Corporate decisions and local activism

How can strategic corporate decisions shape the way activism emerges and evolves? To answer this question, we ran a study on antinuclear protests in the US from 1960 to 1995. Our aim was to look at the effect that such decisions can have on protests in local communities. To give an example, in 1958, the huge Californian utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) announced plans to build the first commercial nuclear power plant in Bodega Bay, a fishing village north of San Francisco. Upon hearing the news, a very vocal coalition of local activists joined together and after six years of intense pressure, PG&E was forced to abandon the project. In the wake of this success, many more activist movements sprung up to stop nuclear power in other locations such as Seabrook, New Hampshire. Here, protests didn’t stop the construction of the plant (in 1986) but did provide a template for large-scale organized action that was frequently used in other contexts.

Our research corroborated three basic hypotheses. The first is that when a company opts not to build a proposed plant, antinuclear activism propagates throughout the local communities surrounding the site. In this case, activists see the decision as a win. What’s more, galvanized by their success and the high visibility of their cause, they can more easily convince others to join and amplify the protest. For a striking example of mobilization, we go to Montague, Massachusetts, where in 1974 Northeast Utilities was planning to build a new nuclear power unit. But a local resident sabotaged the weather tower of the plant using his farm equipment, and then turned himself in to the authorities, justifying his actions with a four-page manifesto. With his actions, he succeeded in rallying the local community to the cause, which resulted in the company postponing and ultimately shelving the project completely in 1980.

As per our second hypothesis, a company that completes a new nuclear power plant as planned will face less pressure from protests in the local community. In such a scenario, activists consider the corporate decision as a defeat. As a result, they became disheartened both because they failed to achieve their objectives and because the problems organizing protests became exacerbated. A similar dynamic played out in the UK during the 1984 minors’ strikes when most minors rejected the call to walk out and continued to work. In the end, when the strike was formally called off in March 1985, this marked the defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers. Generally speaking, we can assert that when activists suffer a major blow, the risk is that they lose faith in the movement and in their ability to engender change. The end result is demobilization.

Our third and final hypothesis holds that if a company completes construction on a new nuclear power plant as planned, protests will spill over into surrounding communities on different issues. When new reasons to protest emerge, the individuals who took part in past social mobilizations are more apt to get involved again and channel their energy into new causes. We can clearly see this phenomenon in France, the country with the most nuclear power in the world since 2017. In fact, nuclear supplies 72% of that nation’s total electrical energy production. Since protests could not stop the national nuclear program, many activists went on to create new organizations to fight for causes relating to the environment, feminism, pacifism, and so forth. For them, the antinuclear movement actually served as an incubator.

With regard to our methodology, we ran our quantitative study tapping data from myriad sources: information on all counties in the US gleaned from several editions of the “City and County Data Book” compilated by the US Census Bureau, geo-codified individually to assign each county an approximate center; information on proposals for nuclear power plant projects obtained from both historical data and from an online database published by the International Atomic Energy Agency; and finally information on local protests extracted from a database created by Stanford University based on all the numbers published by the New York Times during the period in question. The sample we selected for our study included 58,734 observations relating to 2,025 counties where there was a potential risk of antinuclear protests from 1960 to 1995.

While most of the research on this question focuses on how companies react to protests in local communities, in contrast, our work concentrates on the influence that strategic corporate decisions can have as critical junctures in social conflict. We show that the decision to cancel a nuclear project proposal accelerates the momentum of the antinuclear movement because this success emboldens activists and paves the way for further protests. When the nuclear power plant in question is completed, instead, two different phenomena can ensue, both associated with the defeat of the antinuclear protest: less mobilization at a local level, and more activism on other social questions.

Like the grandmasters of chess, who can play numerous matches simultaneously, companies that have multiple branches or a number of initiatives in the works should consider the fact that their decisions could spark a mobilization, beyond the main project, in particular in contexts where activism in the local community is already intense. By the same token, corporate strategies can also be exploited by activists as forces that shape the evolution of local protests. Since victories can have a powerful impact on future mobilization, activists should choose their objectives wisely, possibly even selecting the ones that are most likely to fail. But if they don’t achieve their goals, the protest will only continue if the movement experiences a ripple effect, in other words, if activists find collaboration in other movements or related causes.