A Longitudinal Feminist Enquiry into Corporate Political Activity on Finnish Equal Pay Legislation

This article adopts a feminist perspective to examine corporate political activity (CPA) and advocacy, focusing on a rarely explored case in business and management research: the involvement of business advocacy in shaping governmental gender equality policy and its implications for gender equality in a Nordic welfare state. The study makes a significant contribution to feminist scholarship on business–society relations. In the Finnish and broader Nordic contexts, employer and business organizations and trade unions have a central role in policy processes and privileged access to them. The article presents a longitudinal qualitative analysis of an extensive archival dataset (N = 282) on policy processes related to equal pay legislation from 2010 to 2024. Employing Carol Bacchi’s policy-constructivist ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ method, the analysis examines problem representations produced and rhetorical devices deployed by central actors, with particular attention to resistance to equal pay policies. This study contributes to CPA literature by showcasing a case in which employer organizations and business advocacy groups uniformly oppose policy reforms. Resistance is enacted by constructing problem representations that frame equal pay policies as flawed or redundant and by using rhetorical tactics that distort, manipulate, or delegitimize policy initiatives and their underlying principles.