Coming in August of 2026 from Island Press (imprint recently acquired by Princeton University Press), Reining in the Bulls by Michael Marx is the first comprehensive guidebook on how to design and execute corporate campaigns. The book provides a brief history of corporate campaigning and step-by-step instructions for every major stage and track of an impactful corporate campaign.
Contents
Part 1: Introduction to Corporate Campaigns
Part 1 is an introduction to corporate campaigns. In the Preface, it provides a brief history of the corporate campaign movement as well as the author’s Introduction to why the book was written and how it’s organized. Subsequent chapters document why campaigns are needed to control companies’ social and environmental abuses; the different kinds of corporate campaigns and why they are employed; the typical stages that corporate campaigns go through from research and planning to alliance building, escalation, and negotiations; and the different audience tracks that corporate campaigns can employ including shareholders, government policy, and legal suits, as well as the field and online strategic and tactical tracks to influence those audiences.
Part 2: Understanding the Target and Developing Strategy
Part 2 is dedicated to the development of campaign strategy. It begins with an explanation of how corporations are typically structured, which is important for understanding how best to pressure them to change. This is followed with guidance on how to conduct research on companies to select the best campaign targets and their vulnerabilities. That is followed by a power-mapping procedure to determine a campaign’s priority audiences and tactics. The final chapter focuses on how to develop a compelling campaign story using polling and focus groups to generate public outrage and support for change.
Part 3: Organizing Stakeholders
Part 3 is about organizing stakeholders to achieve change. This part covers recruiting and organizing ally organizations into a well-coordinated team and mobilizing individual and organizational shareholders to raise issues and advance solutions. Part 3 further explores the significant internal stakeholder power held by employees over company social and environmental policies, and how to educate and mobilize employees to support a campaign.
Part 4: Direct Action Tactics
Part 4 is about execution, exploring field strategies and tactics and how they can be used to increase activist engagement and pressure companies to change. Part 4 also explores online strategies and how they can be used to build public support and engage influential audiences. These are the offensive strategies in a campaign, but this part of the book also describes defensive public relations and legal strategies and tactics for advocates.
Part 5: The Final Stages
Part 5 dives into the final stages of a campaign to educate campaigners on how to manage the all-important negotiation process and how to arrive at solutions that institutionalize the company’s commitment so that it is publicly or legally bound to compliance and to promulgating that solution within its industry so that competitor companies also come to be bound by the same standards.
Part 6: The Path Ahead
Part 6 provides guidance on how to raise financial support from charitable foundations, individual donors and crowd funding for corporate campaigns. This section also provides guidance for prospective corporate campaigners and new corporate campaign organizations on the challenges and the rewards of this form of activism to achieve social and environmental change. It provides a preview of the path ahead for corporate campaigns when progressive legislative options at the federal level are closed down. It concludes with principles to guide the selection of campaigns and suggests several possible campaigns to explore.