Shareholder Expression in a Time of Heightened Political Tension

In this article, I provide context for my forthcoming research project on shareholder proposals and racial equity audits. Since the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, progressive shareholder actors have increasingly used the proposal mechanism to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice-related goals. These proposals have frequently gone beyond requesting the usual corporate fare of diversity trainings, intersectionality workshops, affinity groups, etc. Instead, a more ambitious type of proposal asks corporate America to conduct racial equity audits, defined as “an independent, objective and holistic analysis of a company’s policies, practices, products, services and efforts to combat systemic racism in order to end discrimination within or exhibited by the company with respect to its customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.” In my study, I am creating a dataset of racial equity audit-related shareholder proposals submitted to Russell 3000 companies by both left and right-leaning shareholders. I am systematically organizing, categorizing, and coding the textual data, as well as tracking the voting results on these proposals.

My aim is to perform a documentary content analysis of the proposals themselves; corporate responses to the proposals; and the racial equity audits that have resulted from the proposal process.