Is Corporate Political Activity a Field?

Abstract

This article focuses upon answering the following question: Does corporate political activity (CPA) stand as an academic field? Following Hambrick and Chen, we consider three elements of the emergence of an academic field—differentiation, mobilization, and legitimacy. Utilizing a variety of data sources, we find CPA to be well differentiated from other academic fields; to have undertaken a number of activities to mobilize CPA as a field, but short of large-scale unification; and to have earned low to moderate legitimacy within management, but little legitimacy outside of management. All in all, at this time, CPA does not squarely meet the elements necessary to emerge as a field.

Indirect Reciprocity and Corporate Philanthropic Giving: How Visiting Officials Influence Investment in Privately Owned Chinese Firms

“…Unlike previous studies, we distinguish the strength of political access by measuring the number of official visits to firms. Official visits strengthen the interactions between executives and politicians (Li et al, ; Schuler et al, ). Managers deliberately allocate cash for philanthropic giving to forge ties with local officials; public knowledge of the official visits increases these allocations.…”

Shaping the Political Environment: An Ethnography of Public Affairs Professionals at Work

“…At best access is said to be necessary but insufficient for exercising influence. Importantly, most scholars have also eschewed the study of process to focus on the antecedents and outcomes of measureable and specific political tactics such as campaign contributions at the expense of an holistic understanding of how political influence is exercised by organizations (Lux et al, 2011;Schuler et al, 2016). In contrast, our agenda has been to develop a process model of CPA that demonstrates how public affairs professionals carry out various influence activities, how they are interrelated, how they reinforce each other, and how they define an ongoing cycle of work that links the organization to its political environment.…”

“…Nevertheless, CPA researchers separate themselves from their counterparts in political science by focusing on firm-level antecedents and outcomes of political activity. 2 CPA scholarship has also provided insights into the efficacy and profitability of various political strategies (Schuler et al, 2016).…”

“…Yet, only a small subset of organizational scholarship has focused explicitly on "corporate political activity" (CPA), that is, how firms attempt to shape their political environment in ways favorable to the organization (Getz, 1997;Hillman & Hitt, 1999;Hillman, Keim, & Schuler, 2004;Keim & Baysinger, 1988;Keim & Zeithaml, 1986). Scholars studying CPA have looked at the antecedents of political activity and the efficacy of certain influence tactics such as forming political action committees (PAC), making campaign contributions, or lobbying government officials (Schuler, Rehbein, & Green, 2016). However, scholars have not closely studied how organizations interact with their political environments to shape it in ways favorable to the firm.…”

Book Review Essay: Wealth, Power, and Political Influence: Organizations as Tools

“…The role of big business in politics has, of course, received an enormous amount of attention from political scientists and political sociologists, but organizational scholars have tended to ignore it (but see Pfeffer, 1987). 3 More recently, a group of scholars in the field of corporate strategy have published a series of excellent papers (for reviews, see Hillman, Keim, and Schuler, 2004; Schuler, Rehbein, and Green, 2016), although they have focused on political action more as a means of gaining benefits from an otherwise powerful state than as a means of exercising control over it. Timothy Werner (2012) produced an important book on corporations’ efforts to self-regulate in response to shareholder activism, an area that has received considerable attention, but although he also discusses the influence of big business on the state, his focus is on firms’ responses to the environment rather than their control over it.…”