Corporations increasingly face pressure to participate in sociopolitical discourse, yet their engagement patterns in corporate activism remain theoretically underexplained in the existing scholarship. In this study, we try to inductively build a theoretical explanation for the observed pattern of corporate activism using the theoretical lexicon of issue arenas and digital trace data from multiple sources. Using a computationally intensive theory construction (CITC) approach, the study analyzes digital traces from Wikipedia pageviews, Google search trends, and corporate Twitter posts (23,460 tweets from S&P 500 companies, 2015–2021). Conceptualizing digital spaces as issue arenas, the study introduces the concept of digitally enabled corporate activism (DECA). Then, first building qualitative-exploratory evidence for the interplay between collective public attention and DECA and subsequently employing quantitative analysis through Vector Autoregression (VAR) and Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA), the study establishes collective public attention to be a necessary trigger for DECA. Lastly, we strive to inductively theorize about the mechanism that connects collection attention to corporate activism by drawing from the theoretical foundation of social license and corporate legitimacy. The study contributes to the discourse on corporate activism and the IS scholarship focusing on corporate use of digital space for non-business activities.
