Technology governance shareholder activism: When investors disagree with executives over the direction of technological change

Literature on the political economy of large technology firms conceptualizes them as singular actors or agents in service of capital. We problematize this notion by drawing on literature on politics of corporate control, which identifies an inherent conflict between capital and management. We posit that technology firms’ shareholders should prefer technologies that entail fewer societal externalities than what the companies’ executives prefer. To observe such conflict, we analyse annual general meeting documents of top fifty tech firms, identifying shareholder proxy ballot initiatives aimed at shaping technological development toward less societal risk. Shareholders at Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft raised concerns over technologies such as AI and cloud computing, in some cases influencing the company’s behaviour. Such technology governance shareholder initiatives grew rapidly from 2015 onward to represent a fifth of all initiatives by 2024. We argue that this activism was part of a broader social movement that in the U.S. expressed itself via corporate governance institutions, because opportunities for legislative intervention were blocked. We contribute a model that conceptualizes technology firms not as actors but as sites of contestation between competing interests expressed via political, market, and corporate governance institutions. The model helps to explain why executives at technology firms with significant socio-political externalities invest not only into political lobbying but also disproportionately into corporate control. We also contribute to substantive technology governance literatures by highlighting corporate democracy as a neglected means for broader societal interests to influence technology.