Making and Unmaking a Toxic World: Corporate Strategy, Organizational Spillovers, and the Regulation of Environmental Exposures

Gabriel Levesque, Department of Sociology, McGill University

Many of our current concerns over toxic exposure from industrial sources have a long history. Yet, data accessibility and secrecy around corporate practices has so far limited our understanding of the pathways through which industrials coalesce and cohesively act to influence environmental regulations. In this paper, I seek to answer three research questions: 1) How do corporate strategies of influence spill over between corporations? 2) How do they spill over between individual cases of toxic exposure, and 3) How do changes in policies and regulations impact corporate strategies of influence? To answer these questions, I make use of Toxic Docs, a textual database that comprises millions of pages of previously classified corporate documents spanning the 20th century. I use word embeddings to measure linguistic convergence as a proxy for shifting ideas and communication strategies. Three major findings emerge from the analyses. First, corporate strategies around old toxics have provided the playbook for the defense of new toxics later on. Second, early adopters of those strategies have been better able to sustain their business activities in a given industry and were more successful in jumping to new industries. Third, change in policies and regulations provide the impetus for the selection of corporate strategies and for growing cohesion among corporate actors. This paper contributes to better understanding environment-society interactions in a long-term trajectory, which has drawn considerable interest in recent years. Recent scholarly discussions on this question have centered on political and economic obstacles faced in enacting environmental solutions. Using novel corporate data of unprecedented scale and quality, this paper proposes a rigorous analysis of how those barriers are established, how they adapt in time to different regulatory contexts, and how they are displaced.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 13. Environment, Justice, and Land