BLM in the Boardroom: How did Large Corporations Respond to Racial Justice Protests?

Did U.S. corporations embrace racial justice in reaction to the murder of George Floyd and mass Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests? Drawing on both network and organizational theories we conceptualize this as a problem of organizational decision making. We first document the range of responses by US Fortune 500 companies and the deploy latent class analysis (LCA) to categorize responses. Sixty percent of the Fortune 500 stayed silent and 21% made primarily symbolic responses. Right wing fears of a movement toward “woke” capitalism seem premature. On the other hand, 19% of the Fortune 500 made substantial commitments of time and money to promote racial justice. We model this variation as a function of the attributes of internal decision makers and external audiences. Controlling for prior pro-social behavior and firm size, we find that the strongest covariates to making a muscular response to racial justice claims came from firms whose DEI staff were central to the national network of DEI professionals and were led by politically liberal CEOs. Being a consumer brand has a weaker but statistically significant relationship with muscular responses. Having more Black executives in headquarters is associated with symbolic, but not muscular or silent, responses to BLM protest. Firms led by conservative CEOs were more likely to stay silent. Who has a seat at the table when corporations respond to cultural pressures matters a great deal. Internal and external audiences seem less important in this instance.