Working on my PhD project, I run into a lot of interesting books, articles and websites, not all of which will make it to the Final Works. This blog will feature bits & pieces that I find worth sharing, comments and questions maybe. In other words: Spin.off!

My PhD project investigates the covert world of corporate spying on activists. Please find a short outline of the project included.

Mapping the market for activist intelligence

PhD project - Short outline

May 2005

The emergence of new social movements in many parts of the world has challenged the legitimacy and ‘closed’ culture of global governance and advocated alternatives for the direct involvement of citizens.

Corporations are under more pressure from their critics these days than ever before. In a concerted effort to roll back the adverse publicity their environmental, labour and consumer records so often invite—and the attendant danger of lower share prices—many large corporations are now resorting to sophisticated strategies in order to combat the activities of organized opposition.
Today, identity determines a corporation’s value, over and above its actual products or services. The more companies shift toward being all about brand identity (as Naomi Klein has explained in her book No Logo), the more vulnerable they are to attacks on this image. At the same time, corporations are becoming powerful entities that must expect to be held to account. Consumers are demanding sustainability, accountability and transparency.

In these circumstances, reputation has become a major correcting mechanism for firms that do not meet the expectations of their various stakeholders, including NGOs and the ethical investment community. Accordingly, reputation management now includes the gradual embrace of mostly weak corporate social responsibility guidelines. More than often this embrace covers the underlying unwillingness to establish a more substantive corporate accountability regime.

However, this research is not about sustainable management, corporate responsibility or the merits of business engaging with NGOs. There is already plenty of attention for the good intentions of certain companies, their PR strategies, or greenwash efforts, as some may call it. This study will investigate the indispensable informal dimension of information gathering behind the politics and practices of reputation management, an issue that is rarely considered. 

Unless a company genuinely wants to change controversial policies, it is in desperate need of strategies to counter the effects of critical pressure. PR departments are often not sufficiently equipped to deal with today’s complicated stakeholder demands and political crises.

To protect their vulnerable reputation companies need to know what crises may be coming their way. Nowadays risk analyses must include an assessment of the chance of becoming the target of campaigners, boycotters or net.activists. Publicly available information is not sufficient for this task. Informal data, however obtained, is valuable in developing corporate strategy. Desirable information is not limited to concrete action scenarios, but can be as broad and vague as long term strategy discussions, impressions of the atmosphere inside a group, connections between organizations, networking possibilities, funding details – the list is endless. And so are the ways to get this information.

This project will investigate the use of intelligence gathering methods and spying activities instigated by companies under fire. As my research raises questions that can not be answered within existing fields of study, I  will propose a new way of approaching the topic.

Because of their focus on public documents and overt actions, disciplines like CSR- and PR analysis or issue- and reputation management fail to address the issue of corporate intelligence. While the study of informal means of information gathering is not altogether new, as the study of competitor intelligence is reasonably well-established, my focus will be on another sub-set of corporate intelligence. 

To address the blind spots in investigating corporate cloak & dagger activities toward their critics, I want to introduce a new concept called ‘activist intelligence’.

This field of investigation consists of intelligence gathering methods, as well as the people that have made this their profession. A further extension of the research includes the (covert) actions that stem from the analysis of the gathered intelligence.

The informal information about activists, NGOs and other stakeholders, their ideas and plans, provides the basic material for the development of corporate counter-strategies. Some will engage in a complicated divide-and-rule strategy by dialoguing with ‘moderate’ critics and separating them from their ‘radical’ counterparts. And others might resort to underhanded activities quite at odds with the public image they wish to portray. It is at this level that my research relates to the issues of CSR and reputation management, focussing on the hidden dimensions that have never been explored in a systematic way before.

Chapter Outline

1. Introduction

2. Questions of method and strategy

3. How do we ‘do’ activist intelligence studies?

-          Intelligence studies

-          Management studies

-          PR and media studies

-          Activist research

Crafting a theory of activist intelligence

4. Historical background

5. The Case studies

- McSpying

- Cybersurveillance

- Corporate Intelligence

- Threat Response Spy Files

6. A polyhedron of intelligibility

- Grey zones of overlap

- Conclusion

7. Future need for research