Mixing Business with Politics: A Framing Analysis of Sir Sam Jonah’s “Down the Up Escalator” Activist CEO Speech of April 22, 2021

Abstract

Given that more CEOs are taking activist stances, this chapter addresses the dearth of literature on CEO activism within non-Western contexts by analyzing an external-facing activist CEO speech, “Down the Up Escalator: Reflections on Ghana’s Future by a Senior Citizen,” delivered by Sir Sam Jonah, the former Chairman of Anglogold Ashanti, and the current Chairman of Jonah Capital. We followed a theory-guided approach in performing a framing analysis of the selected text to enable us to transcend the manifest meanings, decipher the latent meanings, and isolate the major frames and emergent framing devices. This study seeks to invigorate the CEO activism literature by adopting a unique focus on the African context and applying framing theory to closely examine a speech by a CEO activist in the Global South. This study contributes to the nascent field of CEO activism and speechmaking in public relations and strategic communications by offering a typology of four major activist CEO speech frames, including the governance frame, the solutions frame, the assault on democracy frame, and the silence frame. Also uncovered are framing devices such as metaphors, repetitions, epigrams, coinages, idiomatic expressions, and colloquialisms. In a field currently dominated by Western (American) cases, this study illuminates our understanding of CEO activism by contributing perspectives from a non-Western activist CEO. The study also contributes to the growing streams of literature in the African School of Thought in Public Relations, Afrocentric sustainability philosophies, and concepts of inclusive capitalism such as Africapitalism.