Organizational Repression of Stakeholder Collective Action

Organizations face mounting pressure from stakeholders to change practices and policies, yet scholarly understanding of how organizations manage this pressure remains incomplete. While existing research has examined various organizational responses to stakeholder pressure—including acquiescence, neglect, collaboration, and resistance—these responses have been predominantly reactive and discrete, with research overlooking a more systematic approach organizations can employ to neutralize stakeholder pressure before it emerges, and end it if it materializes. To address this gap, this paper introduces organizational repression as an integrated strategy aimed at preventing, controlling, or constraining stakeholder collective action from evolving. Drawing on the social movements and state-based repression literatures, we theorize how organizations can effectively undermine collective action by targeting its enabling conditions across three distinct phases: emergence, coalescence, and formalization. We propose five key repressive tactics—manipulating threat perceptions, closing opportunity structures, restricting resources, selectively disincentivizing recruits, and fragmenting coalitions of members and allies—and explore how organizations can implement each. Ultimately, this paper contributes to the social movements and nonmarket strategy literatures by theorizing organizational repression as a stakeholder management strategy and revealing how organizations can undermine stakeholder efforts to produce organizational and societal change.