Timothy Werner, professor of business, government, and society and Wade T. and Bettye C. Nowlin Centennial Professor of Business Administration at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, has given this playbook a name: organizational repression. The term is borrowed deliberately from political science, where researchers have long studied how governments anticipate, disrupt, and escalate against political dissent. Werner’s contribution, developed with Natalie Holzaepfel and Olga Hawn of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is to argue that companies deploy an analogous set of strategies against stakeholder activism, and that these strategies are far more alike, and far more widespread, than previous scholarship has recognized.

Stakeholders, in this framework, are non-shareholder groups with an interest in a company’s conduct: employees seeking better conditions, activists demanding environmental accountability, communities affected by operations. Past research has generally assumed that firms treat such groups with a kind of grudging respect. Companies might resist stakeholder pressure, the literature suggested, but they might also collaborate with it or simply ignore it. What Werner and his colleagues wanted to show was something more unsettling: that firms can act to undermine the very ability of stakeholders to organize in the first place, before any negotiation, boycott, or campaign even begins.

The theoretical architecture of the paper, published in the Academy of Management Review, maps corporate tactics onto the three phases that social movements typically pass through. The first is emergence, the stage at which individuals privately notice a grievance but have not yet connected with others who share it. The second is coalescence, when people begin to organize, communicate, and identify as a group. The third is formalization, when the movement acquires structure, formal membership, and alliances with outside organizations. For each phase, the researchers identify matching corporate strategies designed to prevent or discourage the movement from advancing to the next one.

At the emergence stage, the goal is to stop collective action before it starts by convincing people there is nothing worth mobilizing over. The paper points to Exxon Mobil, which began funding research downplaying climate change as early as the 1970s, years before the company became a target of activist campaigns. By shaping the information environment and the perceived legitimacy of a grievance, a firm can prevent the grievance from ever crystallizing into a shared cause. A second strategy at this stage is reputational: cultivating a public image of being unreceptive to activism, so that potential organizers conclude that mobilization would be pointless before they ever attempt it.

Once a movement begins to coalesce, the corporate calculus shifts toward making participation costly. Here companies target the individuals most likely to join. When Delta Air Lines faced a unionization push among flight attendants in 2024, it offered a carrot: a 5 percent pay raise, but only for nonunion workers. The message was that loyalty to the company, not to a collective, would be rewarded. Other firms have reached for sticks instead, including demotions, schedule changes engineered to conflict with organizing meetings, and implicit threats to fire known organizers. The Amazon case in Virginia illustrates the same logic, combining surveillance with messaging designed to make association itself feel risky.

If a movement nonetheless achieves full formalization, recruiting members and forming alliances with outside groups, the most effective corporate response changes again, toward fracturing the coalition itself. The pipeline company Energy Transfer, facing protests over its Dakota Access Pipeline, allegedly hired private security firms to disrupt activist networks. It also pursued litigation against protest groups, ultimately winning a judgment of more than $600 million from Greenpeace. Lawsuits of this kind, often described by critics as strategic suits against public participation, can drain resources and attention from a movement even when the underlying dispute remains unresolved.

Werner is careful to emphasize what the theory does and does not claim. The researchers pass no ethical judgment on organizational repression, and they take no stance on whether repression is good or bad. Their claim is analytical rather than moral: that these tactics constitute a systematic, coherent, and underexplored set of behaviors that deserve rigorous empirical study in their own right, rather than being treated as scattered anecdotes about particular companies or industries. Framing union-busting, greenwashing, surveillance, and litigation as instances of a single strategic umbrella, they argue, allows scholars to see patterns that case-by-case analysis obscures.

The theory also carries an important caveat: organizational repression is not guaranteed to work. A company that moves too aggressively may trigger a backlash that strengthens the very movement it was trying to suppress, drawing public sympathy, media scrutiny, or regulatory attention to the grievance. The effectiveness of any given tactic therefore depends on context, on how visible the repression is, and on how stakeholders and observers respond. This contingency is precisely why the authors argue that systematic measurement is needed, rather than assumptions in either direction about how firms behave or how stakeholders fare.

The researchers’ next step is to test the framework empirically, drawing on data sources such as whistleblower reports, lawsuits, and leaked corporate documents to assess how often, and how effectively, companies actually deploy these tactics in practice. If the theory holds, it could reshape how scholars and policymakers think about the balance of power between corporations and the people they affect, moving the conversation from isolated scandals toward a structural understanding of how dissent is managed before it can gain momentum.

Subject of Research: How companies systematically repress collective action by stakeholders such as employees, activists, and communities

Article Title: How companies quietly undercut dissent

Article References: How companies quietly undercut dissent. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: organizational repression, stakeholder activism, corporate strategy, union-busting, social movements, labor relations, greenwashing, Academy of Management Review, corporate surveillance, strategic litigation, collective action, business ethics

The study, led by Jackline Juma Robert of Egerton University together with Mary W. K. Mathenge and Augustus Sammy Muluvi, examines why some smallholder cashew farmers throw themselves fully into cooperative life while others remain on the margins. The stakes are considerable. Kenya’s national cashew output has collapsed from 28,410 tonnes in 2015 to just 8,997 tonnes in 2023, and Kilifi County, which produces roughly 40 percent of the national crop and supports more than 70,000 smallholder farmers, sits at the epicenter of the decline. Weak institutional coordination, thin market linkages and low cooperative participation are identified as central culprits.

Agricultural cooperatives, the authors argue, are among the best-documented institutional fixes for smallholder market failure. By pooling produce and sharing infrastructure, they cut transaction costs, improve access to quality inputs, credit and markets, and create platforms for disseminating knowledge and new technologies. In cashew value chains specifically, cooperatives enable collective investment in storage, transport and processing, allowing farmers to capture more value from each nut. The problem, the researchers found, is not that cooperatives do not work; it is that participation intensity, meaning the number of different services a farmer actually draws from the cooperative, remains stubbornly low.

To investigate, the team surveyed 394 smallholder farmers in Kilifi North Sub-County, a designated cashew production zone where the crop is the principal cash enterprise. Using a multistage sampling design, they first purposively selected the county, then the sub-county, and finally four major cashew-producing wards: Kibarani, Matsangoni, Dabaso and Tezo. Individual respondents were drawn by simple random sampling from a register of 11,012 registered cashew farmers maintained by the county agriculture department and the Empowering Farmers Foundation, with the sample size calculated using Yamane’s formula and inflated slightly to guard against non-response.

Because the outcome of interest, the count of cooperative services a farmer receives, is count data plagued by excess zeros, the researchers compared four regression specifications: standard Poisson, negative binomial, zero-inflated Poisson and zero-inflated negative binomial. Diagnostic tests revealed significant overdispersion, with a mean of 1.82 against a variance of 2.62, and a glut of zeros largely produced by non-members who are structurally excluded from cooperative services. The zero-inflated Poisson model, which separately models this structural-zero group from the count process among members, delivered the lowest Akaike Information Criterion at 1304.858 and emerged as the preferred specification. Multicollinearity checks using variance inflation factors showed no problematic correlation among predictors.

The descriptive portrait of the farming population is striking in its own right. Nearly 64 percent of surveyed cashew farmers were women, a pattern the authors attribute to men migrating toward alternative income activities as cashew returns have stagnated, leaving women to shoulder routine farm management, harvesting and marketing. Cooperative members were also significantly more likely to have received training in cashew production and Good Agricultural Practices, to access market information, to use pesticides and to belong to social groups, suggesting that membership is entangled with broader networks of information and support.

The regression results tell a coherent economic story. Older farmers used more services, with each additional year of age raising the expected rate of service utilization by a factor of 1.012, plausibly because experience has taught them the long-run value of cooperative support. Education mattered as well: each additional year of schooling increased service uptake by a factor of 1.023. Larger households, with their deeper labor pools and diversified risk, participated more intensively, as did farmers earning off-farm income, whose expected rate of service use was 1.264 times higher per unit increase in such income, presumably because financial slack makes cooperative engagement less risky.

Scale and market access proved decisive. Each additional cashew tree owned raised expected service utilization by a factor of 1.004, reflecting economies of scale that make cooperative services worth the trouble, while farmers with market access used services at 1.895 times the rate of those without, a finding the authors interpret as evidence that a ready market builds the trust that underpins collective action. On the flip side, geography worked against participation: every additional kilometer from the nearest market, or from the nearest tarmac road, reduced service utilization by a factor of 0.985. Remoteness, the study suggests, cuts farmers off not just from physical market access but from extension visits, cooperative announcements and the peer networks through which cooperative life actually happens.

The authors are careful to acknowledge limits. Their data are cross-sectional, gathered between July and August 2025, and thus capture a snapshot rather than the dynamics of participation over time. Conditions in other cashew-producing areas, with different cooperative structures, market access and agroecology, may diverge from Kilifi North, cautioning against overgeneralization. Still, the analytical framework, grounded in Collective Action Theory and Random Utility Theory, treats each farmer as a utility maximizer weighing the perceived costs and benefits of engagement, and the data support that framing with unusual clarity.

The policy implications are concrete. The researchers recommend targeted training to diffuse information about cooperative benefits, deliberate strengthening of social networks and market interactions, and subsidy programs channeled through cooperatives, especially for farmers with fewer trees who might otherwise be priced out of participation. They also call for public investment in rural roads and market proximity, alongside growth in the non-farm economy, to raise off-farm incomes that fuel cooperative engagement. In a county where one nut once funded households, schools and futures, the message is blunt: reviving Kenya’s cashew sector may depend less on the tree than on the roads, education and trust that carry farmers into collective action.

Subject of Research: Determinants of the intensity of participation in agricultural cooperatives among smallholder cashew farmers in Kilifi County, Kenya

Article Title: Intensity of participation in cooperatives among smallholder cashew farmers in Kilifi County, Kenya

Article References: Robert, J. J., Mathenge, M. W. K., & Muluvi, A. S. (2026). Intensity of participation in cooperatives among smallholder cashew farmers in Kilifi County, Kenya. Discover Agriculture, 4(1), Article 282. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44279-026-00755-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00755-5

Keywords: cashew farming, agricultural cooperatives, Kilifi County, Kenya, smallholder farmers, Zero-Inflated Poisson model, cooperative participation, market access, rural infrastructure, farm productivity, collective action, coastal agriculture