This study investigates the concept of ideologically opposed stakeholders and its implications for the adoption and justification of contentious organizational practices. When organizations face stakeholders who oppose the ideological content of a new organizational practice, we theorize that this opposition causes organizations to emulate prior adopters whose animating values resonate with these opposed stakeholders. We further argue that if they adopt the practice that their stakeholders oppose, such organizations will be more apt to rhetorically justify the practice in a way that resonates with those opposed stakeholders’ values. Using the adoption of same-sex domestic partner benefits among US public universities as our empirical setting, we find support for these ideas. When universities have conservative state legislatures (a key opposed stakeholder), this reality amplifies the university’s emulation of proximally headquartered for-profit corporations, and, at the same time, weakens their emulation of other universities in their inter-collegiate sports network. Universities facing conservative legislatures are also more likely to issue market-based (as opposed to social equity-based) justifications when announcing domestic partner benefits adoption. These findings contribute to organizational research on diffusion, political ideology, stakeholders, and non-market strategy.
