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Woke-washing is beginning to infect our industry. It’s polluting purpose. It’s putting in peril the very thing which offers us the opportunity to help tackle many of the world’s issues.—Alan Jope, Unilever CEO (Davies, 2019)
For better, and often for worse, the rise of “Woke Capitalism” means big business is constantly undermining its own purpose by pursuing trendy social goals. Earlier this year Dutch airline KLM launched a campaign telling their customers to fly less. —Matthew Lesh, Adam Smith Institute (Lesh, 2019)
At the first Society for Business Ethics (SBE) annual meeting that I attended in 1997, Tom Dunfee presented his ideas on the marketplace of morality, which captured the new trends of social cause marketing and socially responsible investing (Dunfee, 1998). More than twenty years later, we see robust evidence of consumers, employees, shareholders, and communities choosing firms for their positions on social issues (Aziz, 2020; Deloitte, 2019, 2021; US SIF, 2020). Never before have we seen so many firms demonstrating the concepts behind the marketplace of morality and, at the same time, being criticized for their engagement in social issues. More specifically, recent business initiatives in response to pressing social issues have garnered criticisms from a wide range of audiences for being “woke” or engaging in “woke washing,” with both terms used in derogatory ways. Woke, a term originally meant to signal awareness, especially in relation to social injustices and discrimination, is now also being used in a stigmatizing manner to label firms for inconsistencies between their corporate social initiatives (CSIs) and firm purpose, values, or practices.
For some, the “woke” labeling process may seem similar to other negative, stigmatizing labels associated with poor firm behavior, such as greenwashing or sweatshop labor (Marquis, Toffel, & Zhou, 2016). The difference between these labels and woke labeling, I argue, lies in the underlying values associated with the label. Sustainable operations and the humane treatment of labor are broadly endorsed by societies such that firms do not experience criticisms for being “green” or treating their labor fairly. A firm that is exceptionally green or treats its factory workers exceptionally well will not be the target of a boycott for being “too green” or “too humane.” For woke labeling, firms face a substantial group that rejects...