Social change unfolds within larger economic systems and business can have a significant role in furthering or hindering change. Similarly, activists can engage in activities that affect corporate values or brand equity. When advocates, foundations, and the federal government teamed up to take on the tobacco industry, one of the first lines of attack was to create policies that made it far more difficult to sell tobacco to children. In response to a challenging business environment in the United States, American tobacco companies sought new markets in far less-regulated Asian countries. In China, the smoking rate among men is more than 60 percent, with no signs of turning around (Chen, Peto, Zhou, Iona, Smith, Yang, Guo, Chen, Bian, Lancaster, Sherliker, Pang, Wang, Su, Wu, Wu, Chen, Collins, & Li, 2015). For their part, business can engage with key stakeholders through corporate social responsibility or take on causes of their own through corporate social advocacy. It is impossible to ignore the agenda-setting roles and significant change that large corporate policies can engender.
