Management traditionally had two major ways of thinking about antagonism: social conflict within business and competition in the market. Internal tension with subordinates, external competition with rivals. With the eruption of an activism targeting multinationals, a third case, strange and unexpected, was now presenting itself: an external social conflict, against which traditional tactics proved inadequate. Firms which had first thought they could treat this new challenge in the same way as labour disputes eventually realized that ‘these new stakeholders also do not want to be managed within the corporate defined operational parameters’. If those external forces over which they no longer had any hold were to be fought off, they had to adapt, by developing a completely different repertoire of countermeasures.
“a third case”
This is what the Powell Memo was about, gosh