How Ideologically Opposed Stakeholders Influence Organizational Practice Adoption: Theory and Evidence from the Diffusion of Domestic Partner Benefits in Higher Education

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 U.S. public universities as our empirical setting, we find support for these ideas. When universities have conservative state policymakers (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 intercollegiate sports network. Universities facing conservative policymakers 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 nonmarket strategy. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.17219 .