Description
What is “woke capitalism”? Existing explorations of this topic tend to engage in polemic, broadly falling into one of two camps: either radical populist critiques of “stakeholder capitalism”, or progressive critiques of the corporate appropriation of social justice values. This paper takes a different perspective, by developing a study on the question of the meaning of woke capitalism. This study has two components. The first part entails tracing the development of “woke capitalism” discourse in the US, so to develop an analytical narrative of its emergence. This shows how the discourse of woke capitalism is predominantly used in a libertarian way to criticise the supposed tyranny of activities such as diversity schemes, corporate messaging around Black Lives Matter, and forms of sustainable investment (among other things). The second part develops an analytical framework that channels a famous theory from Albert Hirschman so to understand the implications of this discourse, by looking at how critics of this either: (1) activate “voice” so to pushback against asset-management and so-called sustainable finance so to reassert shareholder primacy; and/or (2) “exit” for those who seek to disinvest from and boycott woke firms, sometimes including the creation of alternative (anti-woke) economies.
