in Turkey he built an ice sculpture of a dam in front on the headquarters of the company building it.

4) Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules (Alinsky 1972: 128). This is one of Mark Thomas's favorite tactics. He found out that people who inherited expensive paintings could avoid inheritance tax by allowing the public to have access to the painting. He got the public to ring up numerous people who had done this and request to see the paintings. When they refused, or refused everyone he managed to get the law changed.

5) Ridicule is man's most potent weapon (Alinsky 1972: 128). Mark Thomas was complaining about the exporting of guns to Iran, where the government had claimed that they did not know the pipes were going to be used for that purpose because they had been put down as something else for export terms, despite the fact that they could not have been used for that purpose. He protested by painting a tank pink, put a plastic ice-cream cone on the top of it and tried to export it as an ice cream van.

6) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy (Alinsky 1972: 128). When some pensioners had arranged to have, what could easily have been a boring meeting with a health minister, he got them to ask questions in the form of a dance routine. He also get a group of people to protest against GM crops by wearing radioactive protection gear and running around with Geiger counters.

7) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag (Alinsky 1972: 128). Mark Thomas confesses to using a series of 'stunts', to make his points. He tends to use a lot of small actions, as illustrated about, rather than a prolonged action. This approach leads into the eighth rule.

8) Keep the pressure on (Alinsky 1972: 128). Saul Alinsky says not to rest on ones laurels if one has a partial victory. He says we should keep in mind Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to a reform delegation, 'Okay, you've convinced me. Now go on out and bring pressure on me!' For Alinsky, action comes from keeping the heat on. When protesting about the use of human protein in baby milk by Nestle Mark Thomas asks questions in a public meeting with the CEO presentation about corporate responsibility, he has a protest at an international conference, he writes letters to the board, he interviews specialists and the scientists from the company, he has protests with animal impersonators, visits the farm where the herd of cows being used are kept and drives round to the ministry of agriculture in a milk tanker and starts cleaning the windows with the milk.

9) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself (Alinsky 1972: 129). When Saul Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O'Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city's reputation. Again, when challenging the avoidance of inheritance tax, Mark threatened to have more and more people requesting to see the paintings if a change did not happen.

10) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition (Alinsky 1972: 129). Such pressure is necessary, Saul Alinsky argued, in order to get reaction from the opposition. He argued that 'the action is in the reaction' ( op. cit.).

11) If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside (Alinsky 1972: 129). Essentially, this is to not give up and be afraid to concentrate on the negative aspects. In many cases Mark's pushing of the negative aspects led to changes, such as a change in the law for the paintings, Nestle reconsidering their production of milk and Channel Four producing a website for posting up MEP's interests (which is compulsory in other countries). He also succeeded in getting some serious questions asked about corporate killing in Parliament.

12) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative (Alinsky 1972: 130). This is the other side of the previous rule. If one does push the other party through to changing one has to offer some kind of solution. This would be one of my criticisms of Mark Thomas; he rarely offers solutions to the issues that he raises. It probably highlights the difference between an entertainer and a community organizer. It would also be one of Saul Alinsky's main criticisms and goes back to the distinction he made between a real and a rhetorical radical. He had little time for some on the ultra left who knew what they were protesting against, but had little idea what they were fighting for. It is noticeable that Mark Thomas does achieve concrete things, when he has concrete demands.

13) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it (Alinsky 1972: 130). This is perhaps Saul Alinsky's most controversial rule and is the counter to the common idea that we should not make things personal. When pursuing the changes in the inheritance law for paintings he targets one individual. He will often find out who the CEO is in a company and hound that person. In the organophosphates debate it is one scientist that he targets and the validity of his findings.

Conclusion

Saul Alinsky's ideas could be seen as controversial, but he was effective and practical as a community activist, and his work and writing deserves to be more widely known among those involved in informal education, community development work and social pedagogy. Not that his principles and rules are unquestionable or right for every situation, but they are a practical toolkit to effect change though leverage in those with power, potentially of great worth to those engaged in community work and education. In addition, next time one hears someone make a moral judgment about another, or make a claim to be a radical, I would encourage the reader to think about Saul Alinsky's ideas.

Further reading and references

Alinsky, Saul D. (1946) Reveille for Radicals. (1969 edn.), New York: Random House. Written in Alinsky's catchy style, this influential text includes chapters around purpose; means and ends; words; the education of an organizer; communication; beginnings; tactics; the way ahead.

Alinsky, Saul D. (1971) Rules for Radicals. A pragmatic primer for realistic radicals (1972 edn), New York: Vintage. 196 + xxvi pages. Focuses on the building of people's organizations with chapters on programmes; leadership; community traditions; tactics; popular education; and psychological observations on mass organization.

Sanford D. Horwitt (1989) Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky, His Life and Legacy. New York : Knopf. The major study of Alinsky's life and contribution.

References

Alinsky, Saul (1949) John L. Lewis. An unauthorized biography. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

McConnachie, Alistair (2001) 'The morality of means and ends', Sovereignty. [ http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/features/activistinf/morality.html]

Rogers, Mary Beth (1990) Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics. Denton TX.: University of North Texas Press.

Sanders, Marion K. (1970) The Professional Radical: Conversations with Saul Alinsky. New York: Harper & Row

Silberman, C. E. (1964) Crisis in Black and White. New York: Random House.

Sinclair, U. (1906) The Jungle (1985 edition). London: Penguin Classics.

Websites

Interview with Saul Alinsky, published in Playboy in 1972. The interview is in twelve parts. The entire text is copied onto one page, here.

Website devoted to a documentary about Saul Alinsky and his legacy, Democratic Promise.

Some excerpts from Reveille for Radicals.

Mark E. Santow: Saul Alinsky and the dilemmas of race in the post-war city - ScholarlyCommon@Penn (University of Pennsylvania).

' Problem of the Century,' in TIME (book Reveille for Radicals reviewed by Whittaker Chambers, published February 25, 1946)

'Democrats and the Legacy of Activist Saul Alinsky'. The NPR host Robert Siegel discusses Alinsky's legacy with biographer Sanford Horwitt. At issue is that Democratic Presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama claim to be influenced by Saul Alinksy.

Saul Alinsky and the industrial areas foundation (progress.org)

Saul Alinsky, The American Radical from the Free Range Activism Website

Saul Alinsky - latter-rain.com - reproduces the prologue from Rules for Radicals.

About the writer: Mike Seal is a Senior lecturer in Informal and Community Education at the YMCA George Williams College in East London. He is also a tutor on a post graduate certificate in Health Issues for People Experiencing Homelessness for Oxford University. He has worked in the supported housing field for 18 years as a front line worker, manager, trainer and development worker in Liverpool, London and Birmingham. He is the author of Resettling Homeless People: Theory and Practice (RHP 2005), Working with Homeless People: A Training Manual (RHP 2006), Understanding and responding to homeless experiences, cultures and identities (RHP:2007 and Not about us without us: client involvement in supported housing (RHP:2008).

Acknowledgement: "I am a community organizer" is a photograph by baratunde and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons Licence (Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic) from Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/baratunde/2837373493/.

How to cite this article: Seal, Mike (2008) Saul Alinsky, community organizing and rules for radicals', the encyclopaedia of informal education. [ www.infed.org/thinkers/alinsky.htm].

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Saul Alinsky, community organizing and rules for radicals

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Only two kinds of people can afford the luxury of acting on principle, those with absolute power and those with none and no desire to get any...everyone else who wants to be effective in politics has to learn to be 'unprincipled' enough to compromise in order to see their principles succeed.

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What happens when corporate activism is driven by the CEO of a billion dollar company

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What happens when corporate activism is driven by the CEO of a billion dollar company

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Yvon Chouinard has spent his life exploring the peaks and valleys of the world, and now he is fighting--with all the force of his company--against capitalist corruption, unsustainable and environmentally damaging business practices, and most importantly, the White House.

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We all knew the legendary outerwear company Patagonia lived and breathed the adventurous life. We knew they cared about the environment. But it wasn't till Trump came along that we realized they were ready to fight.

Patagonia was built in the image of its founder, Yvon Chouinard. In late January, when we met for the first time, that image included a flannel shirt, beat-up trousers, and flip-flops. Chouinard is an unlikely nominee for wealthiest man in the room. He walks with an air of deflection, as if to duck attention. "It's funny, the first time I met him," the celebrated mountain climber Tommy Caldwell told me, "I walked into the cafeteria at Patagonia, and I was like, 'That guy looks like a homeless dude.' "

Chouinard is both a beatnik dropout and a renegade capitalist. A revolutionary rock climber in his day, who still disappears regularly to surf and fly-fish, he oversees a corporation that did $800 million in sales last year. At 79, Chouinard looks like a recovering mountain troll who enjoys sunshine, food, and wine but will probably outlast the rest of us if the apocalypse hits tomorrow. "I've spent enough time in the mountains," he told me, "that I can get from point A to point B safely and efficiently. If shit hits the fan, I could feed my family off the coast. But I'm totally lost in the desert. I don't understand the desert at all."

In the months leading up to our meeting, Chouinard and Patagonia had seen a few disasters. The Thomas wildfire, the largest in California history, torched the hills around the company's Ventura headquarters. Five employees lost their homes, and then came the mudslides. All of which took place while Patagonia dealt with a crisis back east: a decision by President Trump, the great un-doer, to shrink some of his predecessor's national monuments. The pledge was a first for an American president; limiting the size of monuments like Bears Ears in Utah would mean the largest reduction of protected land in U.S. history. Which is what led Patagonia, in early December, to change its home page to a stark message: "The President Stole Your Land."

In response, the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources sent out an e-mail with the subject line "Patagonia: don't buy it." This wasn't just Trump whining on Twitter that Nordstrom wasn't supporting his daughter's fashion line. The federal government, run by allegedly pro-business Republicans, basically called for the boycott of a privately held company-provoking a former director of the Office of Government Ethics to label the action "a bizarre and dangerous departure from civic norms."

Chouinard has been known to be a prickly contrarian. He doesn't do e-mail. His cell phone goes largely untouched. But he's adept at delivering powerful sound bites. In December, Chouinard went on CNN-wearing what looked to be the same flannel shirt from the day we met-and said, "I think the only thing this administration understands is lawsuits. We're losing this planet. We have an evil government.... And I'm not going to stand back and just let evil win."

This is not your parents' fleece-maker. We're past the old jokes about Patagucci or Fratagonia. Sure, you still see a Synchilla vest on every venture capitalist in Palo Alto; not for nothing does the Jared Dunn character on Silicon Valley possess a Patagonia collection supreme. But the vest also crisscrosses popular culture: DeRay Mckesson, one of the faces of Black Lives Matter, wears Patagonia so often his vest has its own Twitter feed. A$AP Rocky shows up in Snap-T sweaters. Louis Vuitton cribbed its Classic Retro-X jacket for a mountaineering look. Universities from Oregon to Ole Miss are Patagonia-saturated, and meanwhile, vintage finds -the rarest featuring the original "big label" logo-fetch a premium on eBay.

The company's HQ looks like a cross between a college campus and a recycling center. Solar panels everywhere. Wet suits drying on the roofs of cars-the five-acre spread is a short walk from the beach. The company has an on-site school where employees can enroll their kids through second grade, one of the reasons that Patagonia has near gender parity among employees. Many of its CEOs have been female, including the current one, Rose Marcario. Chouinard writes in his memoir-cum-business bible, Let My People Go Surfing, "I was brought up surrounded by women. I have ever since preferred that accommodation."

Chouinard was born in Maine but formed in California. The son of a hardworking French-Canadian carpenter, he moved with his family to Burbank, just north of Los Angeles, in 1946, when Chouinard was 8; it was his mother's idea, to improve his dad's asthma. In California, Chouinard stood out, not in a good way. He was short, spoke French, and had a name like a girl. He hated school. High school history class was for practicing holding his breath, so he could free-dive deeper to catch wild lobster off Malibu. "I learned a long time ago that if you want to be a winner," he told me, "you invent your own games." So he ran away, to Griffith Park to hunt rabbits, the Los Angeles River to catch crawdads. It was a funny wilderness in the Valley-his favorite swimming hole was fed by a movie studio's film-development lab. "Yeah, I used to swim in the outfall," he said, cracking up.

Then he discovered climbing. In the 1950s, age 16, Chouinard drove to Wyoming and climbed Gannett Peak, the state's highest mountain. Soon he met other young climbers, like Royal Robbins and Tom Frost, and migrated to Yosemite, where he lived off scraps-at one point, tins of cat food-and made first ascents up the granite walls. "In the '60s, it was kind of the height of the fossil-fuel age," he said. "You could get a part-time job anytime you felt like it. Gas was 25 cents a gallon. You could buy a used car for 20 bucks. Camping was free. It was pretty easygoing."

Chouinard and his friends would transform rock climbing, helping to bring about the modern "clean" version, where you no longer hammer iron spikes into the cracks to aid your progress. This led to athletes like Caldwell, a Patagonia "climbing ambassador," pulling off accomplishments no one thought possible-like the first free climb of Yosemite's Dawn Wall. Chouinard also met his wife of 47 years, Malinda, in Yosemite. At the time, she was a climber who worked as a weekend cabin maid. According to Chouinard, the moment that clinched it was a day they were hanging out and Malinda saw some women pull up and throw a beer can out the window. She told them to pick it up. They gave her the finger. Malinda went over, tore the license plate off their car with her bare hands, and turned it in to the rangers' office. Chouinard was in love.

Patagonia got its start as Chouinard Equipment, selling the climbing gear that Yvon was making for his friends. The first apparel was equally functional, designed to resist rock: sturdy corduroy trousers, stiff rugby shirts like the ones Yvon brought back from a climbing trip in Scotland. When the clothing started to take off, they decided to separate the garments from the gear; they just needed a good name. As Chouinard explained: "To most people, especially then, Patagonia was a name like Timbuktu or Shangri-la-far-off, interesting, not quite on the map."

These days, that "far-off" land is thriving. With Marcario at the company, revenue and profits have quadrupled. In addition to clothing, the company produces films, runs a food business, even has a venture-capital fund to invest in eco-friendly start-ups; one, Bureo, makes skateboards and sunglasses from former fishing nets. Along the way, Patagonia began donating 1 percent of its sales to environmental groups-$89 million as of April 2017-and led the garment industry in cleaning up its supply chains, demanding better practices from factories overseas. (Chouinard, his wife, and their two adult children remain the sole owners of Patagonia.)

For all the success, an enduring thorn sticks in Chouinard's side: A clothing company can't help but pollute. This season's new puffy jacket is tomorrow's landfill. "The best thing you can do for the planet as far as clothing goes is to buy used clothes and wear them until you just can't wear them anymore," Chouinard said. "It's like a car. If you get rid of your Chevy and buy a Prius, you're not doing anything for the planet-you just put one more car on the road. Someone else is going to be driving your Chevy."

In 2011, on Black Friday, Patagonia ran a full-page ad in The New York Times, headlined "Don't Buy This Jacket." The company vowed to repair or recycle old garments while also pleading for customers to stop buying crap they didn't need. Of course, Patagonia's ad made headlines-and the company sold a ton of jackets. "But it also forced us to put in the largest garment-repair center in North America," Chouinard said. "I made a commitment to our customer that we were going to put as much quality as we could into the product. If it breaks down, we were going to fix it, and if you no longer want it, we're going to find another home for it, and then when it's finally completely finished, we were going to recycle it into more product." He added, "It wasn't a way to sell more product, even though, of course, that jacket sold like crazy. It's kind of Zen. You do the right thing and good things happen."

In the Trump era, Chouinard and his company feel galvanized. Following the election, a junior employee had the goofy idea to give away Patagonia's Black Friday profits to hundreds of grassroots environmental organizations, the kind that often work for changes the current administration hates. But not just a share of the day's revenue: all of it. The idea was kicked up the chain. Within days, the company had made a promise on social media. Sales started to pour in.

The previous year, Patagonia had done $2.5 million on Black Friday. In 2016 it was $10 million-and they gave it all away. "It cost us a bunch of money," Chouinard said, "because it was total revenue. But 60 percent of the customers were new buyers. Sixty percent. It was one of the best business things we've ever done."

In Ventura, weeks after the Thomas fire, the air still smelled of smoke. Patagonia's headquarters had been used to house evacuees until the fires got too near. Later, the Ventura store gave away long underwear to firefighters working nights in the mountains and fishing waders to crews trying to find people in the mud. I felt a little awkward, then, considering the context, when I told Chouinard that Patagonia's activism seemed pretty convenient when it did so well for the bottom line. What's "Zen" to his mind might sound to others like "good marketing." He conceded the point, somewhat, but strongly disagreed: "What we say we're doing, we're actually doing. A lot of companies are just greenwashing, and young people can see right through it. Kids are smart, so we don't talk down to them. Our marketing philosophy is just: Tell people who we are. Which is, tell people what we do, and don't try to be anything more than that."

I asked Chouinard about the lawsuit and his personal feelings about Trump. He thought for a moment, perhaps to contain himself. "What pisses me off about this administration is that they're all these 'climate deniers'-well, that's bullshit. They know what's happening. What they're doing is purposely not doing anything about climate for the sake of making more money." He paused, bowed his head, and scraped his fingernails on the table. He sat up again. "That is truly evil. That's why I call this administration evil. They know what they're doing, and they're doing it to make more money."

Gradually, the conversation went even darker. About Trump, Chouinard added, "It's like a kid who's so frustrated he wants to break everything. That's what we've got." I asked sarcastically if any part of him was an optimist. Marcario, sitting next to him, laughed loudly. "Did you just ask Yvon if he's an optimist?" Chouinard smiled and cocked his head. "I'm totally a pessimist. But you know, I'm a happy person. Because the cure for depression is action."

In December, Chouinard was invited to Washington to testify before the House Committee on Natural Resources. He refused. In a response Patagonia made public, Chouinard wrote to the committee chairman: The American people made it clear in public comments that they want to keep the monuments intact, but they were ignored by Secretary Zinke, your committee, and the administration. We have little hope that you are working in good faith with this invitation. To me, he scoffed and shook his head; Washington's the kind of desert a man like him could get lost in. "You sit down in a little chair, and they're up on high chairs looking down at you, and they give you two and a half minutes to give your testimony," he said. "I'm not going to play that game."

It reminded me of how Chouinard had described his childhood, growing up in Burbank, facing off against teachers and bullies. When I asked him how it felt to be attacked by the administration, he laughed. "I'm stoked. If you're not getting attacked, you're not trying hard enough."

Utah is currently feeling the effects of one of the company's political actions. The outdoor-retail industry gathers each winter at an enormous trade show to flaunt new gear. Traditionally, the event had been held in Salt Lake City, giving the city a roughly $20 million boost-until last February, when Patagonia led the charge to move the show. Along with companies like REI and The North Face, Patagonia had gotten fed up with Utah's Republican governor, Gary Herbert, who was determined to roll back protections on his state's public lands.

Herbert was reportedly furious. Montana senator Jon Tester said the relocation had sent "a hell of a message." At this year's show, in Colorado, it was a topic of conversation everywhere I went. An industry veteran pointed out to me how, for one example, REI has plenty more members than the NRA but no lobbying muscle to compare. Now maybe that could change.

"That's why I call this administration evil. They know what they're doing, and they're doing it to make more money."

I wandered the trade show for two days. Among the tens of thousands of attendees, Patagonia was easily the unofficial clothier of the convention, if not the city of Denver. Backpacks, jackets, trucker hats. On the street, outside the convention center, a man selling a newspaper that benefits the homeless, the Denver Voice, was wearing a Patagonia hat and top-of-the-line down jacket.

At one point, I caught a panel of executives discussing access to public lands. Corley Kenna, Patagonia's director of global communications, mentioned that, in addition to what had happened in Utah, numerous other monuments were on the chopping block-not to mention the Arctic Refuge, which Trump had just opened for oil drilling, or U.S. coastlines, which he'd vowed to exploit for drilling, despite resistance from the vast majority of the states themselves. Kenna pledged that the company, with its partners, would maintain its resolve: "We're fighting an administration that lies, that flat-out lies."

Building off the momentum around public lands, Patagonia is doubling down on its activist streak. In February, it launched a new online platform to connect customers with environmental groups. This spring it will announce a certification it's spearheading for "regenerative organic agriculture," Chouinard's latest obsession. That's the practice where farmers, through topsoil management, absorb carbon from the climate. As Chouinard sees it, it's possibly our best shot against climate change-and likely good for Patagonia's bottom line. "In business, this is what we do here-we just break the rules," he said. "Life is so much easier by breaking the rules than trying to conform to the rules. It's so much easier."

For a doomsayer on the verge of becoming an octogenarian, Chouinard stays awfully busy: writing op-eds, developing new products, stoking outrage. Assuming he doesn't get cancer from those childhood swims in photo-processing chemicals, I don't just think he'll outlast Trump, who's eight years his junior; he'll probably outlast me, and I'm only staring down 41. The solution, Yvon-style, would appear to be to remain active, to remain engaged. In a 1992 letter to employees titled "The next hundred years," Chouinard wrote, "I have a little different definition of evil than most people. When you have the opportunity and the ability to do good and you do nothing, that's evil. Evil doesn't always have to be an overt act. It can be merely the absence of good." The cure is action.

Rosecrans Baldwin's latest novel, The Last Kid Left, was one of NPR's Best Books of 2017.

This story originally appeared in the April 2018 issue with the title "Patagonia vs. Evil."

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We all knew the legendary outerwear company Patagonia lived and breathed the adventurous life. We knew they cared about the environment. But it wasn't till Trump came along that we realized they were ready to fight. Patagonia was built in the image of its founder, Yvon Chouinard.

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It is also worth mentioning individuals such as Martin smedjeback and Pelle Strindlund, who have accepted activism in the workplace to such a level that activism is their occupation. Both live very simply and rely mostly on crowd funding from sponsors. In an interview with martin Smedjeback, he revealed he has around 40 sponsors a year and lives off of 70,000kr. This is more than enough to cover his costs of living, and the rest goes towards his projects.

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Södermanlands-Nerikes nation (Snerikes) have organisations within that work towards, for example, gender equality and proenvironmental procedures. By using posters with eye-opening stats, such as “you can make 38 cups of coffee on the energy saved by recycling a newspaper”, the students are spreading a message. This technique is non-violent, and doesn’t force anyone to change their behaviour, rather it allows them to become informed and make their own decisions about how they should act.

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"The role of accountants in a new ideal must be to drive democratisation of data" 

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"The role of accountants in a new ideal must be to drive democratisation of data" 

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This arcticle descibes how CSR reporting could be made into an efficient branding tool by using open, transparent and real-time data that engages customers.

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Sustainability reporting has moved from a niche activity to the mainstream with organisations' feet being held to the fire of social activism. Corporate social responsibility was once perceived as being harmful to financial performance, but it is no longer defensible to claim an unrealistic and abstract separation of sustainability from business operations, for they are inextricably intertwined. The corporate sustainability agenda has faced setbacks as a result of some companies mismanaging and misrepresenting their sustainability credentials, leading to societal stakeholders perceiving such companies as disingenuous.

Unfortunately, organisations have not been able to fully overcome this verdict, resulting in sustainable practices not fulfilling their optimistic expectations. In response to this, an accountant must broaden their thinking about the role of reporting from the conventional focus on monetary measurements to finding solutions for clients that can catalyse the sustainable revolution.

Traditional Reporting

The traditional sustainability report model is swiftly losing relevance. Considerable amounts of resources and energy are spent on developing dense corporate documents that people seldom read, forever lost within the online labyrinth of corporate investor centres, failing to connect with the intended audience. Multi-purpose, multi-stakeholder reports aspire to be all things to everybody, painting a picture of an organisation's activities in broad strokes. Stakeholders are not a monolith, but a vast and ever-evolving spectrum of various interests, each with specific items on their wish-list.

This broad stroke approach has led to the average annual report increasing by 17%, from 132 pages in 2014 to 155 pages in 2017. If this growth were to continue, within the next decade we would see the nightmarish average annual report of 745 pages. Engagement with the contemporary form has unsurprisingly fallen, with less than a quarter of global citizens having read a sustainability report in the past 12 months.

Democratisation of Data

The role of accountants in a new ideal must be to drive democratisation of data. Companies need to leverage and communicate data in new ways to stay relevant. Digitalisation across the supply chain has provided a massive pool of untapped data that can transform the measurement of sustainability. New approaches will form the foundation for data to become fully digital and almost real-time, empowering stakeholders with real-time information on companies' sustainable performance, providing an unprecedented insight into any one company's operations.

Sustainability data can be collected and analysed through artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain technologies. This allows organisations and consumers alike to understand and find the correlations between what would otherwise be complex and unintelligible statistics.

Real-Time Data

Contemporary static sustainability reporting must be transformed into an interactive digital tool open to the public and providing up-to-date information allowing stakeholders to monitor a company's sustainability practices in action. Reports of the future should be dynamic, customisable, interactive, and, most importantly, accessible and engaging, granting stakeholders the ability to tune into the data and information that is most relevant to them.

Not only will these digital platforms make organisations more accountable to external stakeholders but will also allow better decision-making internal to drive progress in sustainable business performance. Real-time data will provide real-time stakeholder scrutiny. Companies, as a result, will be increasingly motivated in achieving improved consistency between their stated values and actions in practice.

An estimated €966bn opportunity exists for brands that make their sustainability credentials clear, with a third of consumers choosing to buy from organisations they believe are acting in a socially or environmentally conscious way. Despite the most difficult economic climate in decades, the sustainable sentiment is consistent across income levels, and a global phenomenon that trends to purpose-led purchasing which can be observed in both developed and emerging markets.

The challenge for accountants, therefore, is not merely providing assurance over these platforms, namely the volume, variety, velocity and veracity of big data, but leading organisations on this journey towards sustainability. Accountants can and must help clients move from sustainability principles to practice, and make corporate citizenship real, not just rhetoric.

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The Sustainable Revolution: Reporting and the Accountant's Role - The Market Mogul

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Sustainability reporting has moved from a niche activity to the mainstream with organisations' feet being held to the fire of social activism. Corporate social responsibility was once perceived as being harmful to financial performance, but it is no longer defensible to claim an unrealistic and abstract separation of sustainability from business operations, for they are inextricably intertwined.

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"When I first began studying the interactions between social movements and corporations 25 years ago, it was rare to see business take a public stand on social issues. Yet today we see organizations ranging from General Electric to the NCAA weighing in on transgender issues, something that would have been hard to imagine even a decade ago."

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Not surprisingly, given Wal-Mart's status in the state and the corporate backlash that accompanied a similar law in Indiana, the governor obliged and eventually signed a modified bill. That din't sit well with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, however, who argued in The New York Times that companies in those states were joining "left-wing activists to bully elected officials into backing away from strong protections for religious liberty." He warned companies against "bullying" Louisiana.

Why have corporations shifted from "abiding local custom" around segregation and other divisive social issues to "bullying elected officials" to support LGBT rights?

Changing environment

In my view, there are two broad changes responsible for this increased corporate social activism.

First, social media and the web have changed the environment for business by making it cheaper and easier for activists to join together to voice their opinions and by making corporate activities more transparent.

The rapid spread of the Occupy movement in the fall of 2011, from Zuccotti Park in New York to encampments across the country, illustrates how social media can enable groups with a compelling message to scale up quickly. Sometimes even online-only movements can be highly effective.

When the Susan G. Komen Foundation cut off funds to Planned Parenthood that were aimed at supporting breast cancer screenings for low-income women, a pop-up social movement arose: Facebook and Twitter exploded with millions of posts and tweets voicing opposition. Within days the policy was walked back.

Mozilla's appointment of a new CEO who had supported a California ballot proposal banning same-sex marriage also generated outrage online, both inside and outside the organization. He was gone within two weeks.

More recently, Mylan's exorbitant price hikes on its EpiPen took place over several years, but an online petition fueled by social media this summer turned it into a scandal and a talking point for presidential candidates.

In each case, social media allowed like-minded "clicktivists" to draw attention to an issue and demonstrate their support for change, quickly and at very little cost. It's never been cheaper to assemble a virtual protest group, and sometimes (as in the Arab Spring) online tools enable real-world protest. As such, activism is likely to be a constant for corporations in the future.

Millennials don't like puffery

Second, as consumers and workers, millennials are highly attuned to a company's "social value proposition."

Companies targeting the sensibilities of the young often tout their social missions. Tom's Shoes and Warby Parker both have "buy a pair, give a pair" programs. Chipotle highlights its sustainability efforts. And Starbucks has promoted fair trade coffee, marriage equality and racial justice more or less successfully. In each case, transparency about corporate practices serves as a check on puffery.

Social mission is even more important when it comes to recruiting. At business school recruiting events, it is almost obligatory that companies describe their LEED-certified workplaces, LGBT-friendly human resource practices and community outreach efforts.

Moreover, our employer signals something about our identity. Value alignment is part of why people stay at their job, and among many millennials, socially progressive values- particularly around LGBT issues - are almost a given.

In this situation, corporate activism may be the sensible course of action, at least when it comes to LGBT issues. According to the Pew Research Center, for example, support for same-sex marriage has increased from 31 percent in 2004 to 55 percent today, and there is little reason to expect a reversal.

Risks remain

Even as trends lead to more corporate activism, the reaction hasn't always been as the businesses expected. Businesses on the vanguard of social issues themselves can become targets if and when they slip up.

When Starbucks attempted to promote a dialogue about race after the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner by police in 2014, its method- asking baristas to write "race together" on cups to encourage conversations - was widely ridiculed. Some even regarded the effort as a misguided marketing ploy rather than a sincere effort to promote understanding.

In 1998, William Clay Ford Jr. became chairman of Ford Motor and aimed to turn the company green by improving fuel economy and "greening" its production processes. The company even put an energy-efficient "living" roof on a truck assembly plant. Its continued reliance on its profitable line of gas-guzzling SUVs, however, prompted some to accuse Ford of hypocrisy.

Red and blue companies?

While prominent companies like Starbucks and Target have taken stances associated with liberal causes, some businesses have gone the other direction.

Chick-fil-A aimed to implement "biblical values" and supported anti-gay groups in the 2000s. Those groups returned the favor by encouraging like-minded people to dine there on " Chick-fil-A appreciation day."

Hobby Lobby famously sought to abstain from providing funding for birth control for employees on religious grounds. Koch Industries, overseen by the famous Koch Brothers, has long been a lightning rod for boycotts due to the right-wing proclivities of its dominant owners. And small businesses across the country are not always shy in advertising their conservative political orientations.

As states have seemingly divided into red (for conservative) and blue (for liberal), might we expect the same thing from corporations, as consumers and employees drift toward the brands that best represent their views- red companies and blue companies?

It is already easy to look up political contributions by companies and their employees. For example, Bloomberg, Alphabet and the Pritzker Group lean Democratic; Oracle, Chevron and AT&T tend Republican.

In the current electoral climate, it is not hard to imagine this continuing.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Target recently staked out a position in the culture wars by announcing that it will build private bathrooms in all its locations, after earlier allowing transgender customers to use whichever room corresponds with their gender identity-both actions sparking anger from many conservatives.While big business hasn't always been on the vanguard of social justice, in recent years companies like Target,...

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Protesters encouraged employees to fill out a survey to give their opinion on the Adani Coal mine outside a workplace that was funding the project. (Westpac has now pulled out of the funding for the coal mine!)

https://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/antiadani-mine-protesters-disrupt-westpacs-200th-birthday-celebrations-20170409-gvgz5q.html

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Using A Change Model For Environmental Advocacy — In Depth

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Using A Change Model For Environmental Advocacy — In Depth

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This article discusses critical actors for climate advocacy and the need to frame climate change as a 'people problem'. When we build community, it leads to problem solving.
Actors discussed:

Jerry Taylor (“Getting Real about the Clean Power Plan“)

Bob Inglis (“The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax”)

Lynn Scarlett (“Acting on Climate for the Win“)

Hank Paulson (“Why Fixing the Climate is Like Fixing the Economy“)

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Climate Change

How can we help skeptical individuals to become more open, aware, and receptive to discussions about the effects of global warming? How can we inform people who are resistant to the science of climate change? As our planet and earth's citizens suffer increasing harm, climate deniers are frequently supported by leaders who refuse to acknowledge the growing climate catastrophe around us.

What can we do to alter these uninformed and irresponsible perspectives? Advocates can draw upon a change model to help reluctant audiences understand the effects of climate change.

97% of all scientists concur that climate change is real and a result of human action. Climate change has consequences for every village, town, and city in the world. But it's easy to see why many citizens are baffled by the mixed messages that come out of their elected officials' mouths. Too many people in positions of power continue to deny the science of climate change. They sidle up to their corporate polluter allies, standing erect and proud while blatantly and often consciously hindering the fight against climate change.

Nowhere is the topic of climate change action and rebuttal more powerful than on social media. US President Trump announces his daily rampages on Twitter and has used the platform many times to decry climate change advocacy. His comments across numerous years dismiss the scientific evidence that human-made (also known as "anthropogenic") climate change is real, and, instead, he has labeled the data as a "con," a "hoax," and "bull--."

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

Like many of today's elected officials, Trump has received enormous amounts of funding from corporations who stand to lose their way of financial life if alternative energy sources are widely adopted in the US. The oil and gas industry and its pawns have blocked US support for key global climate-change initiatives at every turn. They've commissioned studies that insist that climate policies would adversely affect the US economy and have gone so far to suggest that the Paris Climate Accord would be uniquely harmful to the US. They even say that efforts to reduce poverty could be jeopardized if the US were to become climate conscious.

Really?

We in the progressive world know that diffusing the monstrous oil and gas industry propaganda means following the money that funds the pseudo-science of delay. We need to expose the co-opted scholars who feed false images of debate to the public. But what is the best method to deconstruct that discourse to persuade climate deniers that climate action is necessary - and now?

There are many approaches to calling out fake science news, but applying a change model within digital spaces may be the most efficacious. A change model looks to the betterment of people's daily existence - which speaks to the real concerns of people across political and cultural divides.

Defining a Change Model for Climate Action

What is a change model? In today's world, new initiatives, project-based design, technology improvements, and staying ahead of the competition combine together to drive the ongoing adaptations to the way that we work together. The comparable collaboration inherent within the change model approach can alter thinking, and the new understandings that emerge can range from quite small in scale to amazingly systemic.

A change model infuses the sometimes opposite constructs of pragmatism and compromise into discussions about climate change, breaking the 'Big Climate Picture' into smaller, interconnected elements. Through a change model, progress can actually be achieved, because the focus shifts from doom and gloom to opportunities for positive results.

John Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School, wrote a book called Leading Change (1995). While the book remains iconic in management arenas, his research has continued, and he has more recently argued that focusing on people through dynamic dialogue and co-creation is the way to take "stakeholders' authentic feedback, reframe it, help them understand our perspective on issues, and explain how we plan to address them."

With an 8-step approach to change, Kotter's model opens up opportunities to guide climate advocacy, which speaks to people's feelings as a way to change behavior. This is really different than the typical approach to climate change discussions, which emphasizes the obstacles and barriers to ecojustice.

How to Begin Using a Change Model for Climate Advocacy

Climate change advocates start by generating a sense of urgency about the issues at hand. Change comes about because the underlying climate crisis will unalterably force people's lives in a different direction. However, focus on the crisis is subsumed by the pressing subject of how people's lives will be affected.

Once a sense of climate action momentum is achieved, gathering the right voices together to deliver messages about transformational change is really important. Reaching people's feelings requires bringing together a coalition whose power is derived from a variety of sources, which can be tense and difficult due to differing perspectives and ideologies. Yet, people from diverse or contradictory backgrounds can come to reach out to each other, and together they can articulate the ways that real people's lives can be made better through an emotional and profound commitment to climate change action.

Determining the values that are central to the change is imperative. So, too, is developing a central statement, sometimes called a "vision speech," of what the change coalition sees as the future of climate change action. The vision speech within a change model can help advocates push cultural or political consensus on climate change through joining with experts who pursue a broad portfolio of policy actions across levels of government and business. Always, though, the vision speech stays with local concerns and community values.

Applying a Change Model to Social Media

According to the Pew Research Center, social media is the way that 7-in-10 Americans connect with one another, engage with news content, share information, and entertain themselves. Since the social media user base has also grown more representative of the broader population, climate change advocates can use social media to target the values that conservatives hold dear. Those personalized climate-related messages should tend toward purity, obeying authority, and loyalty. When conservatives hear messages about how a pro-environmental agenda maintains the purity of America, for example, or how taking responsibility for yourself and the land you call home is patriotic, they are more likely to support that agenda.

Additionally, a study has shown that when climate change advocates frame issues in a way that appeals to the obligation to adhere to authority, conservative audiences may listen. If recycling is a way to join in to help the community, then increased recycling efforts tend to emerge in those conservative households.

Ultimately, a change model should use digital tools and texts to focus on how mitigation efforts can promote a better society by developing mutual trust.

Digital Literacy and Learning as a Way to Implement a Change Model of Environmental Activism

A really good way for advocates to incorporate a change model with environmental issues is within digital spaces. It means drawing upon electronic journalism of all types - the print newspapers-turned-online publications as well as social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and the others. It means blogs with large and small audiences. Reaching out through the digital world is imperative, because, for those who use social media and other digital sources, it has become part of their daily routine.

Scholars across many forums in recent years have been positioning digital literacy as a confluence of disruption, confrontation, and subversion. An institute in Providence, Rhode Island, however, has been taking a different approach for the last five years. Instead of assuming a "this is the right way" to think about the digital world mental model, the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy at the University of Rhode Island has helped participants to reflect within through inquiry how new wonderings and imaginings can move us together to create a collaborative future.

It's a change model from which climate change advocates can draw.

Empowering people to think about how life and learning is changing as a result of emerging media and technologies is still a bit radical in educational and cultural spaces. Yet, when dialogical and representative forms of storytelling incorporate digital mapping, artistry, and toolkits, the results are striking. Original work with the web through social media and multimedia production brings inquiry and intentional design to new levels.

The Summer Institute in Digital Literacy (#digiURI) was recognized in the "2017 National Education Technology Plan," published by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology. The implications of the #digiURI cultural and technological shift mean that people who are less engaged with the issue of climate change are more likely to be influenced by experiential learning. Since researchers have found that the perceived personal experience of global warming leads to increased belief certainty, motivated reasoning can arise when climate change information is filtered through authentic personal experience.

RT if you agree: #ClimateChange is a SOLVABLE problem pic.twitter.com/DkcXghhofQ

- UN Environment (@UNEP) July 27, 2017

Social media today has become a type of vicarious experience, in which climate change advocates can become composers of social media messages that gently and respectfully talk about what's changed in their communities.

Remember when the first frost happened in New England around Labor Day?

Are heat waves stronger and longer than they were when we were kids?

Do different species of birds migrate now to our region than in the past?

Has storm-induced erosion reduced our favorite summer ocean beach even more?

As people learn about climate and engage in inquiry through personal experience, they are more likely to acknowledge that change is happening.

Drawdown is a compendium of every idea known to humanity at the present time that can slow or reverse the devastation of...

Posted by Steve Hanley on Friday, July 28, 2017

#digiURI and the Example of a Change Model in Action

"Personalized" is something human where the learner initiates and controls part or all of the learning process. It often emerges through engagement with others about personal wonderings and building relationships in the process. The Summer Institute in Digital Literacy relies on a Personal Design Inquiry (PDI) model, where mentors guide individuals to focus on learning through questions and to develop their own plans of action as a result of the questions they generate.

Importantly, community building leads to problem solving. Climate change advocates can cite conservative leaders who support climate change action as a way to make personal and ideological connections that coalesce around climate change acceptance.

Asking questions about these individuals, the reasons for their stances, and their identifications as both conservatives and climate change activists is a way to use inquiry to model how reconciliation across seemingly disparate social categories can result.

The Summer Institute in Digital Literacy is supported in part by the Media Education Lab, which offers many resources for inquiry and analysis. Climate change advocates can see the gift in Twitter as a pedagogical tool. Certainly, the confluence of social media and popular culture is essential in today's society for a change model to be effective. What if climate change advocates and deniers alike learned to understand implicit bias through the power of reflection?

Conclusion

A change model that includes reliance on social media messages has the potential to incite social and political shifts. We need such transformation in the world of climate change advocacy if we want deniers are to be brought into our conversations.

We need to gain broader momentum and greater acceptance that climate change is happening, is human-caused, and does present a real threat. People do have strong motivations about the good of society, so a change model may be just the method to inspire climate change deniers, according to Nature and others, to support mitigation efforts.

Climate change advocates and deniers alike may clash when they believe that conservative ideologies and environmentalism are mutually exclusive. However, because a change model seeks commonality and community, climate change advocates have a greater likelihood of achieving positive societal effects.

Won't conservatives act more pro-environmentally if they think that climate change action will create a society where people are more considerate and caring? What if understanding and acting upon climate action can spur greater economic and technological development?

A change model will create more positive progress and forward movement than will a frame that emphasizes the risks of climate change. We are all sensitive to issues that are brought up in the media, so, while we can work from a position that delineates the science of climate change, many people may end up not changing their minds over the newest bit of data. Instead, we climate change advocates can walk in the other side's proverbial shoes, to try to learn about the values and perspectives that might otherwise divide us even further.

As Ed Maibach at George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication has stated alliteratively, yes, while climate change is a problem for plants, penguins, and polar bears, it's also a people problem. When climate change advocates can speak passionately and openly about the impact of climate change on human lives, the persuasion is much more compelling.

Tags: advocacy, anthropogenic, climate change mitigation, climate deniers, Collaboration, consensus, digital literacy, PDI, Summer Institute in Digital Literacy

About the Author

Carolyn Fortuna Carolyn Fortuna, Ph.D. is a writer, researcher, and educator with a lifelong dedication to ecojustice. She's won awards from the Anti-Defamation League, The International Literacy Association, and The Leavy Foundation. She's molds scholarship into digital media literacy and learning to spread the word about sustainability issues. Please follow me on Twitter and Facebook and Google+

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Using A Change Model For Environmental Advocacy -- In Depth

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Climate Change How can we help skeptical individuals to become more open, aware, and receptive to discussions about the effects of global warming? How can we inform people who are resistant to the science of climate change? As our planet and earth's citizens suffer increasing harm, climate deniers are frequently supported by leaders who refuse to acknowledge the growing climate catastrophe around us.

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This article describes how, due to social media, increasing nrs of employees are openly 'activists' at the workspace. This type of activism is mostly related to the workplace itself can be referred to as 'employee activism'.

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There is a famous quote from Warren Buffett that goes: "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." Never has that quote been more appropriate in an age where social media can have a huge impact on an employer's reputation.

A recent study of 2,300 employees titled "Employees Rising: Seizing the Opportunity in Employee Activism" conducted by Weber Shandwick revealed a rising social movement spurred on by the digital and social media era, which they have named "employee activism." The study describes an "employee activist" as an individual who draws visibility to their workplace, defends their employers from criticism and act as advocates, both online and off. One in five employees is estimated to be an employee activist, and another 33% have high potential to be employee activists, the study claimed.

The study also revealed that social media is critical to employee engagement and fuels employee activism. It found that 50% of employees post messages, pictures or videos in social media about their employer and more than a third have shared praise or positive comments online about their employer. A third of employees posted messages, pictures or videos about their employer without any encouragement from their employer. On the negative side, 16% of employees have shared criticism or negative comments online about their employer. "As employee activists gain numbers and strength, organizations need to be prepared to facilitate the activism of these employees," commented Kate Bullinger, co-lead, global employee engagement and change management for Weber Shandwick. "Company storytelling is not just for external media anymore; it's a way of ensuring that employees are informed and have something meaningful to say about their employers."

The research also delved into what drives employee activism. It found that leadership is most important for influencing employee activism but not to the exclusion of other organizational activities and characteristics. Leadership plays a critical role in driving employee support whether that is making the company an employer of choice or building a reputation of trustworthiness.

Some employers are embracing the use of social media in the workplace, the study found. One-third of employers encourage their employees to use social media to share news and information about the organization. The survey claimed that this social encouragement has an outsized impact on employer advocacy among employees. For example, employees with socially-encouraging employers are significantly more likely to help boost sales than employees whose employers aren't socially encouraging (72% vs. 48% respectively)

How employers encouraged their employees to use social media to share information about their work or organization varied, the survey found. The most popular method by employers was providing readily accessible tools for employees to use in social media (55%), closely followed by providing messages about the employer for employees to use in social media (50%). Just over a third of employers provided access to social media at work for employees suggesting there are still concerns about employee use of social media at work.

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There is a famous quote from Warren Buffett that goes: "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." Never has that quote been more appropriate in an age where social media can have a huge impact on an employer's reputation. A recent study of 2,300 [...]