We examine whether and when socially oriented shareholder activists use firms’ corporate social performance (CSP) to identify them as attractive targets for their activism. We build on the research in social movements theory and stakeholder theory to theorize how firms’ engagement with primary and secondary stakeholders reflected in their technical and institutional CSP respectively allows socially oriented shareholder activists to identify targets. We develop a theoretical model by identifying corporate targets’ degree of (1) receptivity to and (2) need to comply with activist demands as two key dimensions of their corporate opportunity structure that explains the variance in firms’ attractiveness as targets for activist demands. We show that a firm’s technical and institutional CSP independently affect the likelihood of activists targeting the firm. We also show that our model has greater explanatory power at firms with high resource slack and from activists not identifying as socially responsible investment funds. Analysis of CSP and shareholder proposals data of 992 U.S. public firms over an 8-year window of observation largely supports our theory.

我们研究了面向社会的股东激进主义者是否以及何时使用公司的企业社会绩效（CSP）来确定它们是其激进主义的吸引力目标。我们以社会运动理论和利益相关者理论的研究为基础，对企业在技术和制度CSP中分别与主要和次要利益相关者的参与进行理论分析，从而使面向社会的股东激进主义者能够确定目标。我们通过确定公司目标的程度（1）对活动家需求的接受程度和（2）需要遵守维权者需求作为他们的公司机会结构的两个关键维度，从而建立了理论模型，这解释了公司作为活动家需求目标的吸引力的差异。我们表明，公司的技术和机构CSP独立影响活动家针对公司的可能性。我们还表明，我们的模型对于资源匮乏的公司以及未认定为对社会负责的投资基金的活动家具有更大的解释力。在为期8年的观察期内，对992家美国上市公司的CSP和股东提议数据进行的分析在很大程度上支持了我们的理论。