As organizations face pressure to communicate stances on contentious sociopolitical issues, there is growing interest in understanding why some speak out publicly while others remain silent. In this research, I highlight that organizations are driven fundamentally by their top leader’s firm-society orientation, which I define as a general viewpoint about the boundary and relationship between the firm and society at large. I further theorize that the leader’s firm-society orientation (integration vs. segmentation) interacts with their primary rationale for the orientation (moral vs. business) to predict a typology of four distinct firm sociopolitical approaches: principled voice, principled silence, strategic voice, and strategic silence. I describe how each approach varies in the general tendency, tenor, and timing of public statements, while holding unique risks and benefits to firms. This research contributes to the burgeoning literature on firm activism by unpacking the predominant ways in which organizations behaviorally contend with questions of whether and how to make public statements on polarizing sociopolitical issues. In doing so, it underscores the difficulty of choosing an optimal path, as firms face inherent trade-offs in enacting any given approach.
