“Liberal Elite” CEOs and Corporate Social Activism

Maks-Solomon, Cory. 2020. “‘Liberal Elite’ CEOs and Corporate Social Activism.” Working paper.

• Online appendices available here.
• Previous draft of the paper, which served as my job market paper is available here, and its appendix is available here.

Corporate social activism–firms taking liberal policy stances on some of the most controversial issues of the day–has been increasing steadily since 2008.

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Why Do Corporations Engage in LGBT Rights Activism?

Maks-Solomon, Cory, and Josiah Mark Drewry. “Why Do Corporations Engage in LGBT Rights Activism? LGBT Employee Groups as Internal Pressure Groups.” Business and Politics. Published online ahead of print, September 2, 2020. http://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2020.5.

• This research was presented at the 2018 APSA annual conference, the winter 2019 NCAPSA workshop, and the 2019 AOM annual conference.
• In the Social Issues in Management section of the 2019 Academy of Management Annual Meeting, this paper received the Best Student Paper Award.
• Pre-publication draft of the paper is available here. And the appendix is available here.
• Replication files (zipped) are available here.

Companies with LGBT employee resource groups (ERG) are more likely to engage in LGBT rights activism. However, this relationship is conditional upon employee education: only in highly-educated workforces are LGBT employees willing and able to use their ERGs to convince managers to engage in activism.

Weathering the Storm

Maks‐Solomon, Cory, and Robert P. Stoker. 2019. “Weathering the Storm: Social Policy and the Great Recession.” Policy Studies Journal 47 (S1): S119–37. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12318.

This review discusses recent challenges to the welfare state arising from the Great Recession (GR). The GR was a significant event for social policy analysts, as it tested the responsiveness of welfare systems in the midst of a recent trend toward austerity politics in advanced economies. Social policy changes were part of the toolkit advanced democracies used to respond to the GR, and the welfare state mitigated the consequences of the GR. However, a stark limitation of the social safety net in the United States was the failure to assist immigrant households. The nexus of immigration and social policy is likely to be a significant controversy as we consider the meaning of social citizenship.