{"id":34624,"date":"2026-09-09T14:21:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T18:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=34624"},"modified":"2026-09-09T11:20:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T15:20:10","slug":"how-companies-quietly-undercut-dissent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2026\/09\/how-companies-quietly-undercut-dissent\/","title":{"rendered":"How companies quietly undercut dissent"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2016, when Amazon workers began organizing at\u00a0a warehouse in Chester, Virginia<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

That sequence \u2014 anticipate, disrupt, escalate \u2014 isn\u2019t random, according to new research from\u00a0Timothy Werner<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Rather, it\u2019s a systematic playbook that a wide variety of companies deploy far beyond the warehouse floor, Werner says. He calls it \u201corganizational repression<\/strong>\u201d \u2014 a term he borrowed from research on how governments suppress political dissent.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 actions from union-busting to greenwashing under one strategic umbrella.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d Werner says. \u201cThese things are more alike than scholars have previously recognized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strategy Against Stakeholders<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat 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,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n