How company behavior guides activists’ choices, according to this Houston researcher

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Companies that capitulate to protestors may encourage them to protest for more. Companies that win against protestors may catalyze them to join similar movements nearby. Photo by Thirdman from Pexels

It’s been more than 100 years since Pavlov’s dog showed the world that behavior is often guided by forces we don’t comprehend.

The same is true of the interaction between companies and protestors, according to Rice Business professor Alessandro Piazza and Fabrizio Perretti of Bocconi University in Milan. In a recent study, the scholars show that when protestors fight to change a company’s policy, their future choices of where and how much to protest are shaped by the company’s response.

Moreover, the outcome may not be what either group has planned for. Companies that meet protestor demand often inadvertently spur the protestors to demonstrate further; conversely, companies that refuse to give in tend to propel protestors to redirect their energies toward related but different issues.

The researchers based their conclusions on a deep dive into the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and a close analysis of protests and company responses in specific locations.

During the time period studied, the researchers found, public sentiment toward nuclear energy changed from mild support to open hostility in the form of an organized protest movement. To quantify this movement’s impact on nuclear power plant construction, the researchers studied the aftermath of protestors’ local victories.

In Massachusetts, for example, the first nuclear power protest in 1974 persuaded Northeast Utilities to postpone, and then permanently cancel, its plant. This reaction, Piazza and Perretti found, catalyzed local protestors. In the years that followed, the region became one of the United States’ strongest bastions of anti-nuclear activism.

In order to quantify how company actions affected protests, the researchers first measured the number of U.S. protest events by geographic location from 1970 to 1995. They then compared this number to the number of nuclear facilities either completed or cancelled over a one-year time period within 100 miles of a given demonstration. They included controls to account for local economic and political differences upon local activism, and for any geographic bias of the newspaper sources used to identify protest events.

The patterns they found were intriguing. Proposing a new plant for construction boosted anti-nuclear protests by 18 percent in a 100-mile radius. Cancelling construction of a plant drove a 27 percent increase in anti-nuclear protests. And when a new nuclear plant was completed and connected to the grid, the researchers witnessed a 2.3 percent increase in the number of protests not directly aimed at nuclear power plants.

The reason for the increase in other protests when a company prevailed and built a power plant? The researchers hypothesize that each time a plant was completed, demoralized activists attached themselves to other movements.

These results raised a related question. Did company decisions on one type of controversy, such as a nuclear power plant, lead to greater support for related protest movements or for unrelated ones? The former, it turns out.

To measure this, the researchers again looked at protests within given regions and categorized them into anti-nuclear weapon protests, environmental protests, public policy protests, anti-war protests and protests against the proximity of a given plant to a specific property, that is, “not in my backyard” protests.

Nuclear power opponents, they found, were most likely to turn to adjacent issues such as protests against nuclear weapons. Protest activities, in other words, have a domino effect.

While most research tracks the effects of activism on companies, Piazza and Perretti’s study shows that the way companies act is also a critical event driver. Company choices can actually drive the evolution of activism, triggering activist mobilization in other causes.

The research represents a challenge to traditional explanations of activism, which usually assume that mobilization and protests are most effective early on then dwindle over time, regardless of the behavior of the organization.

Piazza and Perretti’s findings suggest a valuable lesson for companies, especially those operating in more than one location: Their decisions in one place may actually escalate activism elsewhere. Pacific Gas & Electric successfully acted on this insight in the 1980s. Working with the Sierra Club, the company swapped the cancellation of one site at Bodega Bay, California — the target of frequent protests — for support of a plant at a second site elsewhere in the state at Diablo Canyon.

The findings also offer important insight for activists choosing a company on which to focus. These activists should keep in mind that the companies most likely to capitulate are also the ones most likely to feed a movement going forward — providing, in effect, the possibility of a double win.

Meanwhile, even if they fail in one effort, activists can take heart that their energy isn’t necessarily wasted. Only a little further afield, a similar movement may gain momentum from demoralized protestors looking for a new cause.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and is based on research from Alessandro Piazza, an assistant professor of strategic management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

The organizations most likely to benefit from a competitor's scandal are ones that offer similar services, but are seen as having stricter ethical policies. Photo via Getty Images

Houston research: Innovating a way out of corporate scandal

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When scandal tears through an institution, it can hurt innocents in the same field. But even the darkest scandal can sometimes benefit a similar organization ⁠— if, that is, the public sees it as far more ethical, says Rice Business professor Alessandro Piazza.

In a recent paper, Piazza collaborated with Julien Jourdan of the Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL Research University, to study the effects of the sex crimes scandal that embroiled Catholic priests and other clergy on membership in not just the Catholic Church itself, but also 16 other U.S. Christian denominations. The researchers analyzed the 16 denominations between 1971 and 2000 in an attempt to track any flight of Catholics to other churches. The findings offer insights for secular organizations in scandal-stricken fields.

To reach their conclusions, Piazza and Jourdan studied data sets from the Religious Congregations and Membership Study and the Churches and Church Membership Study, maintained by the Association of Religion Data Archives. The data included county-level statistics on congregations of 149 religious bodies.

Using this data, Piazza and his coauthor first tallied county by county church membership, coding for variables such as ethnicity and economic status. Next, they created a model to rate churches on issues such as strictness, mandatory commitment and evangelism. Finally, they compared the changes in membership figures for non-Catholic churches to explore whether former Catholics might have joined other churches as a result of the clergy scandal, and if so, which ones.

Scandal, broadly defined as publicized transgressions of established norms, can indelibly mark the collective imagination. Media amplify the effect with their investigations of the disgraced organizations, whether it be the Catholic Church, Enron, WorldCom or the British Parliament. Research shows that a scandal can tarnish individuals, organizations and, by indirect association, even entire industries.

At the same time, it's possible for members of a scandal-plagued group to prosper. When, for instance, Nike was accused of using slave labor in the developing world to make their products, rival companies that could showcase better labor practices benefited. Past studies, however, have not shown how these consequences occur, or how they affect people on the inside of the implicated organizations.

Piazza and Jourdan found that scandals can improve business for rival organizations under key conditions, the most important one being if they offer close alternatives to the services once supplied by the disgraced organizations. This kind of swap is most likely to happen when a service is still needed. After the Enron scandal, for instance, clients of its disgraced auditor, Arthur Andersen, still required auditing services, so took their business to rival auditing firms.

The researchers also analyzed the responses of people within an organization disrupted by scandal. Unlike investors, who may react to a scandal quickly and coldly, an organization's members are more likely to reflect on options before leaving.

In the case of the Catholic Church, disillusioned members gravitated to denominations that shared certain traits with Catholicism, but were perceived to enforce stricter norms. For these Catholics, religious participation and commitment to religious activity were the most compelling aspects when choosing a new church. Theology mattered less.

Most of the disillusioned Catholics, in fact, moved to Protestant denominations seen as strict and ethically austere, such as the Missouri Synod Lutheran and Southern Baptists. Far fewer turned to more liberal mainline churches such as the Presbyterian or Episcopalian churches, even though the latter is theologically close to Catholicism.

The stricter churches were more likely to draw ex-Catholics who were poorer and less educated, had contributed more money and attended more services, held stronger beliefs and belonged to more church-related groups.

Though the Catholic Church scandals unleashed enormous spiritual anguish, the practical effects also apply to secular organizations, Piazza and Jourdan write. Certain firms, like certain denominations, can gain tangibly from a rival's disgrace. The caveat: They must offer similar services, and appear to be more virtuous.

Surprising as it may sound, in other words, an industry-wide scandal can sometimes mean opportunity. When a large institution falls to rubble, its survivors resolve not to make the same mistake twice. Looking for similar services, they'll choose the most austere organizational culture they can find.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and is based on research from Alessandro Piazza, an assistant professor of strategic management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

In business, affiliating with high-status colleagues often gives newcomers a professional boost. But less so in the creative industries. Photo by Jaime Lopes on Unsplash

Networking with high-status colleagues isn't successful across industries, per Rice University research

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In a timeless scene from the mockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap," an 80s metal band swaggers in for a performance only to find they're billed second to a puppet show. Though the film is farce, real musicians often come to question the value of playing second fiddle to anyone – even an A-lister.

Now research by Rice Business professor Alessandro Piazza and colleagues Damon J. Phillips and Fabrizio Castellucci confirms those musicians are right to wonder. In fact, they discovered, the only thing worse than performing after a puppet may be opening up for an idol. Bands that consistently open up for groups with higher status, the researchers found, earn less money – and are more likely to break up than those that don't.

"Three cheers," The Economist wrote about the researchers, for confirming "what many people in the music industry have long suspected – that being the opening band for a big star is not a first class ticket to success."

While the findings may be intuitive for seasoned musicians, they fly in the face of existing business research. Most research about affiliations concludes that hobnobbing with high-status colleagues gives lowly newcomers a boost. Because affiliations give access to resources and information, the reasoning goes, it's linked with individual- and firm-level successes such as landing jobs and starting new ventures.

Both individuals and organizations, one influential study notes, benefit from the "sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships."

That's largely because in many fields up and comers must fight to be taken seriously – or noticed at all. This problem is often called "the liability of newness:" In order to succeed, industry newcomers first need to be considered legitimate by the audience they're trying to woo.

Showing off shiny friends is a classic solution. In many fields, after all, linking oneself with a high-status partner is simply good branding: a shorthand signal to audiences or consumers that if a top dog has given their approval, the newcomer must surely have some of the same excellent qualities.

Unfortunately, this doesn't always hold true – especially in the creative world, Piazza's team found. In the frantic world of haute cuisine, for example, a faithful apprentice to a celebrity chef may actually suffer for all those burns and cuts in the star's hectic kitchen. Unless they can create meals that are not just spectacular, but show off a distinct style, consumers may sneer at the newcomer as a knockoff of the true master.

So what determines if reflected glory makes newcomers shine or merely eclipses them? It has to do with how much attention there is to go around, Piazza said. While partnering with a star helps in some fields, it can be a liability when success depends on interaction between audience and performer. That's because our attention – that is, ability to mentally focus on a specific subject – is finite. Consumers can only take in so much at a time.

Marketers are acutely aware of this scarcity. Much of their time, after all, is spent battling for consumer attention in an environment swamped by competitors. The more rivals for advertising attention, research shows, the less a consumer will recall of any one ad. In the world of finance, publicly traded companies also live and die on attention, in the form of analyst coverage of their stocks and angel investors' largesse.

Musicians who perform live, Piazza said, are battling for attention in a field that's gotten progressively more fierce, due to lower album sales and shorter career spans. Performing in the orbit of a major distraction such as Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, however, only reduces the attention the opening act gets, the researchers found. Though performances are just a few hours, the attention drain can do lasting harm both to revenue and career longevity.

To reach these conclusions, the researchers analyzed data about the live performances and careers of 1,385 new bands between 2000 and 2005. Supplementing this with biographical and genre information about each band along with musician interviews, the team then analyzed the concert revenue and artistic survival of each band.

They discovered that in live music, high status affiliation onstage clearly diluted audience attention to newcomers – translating into less revenue and lower chance of survival.

In part, the revenue loss also stems from the fact that even in big stadium performances, performing with superstars rarely enriches the underdogs. According to a 2014 Billboard magazine report, headliners in the U.S. typically absorb 30 to 40 percent of gross event revenues; intermediate acts garner 20 to 30 percent and opening acts for established artists bring as little as $15,000.

The findings were surprising, and perhaps dispiriting, enough for the researchers to carefully spell out their scope. Affiliation's positive effects, they said, are most often found in environments of collaboration and learning – for example academia. In these settings, a superstar not only can bestow a halo effect, but can share actual resources or information. In the music world, however, the fleeting nature of a shared performance makes it hard for a superstar band to share much with a lower-ranked band except, perhaps, some euphoric memories.

Interestingly, in many businesses it's easy for observers to quickly assume affiliations between disparate groups. In the investment banking industry, for instance, research shows that audiences infer status hierarchies among banks merely by reading "tombstone advertisements," the announcements of security offerings in major business publications. Readers assume underwriting banks to be affiliated with each other when they're listed as being part of the same syndicate – even if the banks actually have little to do with each other beyond pooling capital in the same deal.

In the music business, star affiliations mainly help an opening act a) if the audience understands there's an affiliation and b) if they believe the link is intentional. But that's not always the case because promoters and others in Big Music often line up opening bands. When possible, though, A-listers can do their opening acts a solid by making it clear that they've chosen them to perform there.

Otherwise, Piazza and his colleagues concluded, the light shed by musical supernovas typically gets lost in the darkened stadium. For the long term, business-minded bands may do best by working with peers in more modest venues – places where the attention they do get, like in Spinal Tap's classic metric, goes all the way up to 11.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and is based on research from Alessandro Piazza, an assistant professor of strategic management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

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Houston-based Fervo Energy bumps up IPO target to $1.82 billion

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Houston-based geothermal power company Fervo Energy is now eyeing an IPO that would raise $1.75 billion to $1.82 billion, up from the previous target of $1.33 billion.

In paperwork filed Monday, May 11 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Fervo says it plans to sell 70 million shares of Class A common stock at $25 to $26 per share.

In addition, Fervo expects to grant underwriters 30-day options to buy up to 8.33 million additional shares of Class A common stock. This could raise nearly $200 million.

When it announced the IPO on May 4, Fervo aimed to sell 55.56 million shares at $21 to $24 per share, which would have raised $1.17 billion to $1.33 billion. The initial valuation target was $6.5 billion.

A date for the IPO hasn’t been scheduled. Fervo’s stock will be listed on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol FRVO.

Fervo, founded in 2017, has attracted about $1.5 billion in funding from investors such as Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Google, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Devon Energy (which is moving its headquarters to Houston), Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, CalSTRS, Liberty Mutual Investments, AllianceBernstein, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank.

Fervo’s marquee project is Cape Station in Beaver County, Utah, the world’s largest EGS (enhanced geothermal system) project. The first phase will deliver 100 megawatts of baseload clean power, with the second phase adding another 400 megawatts. The site can accommodate 2 gigawatts of geothermal energy. Fervo holds more than 595,000 leased acres for potential expansion.

Cape Station has secured power purchase agreements for the entire 500-megawatt capacity. Customers include Houston-based Shell Energy North America and Southern California Edison.

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This article originally appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Texas university's new flight academy opens at Houston Spaceport

cleared for takeoff

The vehicles may not have “student driver” stickers on them, but Texas Southern University has moved a dozen planes into its new training facility at the Houston Spaceport, opening the way for student flyers to use the facility.

TSU previously reached a deal with Houston Airports and the City of Houston in 2023 to house its prospective Flight Academy at Ellington Field. At the time, TSU had a small fleet of nine planes for student use, but a $5.5 million investment from the city greatly expanded the space available.

The Flight Academy includes a 20,000-square-foot hangar that serves as a TSU satellite campus. The school now has a fleet of 12 Cirrus SR20 aircraft that were acquired last year through state and alumni funding. An additional 4,500 square feet is used as classroom and office space. An 8,000-gallon fuel tank will support flight training operations.

TSU first launched its Aviation Science Management program in 1986 and added a professional pilot program in 2016. The school is now part of the United Airlines pipeline program and has also forged relationships with Delta and Southwest.

“I want to commend Texas Southern University and Houston Airports for their leadership and partnership in advancing aviation education right here in our city,” Houston City Councilwoman Dr. Carolyn Evans-Shabazz in a press release.

“It connects our students to high-paying, high-demand careers in aviation and aerospace. This is how we grow a city in the right way—by investing in workforce development, aligning education with industry and making sure our residents are prepared to lead in the industries of tomorrow. Houston is already a global leader in aerospace and projects like this strengthen that position even further, especially here at Ellington, where innovation and opportunity continue to take flight.”

The City of Houston signed an agreement to continue funding the academy for five years.

Amazon launches ultrafast, 30-minute delivery service across Houston

Amazon Now

More than 20 years after it redefined fast shipping, Amazon is preparing to raise the bar on consumer expectations again by offering to fulfill customers' most urgent product needs in Houston and other parts of the world in a half-hour or less for an extra fee.

The company, which revolutionized online shopping in 2005 with two-day deliveries for Prime members, is rapidly opening small order-processing hubs in dozens of U.S. and foreign cities to cater to shoppers who can't or don't want to wait for cough medicine to relieve flu symptoms or tomatoes for tonight's dinner salad.

The ultrafast service, called Amazon Now, first launched in India last June. Amazon says 30-minute deliveries now are also available in urban areas of the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom.

The mini-warehouses devoted to Amazon Now are about the size of a CVS drugstore. They stock about 3,500 products for expedited delivery, including beer, diapers, pet food, meat, nonprescription medications, playing cards and cellphone charging cables.

“We know that customers love speed and always have,” Beryl Tomay, Amazon’s head of transportation, told The Associated Press on Monday. “What we see customers doing, when we offer faster speeds, are they purchase more from Amazon. And Amazon becomes more top of mind for that or other types of items as well.”

In the U.S., the company first tested Amazon Now in Seattle, the home of its headquarters, and in Philadelphia. Most residents of the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Atlanta now have access as well. The service is also live in Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Orlando, and dozens of other cities, Amazon said, with New York City and others expected by year-end.

The service charges for Amazon Now start at $3.99 for Prime members, who pay an annual fee of $139, and $13.99 for non-members. A $1.99 small basket fee applies to orders under $15, Amazon said.

The company's bet on a need for speed also comes as some consumers are rebelling against rushed deliveries as they weigh the potential impact on the environment and the workers tasked with preparing orders at a rapid rate.

Amazon’s approach
A relentless focus on speed helped Amazon build a logistics and e-commerce empire. After it made two days the new delivery time normal, Amazon moved into one-day and same-day deliveries for its Prime members. This spring, the company began making 90,000 products available in one hour or three hours at an extra cost.

The scaled down and sped up microhubs that are designed to handle 30-minute orders represent another step in Amazon's pursuit.

Only a handful of people prepare orders from aisles of shelves in the 5,000- to 10,000-square-foot facilities, unlike the sprawling fulfillment centers storing millions of items where Amazon employs a mix of human workers and robotics to pick and pack orders.

Amazon tailors the product inventory to each location and uses artificial intelligence and other technology to analyze what customers buy, as well as when and how often. The most popular U.S. purchases so far include soap, toothpaste, mouthwash, toilet plungers, bananas, limes and wireless earbuds, Amazon said.

The competition
Amazon’s attempt to up the instant gratification ante provides direct competition to on-demand food delivery platforms like Instacart, Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub, which don't have the scale of the e-commerce titan, according to independent retail analyst Bruce Winder.

“What Amazon brings is their prowess in supply chain,” Winder said.

These smaller companies said they don't see Amazon as a threat, though, citing the hundreds of thousands of items they are able to deliver to users' doorsteps by partnering with various merchants and restaurants.

“DoorDash has a mission to empower grocers and retailers and augment their existing footprint, not to replace them,” DoorDash spokesperson Ali Musa said in an emailed statement. “We win only when they win, which is how we can offer over half a million grocery and retail items in under an hour across the country.”

Amazon also is in a race with Walmart to become the retailer that reliably gets orders to online shoppers in under an hour.

For an additional $10 on top of standard delivery charges, shoppers can place Walmart Express Delivery orders from among more than 100,000 products that are guaranteed to arrive in an hour. Many customers, however, are receiving the items under 30 minutes, Walmart CEO John Furner told analysts in February.

Domino's cautionary tale
Companies have promised deliveries in 30 minutes or less before, but the landscape also is littered with failed attempts to break the speed barrier.

The COVID-19 pandemic produced a flurry of companies that promised 10- to 15-minute grocery deliveries from microwarehouses in dense neighborhoods, according to Sucharita Kodali, an analyst at market research firm Forrester Research.

But soaring operating costs, low customer loyalty and the drying up of investor money ultimately caused most to fail before the pandemic was over, analysts said.

Domino’s in 1984 pushed a guarantee that customers would receive their pizzas for free if they weren't delivered in under a half-hour. The company amended the “30 minutes or it’s free” policy after two years, providing only a $3 discount for late deliveries.

The promotion helped Domino’s win market share, but it ended up tarnishing the company's reputation. It dropped the guarantee in December 1993 after a string of crashes and lawsuits involving drivers racing to meet the deadline.

Brad Jashinsky, a retail analyst at information technology research and consulting firm Gartner, said he thinks Amazon should take the pizza chain's experience as a cautionary tale.

“You get in trouble when you start overpromising something like that,” he said.

Amazon won't be making any time guarantees and instead plans to keep customers who chose the 30-minute delivery option updated on the progress of their orders, Tomay said.

“There's no rushing either in our building workers or the gig workers,” she said.

Taking it slow
Kodali thinks Amazon will need a lot of people placing orders around the same time from the same or adjacent apartment buildings for the 30-minute service to be cost-effective.

Consumers may appreciate rapid receipt of products like toilet paper and batteries, but retailers and logistics experts said they also see some online shoppers, especially members of Generation Z, choosing no-rush shipping for products they don't need in a hurry.

Amazon for several years has invited customers to skip one- or two-day delivery and to receive their orders on the same day in as few parcels as possible. Consolidating orders into fewer packages by electing to have them delivered at the same time cuts down on boxes, shipping envelopes and fuel use, analysts said.

“The millennials who came to age in an era that was on fast delivery came to expect it de facto, whereas ... Gen Z is more accepting of a slower speed than previous generations before them,” said Darby Meegan, a general manager at Flexport, a supply chain and logistics company that fulfills orders for thousands of online merchants.

Still, Amazon executives have cited positive early results for Amazon Now in India, where they said Prime members tripled their requests for 30-minute deliveries once they started using the service.

Amazon Now also is attracting more repeat American customers, Tomay said.

“It’s in early days and time will tell,” she said. “I think that it will be interesting to see how it evolves.”

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