In 2016, when Amazon workers began organizing at a warehouse in Chester, Virginia , the company tracked where employees gathered, posted anti-union messaging in bathroom stalls, and held town halls to discourage them. The National Labor Relations Board forced Amazon to admit, in writing, that it had illegally surveilled and threatened workers. The union drive still failed.
That sequence — anticipate, disrupt, escalate — isn't random, according to new research from 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.
Rather, it's a systematic playbook that a wide variety of companies deploy far beyond the warehouse floor, Werner says. He calls it "organizational repression" — a term he borrowed from research on how governments suppress political dissent.
He applies the expression to the ways companies manage collective pressure from stakeholders: non-shareholder groups with an interest in a company, such as employees, activists, and communities. The term covers companies' actions from union-busting to greenwashing under one strategic umbrella.
"We were trying to find a more encompassing term that would capture all these different ways in which organizations, as opposed to states, could engage in this behavior," Werner says. "These things are more alike than scholars have previously recognized."
Strategy Against Stakeholders
Past research has assumed that companies are largely respectful toward stakeholder activism, Werner says. They might resist stakeholder pressure, but they might also collaborate or simply ignore it.
"What we wanted to show with this paper was that there are actually ways in which firms can undermine that ability to organize in the first place," he says.
With Natalie Holzaepfel and Olga Hawn, both of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Werner built his framework around three phases that stakeholder movements typically move through.
- Emergence, in which individuals privately notice a grievance.
- Coalescence, in which people start organizing.
- Formalization, in which the group becomes a structured movement with allies.
For each phase, the researchers identify matching corporate strategies that can prevent or discourage it.
Emergence: Stop it before it starts. Companies work to convince people there's nothing worth mobilizing over. Exxon Mobil, for example, began funding research downplaying climate change as early as the 1970s — years before it became a target of activist campaigns.
Another strategy, Werner says, is to cultivate a reputation as being unreceptive to activism, making mobilization feel pointless.
Coalescence: Make joining costly. Once a movement begins to coalesce, companies target the people most likely to join. When Delta Air Lines faced a 2024 unionization push among flight attendants, it offered a carrot: a 5% pay raise , but only to nonunion workers.
Other companies have taken an opposite approach: Brandish sticks such as demotions, changing schedule to conflict with meetings, or implicitly threatening to fire known organizers.
Formalization: Divide and isolate. If a movement fully organizes — recruiting members and forming alliances with outside groups — the most effective corporate response shifts toward fracturing the coalition itself, Werner says.
The pipeline company Energy Transfer, facing protests over its Dakota Access Pipeline, allegedly hired private security companies to disrupt activist networks. It also filed lawsuits against protest groups, eventually winning more than $600 million from Greenpeace .
Not Risk-Free
The researchers don't pass any ethical judgments on organizational repression, Werner emphasizes. They simply propose the theory that it's a systematic and underexplored set of tactics that warrants further study.
"We take no stance as to whether repression is good or bad," Werner says.
It also isn't guaranteed to work, he adds. A company that moves too aggressively may risk a backlash that strengthens the very movement it's trying to stop.
The researchers' next step is to test the theory empirically, using data such as whistleblower reports, lawsuits, and leaked corporate documents. Says Werner, "We want to see how often — and how effectively — companies actually deploy these tactics in practice."
" Organizational Repression of Stakeholder Collective Action " is published in the Academy of Management Review.
