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Reference

Odziemkowska, K., & Briscoe, F. (2026). Contention, Corporate Activism, and Collaboration: The Blurring Boundaries Between Firms and Social Movements. Academy of Management Annals. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2024.0273

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🎙️✨ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit.

Some academic articles do more than summarize a field. They shift the light. They make familiar institutions look newly strange, and newly important. Today, I want to sit with one of those pieces. 📚🌍

This episode turns to Contention, Corporate Activism, and Collaboration: The Blurring Boundaries Between Firms and Social Movements by Kate Odziemkowska and Forrest Briscoe, published online on 8 May 2026 in the Academy of Management Annals, published by the Academy of Management. This is a prestigious FT50-listed journal, one of the most respected venues in management research. 🏛️✨

What makes this article so compelling is its central claim: the old line between firms and social movements is no longer as clear as we once believed.

For years, the script seemed straightforward. Movements challenged corporations. Activists applied pressure. Firms responded, resisted, or adapted. But this review shows that the story has changed. Sometimes firms are still the target of contention. Sometimes they act as participants, taking public positions on social and political issues. And sometimes they become partners, collaborating directly with activists and movements. 🤝⚡

That shift matters. Because once corporations begin speaking the language of justice, values, and social change, we have to ask harder questions. Are they amplifying important causes, or absorbing them? Are they supporting movements, or reshaping them in the image of corporate power? 🧠⚖️

Odziemkowska and Briscoe do not offer easy answers, and that is part of what makes the paper so good. They show both the promise and the tension in this new landscape. Digital media, political polarization, and executive visibility have made firms more present in public life than ever before. And with that presence comes influence, not just economic influence, but cultural and symbolic power. 📱🏢💬

To me, this is what makes the article feel so timely. We are living in a world where brands can sound like movements, CEOs can sound like activists, and collaboration can sometimes blur into co-optation. The old boundaries have not vanished. But they have become unsettled, and that unsettled space is exactly where this paper asks us to think. 🌫️📖

So in today’s episode, I want to explore what happens when firms are no longer just pressured by social movements, but start becoming architects of the social and political landscape itself.

A sincere thank you to the authors, Kate Odziemkowska and Forrest Briscoe, and thanks as well to the Academy of Management for publishing this important article in the prestigious FT50 journal Academy of Management Annals. 🙏📘

If you enjoy episodes like this, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, and subscribe to Weekend Researcher on YouTube. You can also listen on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcast. 🎧📺🍎

And as we begin, here is the question I want to leave hanging in the air: when corporations start speaking in the language of movements, are they advancing social change, or quietly redefining who gets to lead it? ❓✨