Has Your Company Gone Quiet, or Just Given Up?

Abstract

Key messages

• The finding. A survey of 400 senior executives at large US and European firms operating in fragile and crisis-affected markets finds that the corporate social agenda is intact but has been driven underground. Firms are conserving the substance of their commitments while reducing their visibility, mostly under pressure from their own governments.
• The risk. Outsiders cannot tell quiet commitment from quiet retreat, and visibility no longer reinforces internal accountability. Commitments that no one defends in public will erode in private.
• The response. Fund the work separately from its communication, build home-government pressure into risk assessments, test impact through the eyes of affected communities, and use your youngest employees as sensors for the risks your reporting misses.

What the numbers show

• American firms go quiet at three times the European rate: 33 per cent of US executives report a changed approach to CSR under political backlash, against 11 per cent of Europeans.
• Eighty-two per cent of executives say aligning with home-government priorities is in their company's interest, and only 4 per cent disagree. Among European firms the figure reaches 90 per cent.
• Candor collapses as the questions approach the firm: 54 per cent can name a business decision they personally disagreed with, 40 per cent a case where commerce beat ethics, and 12 per cent a concrete instance of harm to a community.
• Among executives aged 25 to 34, half concede their firm's presence can worsen local conditions, double the rate of every older band.
• Thirty-nine per cent of firms with long fragile-market histories changed nothing after the spring 2026 US-Israel-Iran conflict, against 17 per cent of those facing their first war.

Method

NewtonX fielded the survey from 6 May to 2 June 2026, among 400 senior professionals in CSR, ESG, compliance, legal, risk and supply-chain functions at companies with 1,000 or more employees, headquartered in the US (201) and Western Europe (199), all operating in markets they class as fragile, insecure or conflict-affected. Quotations are verbatim.

Full text

Download the report
7 pp · CC BY 4.0

Topics

Cite this

Jason Miklian, John E. Katsos, Harry J. Van Buren III, Angelika Rettberg, Sarah Cechvala (2026). Has Your Company Gone Quiet, or Just Given Up?. STAKES project report. Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo.

BibTeX

@techreport{miklian2026has,
  author  = {Jason Miklian and John E. Katsos and Harry J. Van Buren III and Angelika Rettberg and Sarah Cechvala},
  title   = {Has Your Company Gone Quiet, or Just Given Up?},
  year    = {2026},
  institution = {Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo},
  url     = {https://stakesproject.org/outputs/has-your-company-gone-quiet/}
}