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Being faiiiirrrr the entire job of CEO is to try to optimize for exactly how much you can get away with in the name of maximizing profits before people will balk. Forced diversity is not the only way that media products are getting worse.
I find myself waffling between the position of "CEOs are usually coldly logical sociopaths who are pushing the woke ideology because it appears to be profitable and will change up if it ceases to be so" and
"CEOs are just as brainwormed as other lefties and are genuinely trying to push the message where-ever they think they can get away with it."
In full reality, could be a little from column A and a little from Column B, plus unnoticed variables C, D, and E, too.
My explanation for puzzling CEO behavior.
CEO's don't care about corporate profits or woke politics. What they do care about is status signalling within their elite group. They get more plaudits for woke initiatives than they do for meeting quarterly earnings targets. Therefore, they will purse woke nonsense at the expense of earnings, up to the point where they lose their jobs.
Corporate boards, also caring mostly about intra-elite status games, will give woke-presenting CEOs a long leash before they pull the plug.
However, there is a limiting principle. CEO's with extremely poor performance will lose their job. Being fired is low status so it keeps things from getting too ridiculous.
Yes, lack of accountability does end up gelling with my other theory on institutional failure
As I hinted at above, I would hope that the end of an era of low interest rates enabling all kinds of corporate shenanigans would meant that financial performance again becomes the dominant metric by which decisions to fire are made.
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The question is why does it seem ubiquitous. And maybe it is because leftist culture is the culture of PMC.
My working theory which I don't (yet) endorse is that MBA grads and SJWs actually have a lot of aligned incentives.
MBAs come into a company and try to figure out how to broaden their target market beyond whatever core demographic they have established. Regardless of what your company sells, the MBA wants to find a way to sell it to EVERYBODY.
SJWs also have a 'product' they want to sell to 'everybody.' That is, their ideology.
And SJWs can claim to be the ones who can tell the MBAs how to sell beyond their core demo. "If your product isn't selling well to women, it is probably too sexist. If your product isn't selling well to minorities, its probably too racist. If you can't get LGBT folks to buy, your product is too heteronormative. If you denounce the patriarchy and white supremacy and become known as a queer ally, you can reach out to those otherwise unattainable groups who will then buy your product."
An MBA presumably doesn't bother to comprehend the ideology or its goals, but thinks "Ah, we hire extra women, we run some ads that uplift black people, and we start openly celebrating pride and that will kick open new, untapped markets. Lets do it!"
And because SJWs have indeed done the groundwork in prepping the larger society to accept more diversity, this strategy might even pay off in the short term.
In this sense, MBAs and SJWs form a symbiotic team, with both having the similar end goal of achieving 100% market saturation for their product even if it means 'sacrificing' those things that made the product successful to begin with.
Too general.
Communists also have a ‘product’ they want to sell to ‘everybody.’ After decades with half the planet locked behind their ideology, has this co-opted MBAs into a fifth column? No, because there is a competing ideology, and it has a much more credible route to MBA-approved outcomes, like actually having markets or not getting purged.
I actually agree that social justice gains in corporations involve the motives you describe. They’re viewed as money on the sidewalk, better image with little to no downside. I argued such when the Bud Light business demonstrated the downside and when people were reading Super Bowl ads like tea leaves.
The interesting question isn’t “why do MBAs adopt social justice?” It’s “why doesn’t social justice have a credible competitor?”
Because social justice women put out.
Social justice is a religion, and followers of competing religions have a mild form of chastity nominally attached to it. Social justice has female empowerment and reclaiming sexuality as available tenets, so men signalling their adherence to the religion have a vector to get pussy. High ordered religious/cultural societies relied on sanction of elders to curate mate suitability, but in social justice men have easy access to female curated spaces by just doing performative self abasement.
You can see social justice being unpopular in societies where elder curation is not a barrier to sexual availability, even for nominally religious societies. Religious southeast asian muslim women are notoriously promiscuous and sinic irreligiosity means there is no need for an alternative religion to attract females.
Social justice in the west is the defiled temple with vestigal nuns told to spread their legs for feminism. It sucks.
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Unlike liberalism (in the Founding Fathers sense), SJ recognizes threats to it. A liberal institution will permit the rise within it of those who are hostile to it, one captured by wokeists will purge anyone not sufficiently loyal to their ideology, even if the neutrals are loyalty to the institution.
SJs pulled up the ladder which they climbed up upon. So in order for an alternative to form, wholly separate institutions need to be created anew.
People really need to study the rise of the crits in academia. On the CRT wiki page it's of course described as a "right wing maga conspiracy theory", but if you go to Derrick Bell's bio it explains how his fringe group used threats and backstabbing to take over departments and get their allies hired, their enemies fired, and infinite money for their programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Bell
Liberalism can't beat leninist vanguard party organizing. And Conservatism can't beat it without nuking the whole battlefield, because they can't even engage it.
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I do like that framing.
Seems like it gets towards the issue of Whites being the only racial group that doesn't have a massive ingroup preference on average.
Whatever the reasons for that, the White customers will not abandon a product in droves just because the marketing becomes apathetic to or maybe directly hostile to their identity, so they are simply 'safe' to treat as a pariah.
Personally, I'd ask one more question:
Is social justice is slowly capturing and subverting woke capital to their ends such that these companies will simply follow that ideology by default?
Or is Capital subverting and assimilating the wokies to worship the almighty god of profits and loss, such that they'll push the company line with just as much blind enthusiasm as they do every other cause?
Or are we seeing some unholy combination arise, where large companies continue to operate with impunity but also spend billions of dollars on social justice causes and keep a stable of activists around who help shield and absolve them of sins?
Sometimes it feels like profit-driven companies inevitably roll over when facing down a controversy that might lead to lost sales, and thus official policy is to keep moving left when pushed.
But then I remember that most companies don't celebrate pride month at their branches in Middle Eastern countries.
So there is some somewhat more complex calculus occurring under the hood, even if we are correct on their intrinsic motivations.
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