A CEO’s Social Activism Doesn’t Equal a Firm Commitment

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Published on: August 19, 2025 at 3:02 pm

While CEOs speaking out about social or political issues is notable, it shouldn’t be conflated with corporate social responsibility (CSR), which requires organizational policies and initiatives benefiting a broad set of stakeholders.

Academy of Management Scholar Donald Hambrick of Pennsylvania State University, who cowrote an article in Academy of Management Review with coauthor Adam Wowak of the University of Notre Dame on this topic, cited two landmark cases:

Tim Cook of Apple writing a letter in The Washington Post and other news outlets criticizing a bill in Indiana that he thought was discriminating against gays and lesbians.
Ken Frazier of Merck & Co. speaking out against U.S. President Donald Trump’s response to the “Unite the Right” white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2018.

“CEO activism is really just words, but they’re publicly voiced, not privately voiced, and so, like an antigen in a body, they evoke reactions that may be supportive and potentially antagonistic,” Hambrick said. “Corporate social responsibility, on the other hand, is a firm’s actions—CSR requires leaders to make decisions to take concrete actions to reduce pollution, to improve opportunities for women or underrepresented categories, and so on.

“They’re concrete actions—now, sometimes there are some cases where a CEO will pair activism or words with company action.”

Hambrick cited the example of Ed Stack, CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods, who, after a tragic mass school shooting, went on national media to say that the U.S. needs gun control.

“That’s activism, and he followed it up by saying, ‘We are no longer going to sell assault rifles or any assault-style weapons in our stores’—that’s CSR,” Hambrick said. “But they don’t necessarily always go hand-in-hand—they aren’t always paired together like that.

“The activism can really evoke strong sentiments, but it is just words, and so it seems hollow or cheap if the CEO doesn’t back it up with concrete action.”

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A sample of Hambrick’s AOM research findings:

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree, Cum Laude, from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

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