What happens when employees, activists, or communities begin pushing back against a powerful company? The response may start long before a protest gains momentum or a union campaign reaches a vote. New research suggests that companies can use a range of tactics to discourage opposition at different stages — from shaping perceptions before people organise to making participation more difficult and breaking apart movements once they gain strength.
One example unfolded in 2016, when Amazon workers began organising at a warehouse in Chester, Virginia. The company tracked where employees gathered, posted anti-union messages in bathroom stalls, and held town halls aimed at discouraging the effort. The National Labor Relations Board later required Amazon to acknowledge in writing that it had illegally surveilled and threatened workers. Despite the organising effort, the union drive ultimately failed.
According to new research from Timothy Werner, a professor of business, government, and society at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, this sequence of anticipating, disrupting, and escalating opposition is not random. Werner argues that it reflects a broader corporate strategy he calls “organisational repression”, a term adapted from research examining how governments suppress political dissent.
Werner applies the concept to the ways companies respond to collective pressure from stakeholders, including employees, activists, and communities. Working with Natalie Holzaepfel and Olga Hawn of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he developed a framework that brings practices ranging from union-busting to greenwashing under a common strategic umbrella. The researchers argue that these seemingly different actions may share the same goal: weakening stakeholders’ ability to organise and exert pressure.
The framework follows three stages through which stakeholder movements typically develop: emergence, when individuals privately recognise a grievance; coalescence, when people begin organising around it; and formalisation, when the movement becomes structured and builds alliances. At each stage, companies can employ different strategies designed to discourage collective action or prevent a movement from gaining strength.
During the emergence stage, companies may try to prevent mobilisation before it begins by convincing people there is little reason to act or that activism is unlikely to succeed. Once a movement enters the coalescence stage, companies may focus on making participation more costly or less attractive. During a 2024 unionisation campaign among Delta Air Lines flight attendants, for example, the airline offered a 5% pay increase to nonunion workers. Other tactics identified by the researchers include demotions, scheduling changes that interfere with organising meetings, and threats of dismissal directed at known organisers.
When a movement reaches formalisation, corporate strategies may shift towards dividing members and isolating the movement from outside allies. Werner cites Energy Transfer’s response to protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The company allegedly hired private security firms to disrupt activist networks and pursued lawsuits against protest organisations, ultimately winning more than $600 million from Greenpeace.
The researchers stress that their framework does not make an ethical judgement about organisational repression. Instead, they argue that these practices represent a systematic but underexplored area of corporate strategy. Such tactics can also backfire: overly aggressive action may generate public sympathy and strengthen opposition. Werner and his colleagues now plan to test their theory using whistleblower reports, lawsuits, and leaked corporate documents to determine how frequently companies use these strategies and how effective they are in practice.
More information: Natalie Holzaepfel et al, Organizational Repression of Stakeholder Collective Action, Academy of Management Review. DOI: 10.5465/amr.2024.0426
Journal information: Academy of Management Review Provided by University of Texas at Austin