| > People have started to prioritize values over economic calculus again. I'm actually pretty skeptical of this. I think that in most cases, when corporations are taking a "stand" it is because they have calculated that not taking a stand will be more financially damaging to their prospects. I think the business school lectures that keep coming of late about not alienating consumers are skewd towards a time when 1) The American consumer was more homogenous. 2) Companies had less insight into who their customers were. What's more, analyses like these seem to take for granted that companies risk alienating an equal number of customers taking any stand other than the center. But the consumer base is not the electorate. Conservative leaning Republicans make up less than half the electorate and their cultural preferences are generally held by well below the majority of people. The strangest part of all of this talk is that it has exploded in the discourse at a time when the positions corporations are taking have generally been about issues facing minorities of race, sexual oreintation or gender orientation. Yet dozens of large companies have taken conservative stands in recent decades. And while occasionally the media does question the ends of such stands, i.e. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, there isn't this endless hand wringing about whether businesses ought to be taking culturally controversial positions. The most pointed part being that in a case like Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Hobby Lobby ACTUALLY affected the lives of millions of people. Most of the things business bloggers grouse about of late is corporations throwing out some utterly token signal of wokeness. |