This study investigates the impact of public pressure and information disclosure on the adoption of environmentally friendly technologies, specifically focusing on the use of chemicals in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the US. Utilizing a dataset that includes both publicly traded and privately held firms, we explore how these entities respond differently to regulatory pressures and public scrutiny, particularly in the context of the use of toxic chemicals. Our analysis reveals that public firms, which are subject to greater external scrutiny from shareholders and the public, are more likely to reduce their reliance on toxic chemicals and trade secret claims when faced with increased public pressure. In contrast, private firms tend to increase trade secret claims, potentially as a strategy to conceal toxic chemicals, especially under heightened regulatory risks. The study further examines the effects of the 2016 U.S. presidential election as an exogenous shock, highlighting a shift in private firms’ behavior in response to perceived regulatory leniency under the Trump administration. Our findings underscore the complex interplay between public pressure, regulatory environments, and firm heterogeneity in shaping corporate environmental strategies, with implications for policy design and the effectiveness of information disclosure as a tool for directed technical change.

We conducted a study of the environmental movement, from its conservation beginnings in 1892 to present-day, to explain how marketization impacts social movements’ interactions across issues. Analyzing data from historical and contemporary archives, we use both qualitative and quantitative methods to reveal marketization as a key differentiator between the relatively more market-driven environmental movement and the environmental justice movement rooted in social justice. Resource imbalances between marketized and community-based movements trigger social categorization processes, delimitating organizational identity boundaries that become first-order interpretive frames shaping cross-issue engagement. Rather than collaborating in a broader social movement exchange field, organizations engage in interstitial negotiations from within the bounds of the marketized movements’ identities. In doing so, a third tangential field emerges because the dominant field defines it with a constitutive rule grounded in identity. This research contributes research on social movement theory by unveiling how marketization is reliant on and fueled by organizational identity, and how it can subsequently obfuscate the intentions and goals of even the most well-intended actors. It also contributes to research on institutional field emergence, by reconceptualizing interstitial negotiations through a lens of power

Prior work analyzing social movements’ target selection has emphasized firm characteristics, such as status, reputation, and social responsibility, that enhance attention to the activists’ cause. However, the production of targets by a movement is not a one-shot game. We posit that after an initial attack, the visibility of the activist and the resonance of their frames drive further mobilization. By casting a firm in resonant storylines, a visible activist shines a vilifying spotlight that others follow. We test our theory in the context of the ESG countermovement. We combine scraped media-based data on activist targeting of firms between 2019 and 2023 with data on firm characteristics, activist visibility, and trending topics in traditional and social media. We observe that, rather than being a “bottom-up” movement led by grassroots efforts, the ESG countermovement is predominantly driven by political elites. While firm characteristics drive the initial selection of targets, subsequent targeting is driven by the visibility of the initial activist and whether they linked the target and its ESG practices to resonant societal frames with negative sentiment. Our work offers a more complete model of target production by emphasizing activist visibility and frame resonance, explaining the persistence of activism against corporate targets.