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Reference
Briscoe, F., DesJardine, M. R., & Zhang, M. (2026). Interpreting Violence: How Community Context Shapes Corporate Responses to Street Protests. Administrative Science Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392261419416
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🎙️✨ Welcome to the podcast Revise and Resubmit ✨🎙️
The show where we take you inside the pages of the world’s most prestigious management research and ask not just what it says… but why it matters.
Today, we turn to a paper published in one of the most elite academic journals on the planet, the FT50-listed Administrative Science Quarterly. Yes, that Administrative Science Quarterly. The kind of journal where ideas are not simply reviewed, they are tested, turned, and tested again. Published by SAGE Publications on 19 February 2026, this article carries the intellectual weight that only an FT50 journal can confer. 🏛️📚
The paper is titled Interpreting Violence: How Community Context Shapes Corporate Responses to Street Protests, authored by Forrest Briscoe, Mark R. DesJardine, and Muhan Zhang.
Now pause for a moment.
When violence erupts in the streets, what do business leaders see? Disorder? Or a cry for justice?
In 2020, as the Black Lives Matter protests swept across cities, executives faced a dilemma. Speak up? Stay silent? Announce diversity initiatives? Publicly endorse the movement? Or do something quieter, safer, less declarative?
This paper argues that the answer depends not only on the violence itself, but on memory. On history. On what the community has lived through before.
If a city carries the scars of repeated protest violence unrelated to the current cause, leaders may interpret new unrest as more of the same. Noise. Instability. Risk. 🚧
But if that same city has endured grievance-validating events, such as prior police shootings that signal systemic injustice, executives may see something else entirely. They may see legitimacy. They may see pain that demands acknowledgment.
Using hand-collected data from Fortune 500 firms, the authors reveal a subtle calculus at work. Companies headquartered in communities marked by persistent non-movement violence were less likely to announce diversity actions in response to protest violence. Yet in places with histories of police misconduct, firms were more likely to take action, and sometimes even endorse the movement itself.
Violence, in other words, is not interpreted in a vacuum. It is filtered through local memory. Through community embeddedness. Through the stories cities tell about themselves. 🏙️
And here is the quiet brilliance of this FT50 study. It shows that corporate activism is neither purely instrumental nor purely moral. It is situated. It is contextual. It is shaped by the streets outside headquarters windows.
So we ask: When companies respond to protest, are they reacting to the present moment… or to the past that still lingers beneath it?
Thank you to the authors, Forrest Briscoe, Mark R. DesJardine, and Muhan Zhang, and to Administrative Science Quarterly, published by SAGE Publications, for advancing such rigorous and timely scholarship in one of the world’s most prestigious FT50 journals. 🙏📖
If you love diving into cutting-edge research like this, subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, and follow the YouTube channel Weekend Researcher. 🎧📺
We are also available on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcast, so you can take serious scholarship wherever you go.
Until next time, here is the question we leave you with:
When leaders look out at unrest in their communities, are they seeing chaos… or are they seeing a mirror? 🔍✨
