Ferraro and Beunza (2017)
Ferraro, Fabrizio, and Daniel Beunza. “A Communicative Action Theory of Dialogue in Shareholder Engagement.” Working paper (IESE Business School), 2017.
From the authors’ abstract: “Despite growing empirical evidence of the effectiveness of dialogue between activists and corporations in processes of shareholder engagement, scholars have failed to fully account for such effectiveness. In this paper we do so by leveraging Habermas’s theory of communicative action. In our longitudinal qualitative study of the dialogue on climate change between ICCR, Ford, and General Motors, we find that communicative action can emerge from strategic action as a result of three cycles of interaction: keying, framing and development of a common ground, and deliberation.”