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Rules For Conservative Radicals
Part 2 of 3
How do they do that? Strategic research. A pressure campaign against a company has three targets: money, business, and reputation—not just directed at the company, also at the owners, and the company’s allies and friends. “Money” is about where the money comes from: their relationships with banks, their shareholders and other investors, their commercial world (suppliers, competitors, customers), plans for growth, and the like.
“Business” is about how the company is organized, their workforce, and the legal environment that affects the company. “Reputation” is about the social campaign; leftist activists weaponize as many allies as possible to target a company’s reputation.
The first question in launching a pressure campaign is: What do you want? The second question is: Who has the power to give it to you? The third question is: To what kind of pressure will that person respond?
Answering the first question requires introspection. Answering the second requires researching enemy organizations. Answering the third requires analyzing key people within those organizations.
The labor organizer and folk singer Utah Phillips put it in a way you will see ecosocialists quote a lot: “The planet is not dying; it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.” This sounds threatening, but here’s what it means: Big faceless organizations are made up of real people. And real people have wants and needs, and you can apply pressure to them if you find out what those wants and needs are…
Those people aren’t just the CEO. They’re board members, managers, people in key positions and leadership roles, people who run individual company offices, political figures, and other institutions with which these people are affiliated. The strategic researcher’s job is to collect information about these: where they live, what their contact information is, what they’re into, who their friends are. Find out who has the power, what their resources are, what their current motivations are. Then find out what kind of levers will work on them, directly or indirectly. Maybe you can’t directly target the person whose mind you’re hoping to change… but they have relationships with other people and organizations, and maybe you can effectively target one of those. Or more than one; it’ll probably take a lot, depending on what you want and how inclined the other person is to give it to you.
Lefties call this kind of analysis power mapping. It’s basically an amplification of a technique used in union-organizing. A union organizer maps his workplace, sees who works where and when, who the important figures to talk to are. A strategic researcher planning a corporate campaign maps social networks.
The organizer Lisa Fithian discusses the steps she uses for power mapping social networks in her memoir Shut it Down:
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Write the entity (company/institution) or person with the most power to make your desired change in the center of the paper/board/screen. Draw a circle around it/them.
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Around this central person or company, add the names of other people/companies that could have power to convince your central entity to change their behavior. Draw lines connecting your circles. You might organize these entities in quadrants—work, political, social, and personal.
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Along the lines, write down how the connected relationships can be used, and what new information can be brought into that relationship. Generally this will be a positive incentive, aka a carrot, or a negative incentive, aka a stick, to convince the central entity to change their behavior
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Develop messages and tactics for each secondary or tertiary target, assessing the best time line for each. In every tactic you choose, highlight how the central entity with power is responsible for the problems and what they need to change.
Fithian provides a further breakdown of the quadrants she uses to sort her secondary (and, iterating the mapping process out another level, tertiary) targets. The social quadrant includes “clubs,” “news,” “civic groups,” and “media-social”; the personal quadrant includes “religion,” “school,” “neighborhood,” and “family”; the economic quadrant includes “industry groups,” “other boards” (i.e., of cultural or community groups), “investments,” and “work”; the political quadrant includes the federal, state, and city levels, as well as political parties.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-guide-for-conservative-community-organizers/