Teaching and Learning Guide for: Social Movements in Organizations
Authors: Arthur Mikaila Mariel Lemonik 
Published: October 2008

Author's introduction

The article provides an overview of research about social movements targeting and activism within organizations, such as corporations, educational institutions, the military, and religious orders. I begin by discussing older research in the field, then turn to four key questions that social movements scholars tend to ask and present a summary of the answers that scholars focusing on social movements in organizations have provided: what factors prompt the development of social movements in organizations; who becomes involved in insider activism, and why are they willing to face the risks inherent in participation; what strategies and tactics are used by social movements in organizations, and what are the relative costs and benefits of different strategic and tactical choices; and when do social movements have impacts on organizations, and what kinds of impacts do they have? This field remains underdeveloped, and the article concludes with an overview of potential directions for future research in an area of growing concern as the world population exists more and more under and within the influence of organizations.

Author recommends

Eisenstein, Hester 1996. Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Hester Eisenstein's detailed study of the movement of Australian feminists into the state government bureaucracy is one of the first studies in the current wave of research into insider activism. While her case involves governmental agencies rather than non‐state organizations, the research provides a useful overview of how outsider activists become insiders and how their strategic choices are affected by their location with respect to the organization. The research finds that the creation of women's divisions within the state bureaucracy gave women both a seat at the government table and a foothold for the development of an insider consciousness and ultimately insider activism.

Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod 1998. Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest inside the Church and Military. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Faithful and Fearless considers campaigns by feminist activists to improve the situation for women in the United States military and the Catholic Church. Katzenstein highlights the personal costs of insider activism, the strategic choices activists make, the particular strengths and vulnerabilities of insider activists, and the way that accountability shapes insider activism. Particularly important is her discussion of the ways that the military and the Church, while both institutions that have stressed obedience and compliance, foster distinctive forms of activism and protest. While women in the military use legal action and lobbying to support their cause, women in the Church tend to turn to what Katzenstein calls ‘discursive activism’ (writing, workshops, conferences, and discussions reflecting on the meaning of faith and justice in the Church), and these different strategies have important consequences for the different ways that the impacts of these activists have developed.

Klein, Naomi 2000. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York, NY: Picador.

While Naomi Klein is a journalist rather than a social scientist, No Logo provides a useful overview of the anti‐globalization and anti‐corporate movements written as they were beginning to make a global impression. Eminently readable, this text is a way to highlight the difference between movements targeting organizations from within and without. Klein's main focus is on branding, and she traces the development of branding, the reduction of choice by multinational corporations, and the global movement of manufacturing jobs and concomitant labor issues. In the final section of the book, the part of most use to scholars and students of activism, Klein discusses anti‐globalization movements and other forms of activism targeting corporations from the outside.

Meyerson, Debra E. 2001. Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change at Work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

‘Tempered radicals’ are individuals who have successful careers within and identify with the organizations they are part of, but who simultaneously occupy marginal spaces in relation to these organizations due to some aspect of their personal identities, politics, practices, or ideals. Meyerson's book, written from a management studies perspective, shows how tempered radicals can create change in the corporate environments in which they work and provides an overview of the non‐disruptive forms of resistance such activists use. She presents many case studies of individuals who have created change in their corporate environments through the use of such non‐disruptive strategies, and structures her book as a guide to engaging in corporate change.

Raeburn, Nicole C. 2004. Changing Corporate America from the Inside Out: Lesbian and Gay Workplace Rights. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Raeburn's work provides an excellent way to bridge the discussion of activism within organizations with the discussion of other forms of organizational change. Her research begins with the observation that while the US government has made little progress in extending civil rights to gay and lesbian people, over half of all Fortune 500 corporations offered family leave and domestic partner health coverage by the beginning of the 2000s (up from just three in 1990). She argues that employee activists organized to convince their corporate employers to offer domestic partnership benefits, non‐discrimination policies, and other LGBT workplace rights, and she builds on this analysis to show how changes that originate in a small number of organizations can spread across the organizational field.

Rojas, Fabio 2007. From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Like Raeburn, Rojas's work shows the connection between insider activism and other processes of organizational change, such as foundation‐driven financial support and broad social change. His exploration of the emergence of black studies as an academic discipline in American higher education incorporates significant discussion of strategic choice and its effects on movement impacts. Rojas argues that black studies departments were able to emerge when they resonated with the culture of their college or university, particularly when they developed organizational structures that fit with institutional norms while still staying true to the movement itself. A particular strength of this book is its focus on the institutionalization of social movements and the ways in which institutionalization may actually be co‐evolution and compromise rather than cooptation.

Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Domination and the Arts of Resistance does not focus on insider activism, but in this book, James Scott meticulously documents how resistance can occur beneath the surface and out of sight. It expands the reader's understanding of how insider activists can begin to resist the policies and practices at work in their organizations before they are willing to face repression and other personal costs. Drawing on examples from literature and history around the world, Scott shows how the public expressions of domination and submission differ markedly from the mocking and other forms of resistance that occur backstage – what he calls a ‘hidden transcript’.

Online materials

Social Movements and Culture: A Resource Site

http://www.wsu.edu/~amerstu/smc/

Developed by the Department of American Studies at Washington State University, this site contains extensive bibliographies of texts, syllabi, and websites concerning social movements and activism. While the site does not primarily focus on social movements in organizations, it is a useful place to begin investigating social movement campaigns and contains links to the websites of many organizational activists.

Confronting Companies Using Shareholder Power

http://www.foe.org/international/shareholder/

This primer outlines the history of shareholder activism and provides a detailed overview of how to mount a shareholder campaign. Most useful for teaching purposes, it provides links to primary source documents from a variety of shareholder campaigns in the late 1990s which could serve as the basis for a variety of course projects.

Campus Activism

http://www.campusactivism.org/

This site provides a directory listing hundreds of activist groups on college campuses across the United States, as well as organizing resources, lists of events and campaigns, and a discussion forum. It would be a great starting place for organizing local participant‐observation projects.

Net2

http://www.netsquared.org/

Net2 is a database of projects that utilize social web tools on behalf of both activist and not‐for‐profit groups. The projects highlighted here can provide ideas of Web 2.0 projects for classroom development as well as show the ways that covert or non‐disruptive activism is utilized by those seeking social change.

Sample syllabus

Week 1. Introduction to Organizations

Scott, W. Richard. 2000. ‘Institutional Theory and Organizations.’ Pp. 21–46 in Institutions and Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Week 2. Introduction to Social Movements

Della Porta, Donatella and Mario Diani. 2006. Social Movements: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Snow, David A., Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi. 2004. ‘Mapping the Terrain.’ Pp. 3–16 in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Week 3. Schools of Social Movement Theory

McCarthy, John D. and Mayer N. Zald. 2002. ‘The Enduring Vitality of the Resource Mobilization Theory of Social Movements.’ Pp. 533–565 in Jonathan Turner, ed. Handbook of Sociological Theory. New York, NY: Plenum.

Melucci, Alberto. 1994. ‘A Strange Kind of Newness: What's “New” in New Social Movements?’ Pp. 101–130 in Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston and Joseph R. Gusfield, eds. New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Kriesi, Hanspeter. 2004. ‘Political Context and Opportunity.’ Pp. 67–90 in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Week 4. Labor and the Labor Movement

Fantasia, Rick and Kim Voss. 2004. Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Week 5. Social Movements Targeting Organizations from the Outside

Klein, Naomi 2000. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York, NY: Picador.

Week 6. When and Why do Movements Emerge within Organizations?

Santoro, Wayne A. and Gail M. McGuire. 1997. ‘Social Movement Insiders: The Impact of Institutional Activists on Affirmative Action and Comparable Worth Policies.’Social Problems 44: 503–519.

Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod. 1998. ‘Protest Moves Inside Institutions.’ Pp. 3–22 in Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest inside the Church and Military. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Van Dyke, Nella. 1998. ‘Hotbeds of Activism: Locations of Student Protest.’Social Problems 45: 205–220.

Week 7. Insider Activists

Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod. 1998. ‘Legalizing Protest.’ Pp. 23–42 in Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest inside the Church and Military. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Meyerson, Debra E. and Maureen A. Scully. 1995. ‘Tempered Radicalism and the Politics of Ambivalence and Change.’Organization Science 6: 585–600.

Meyerson, Debra E. 2001. ‘Tempered Radicals.’ Pp. 1–34 in Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change at Work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Week 8. Strategies and Tactics in Organizational Activism

Rojas, Fabio. 2006. ‘Social Movement Tactics, Organizational Change, and the Spread of African‐American Studies.’Social Forces 84: 2147–2166.

Meyerson, Debra E. 2001. ‘How Tempered Radicals Make a Difference.’ Pp. 35–138 in Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change at Work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Week 9. Discursive Activism

Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod. 1998. ‘Discursive Activism.’ Pp. 107–131 in Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest inside the Church and Military. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Scott, James C. 1990. ‘Behind the Official Story.’ Pp. 1–16 in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Benford, Robert D. and David A. Snow. 2000. ‘Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment.’Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611–639.

Week 10. Understanding Movement Impacts

Amenta, Edwin and Michael P. Young. 1999. ‘Making an Impact: Conceptual and Methodological Implications of the Collective Goods Criterion.’ Pp. 22–41 in Marco Guigini, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly, ed. How Movements Matter: Theoretical and Comparative Studies on the Consequences of Social Movements, edited by Marco Guigini, Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Guigni, Marco. 1998. ‘Was It Worth the Effort? The Outcomes and Consequences of Social Movements.’Annual Review of Sociology 24: 371–393.

Earl, Jennifer. 2003. ‘Tanks, Tear Gas, and Taxes: Toward a Theory of Movement Repression.’Sociological Theory 21: 45–68.

Week 11. Impacts on Organizations

Raeburn, Nicole C. 2004. Changing Corporate America from the Inside Out: Lesbian and Gay Workplace Rights. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

The remaining weeks are left open for studies of specific cases, student presentations, or coverage of research techniques in social movements. For a 10‐week trimester course, I would suggest combining weeks 2 and 3 and combining weeks 10 and 11. For those who wish to cover research techniques in social movements, the following selections are useful:

Mahoney, James. 2003. ‘Strategies for Causal Assessment in Comparative‐Historical Analysis,’ pp. 337–371 in James Mahoney and Dietich Rueschemeyer, eds. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences.

Klandermans, Bert and Suzanne Staggenborg, eds. 2002. Methods of Social Movement Research. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Hill, Michael. 1993. Archival Strategies and Techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Focus questions

What factors prompt the development of social movements in organizations?

Who becomes involved in insider activism, and why are they willing to face the risks inherent in participation?

What strategies and tactics are used by social movements in organizations, and what are the relative costs and benefits of different strategic and tactical choices?

When do social movements have impacts on organizations, and what kinds of impacts do they have?

How are social movements within organizations different from and similar to other types of social movements and from other types of organizational change?

Seminar/project idea

Activism in the College/University Context: An Archival Research Project

In this project, individual students or small groups of students investigate periods of activism in their own college or university. The project will introduce students to both the promise and the challenge of doing research on movements in the past, and it will help them to see the complexity of processes of change in an organization they are intimately familiar with. While the moments of activism in each college and university are different, some good places to start might be changes in general education requirements or the development of new majors or programs; the end of parietal rules governing cross‐sex visitation in dorms; changes in religious observance, including chapel regulations or religious affiliations; times of social turbulence outside of the college or university, such as the Civil Rights movement, anti‐war movements, or divestment campaigns related to apartheid in South Africa; efforts related to the admission of students of different sex or race from the original student body; and labor movement activity. Instructors may wish to consult with archivists and/or faculty members with a long history at the institution to draw up a list of possible topics in advance, or they may encourage students to locate their own topics. Students will then need to spend time in the archives to develop an understanding of the context of the activist campaign they are studying. Most campaigns will have received coverage in student newspapers and will be documented in the archives to some extent, but some projects may require interviews with activists or observers present at the time. Students will then prepare papers and/or presentations that rely on the theoretical ideas covered in the course to explain the emergence, strategic choices, and impacts of these change campaigns.

Corporate Case Study Assignment

In this assignment, students conduct a case study of an individual incidence of shareholder activism. Drawing on publicly available documents, such as those that can be located at foe.org, SEC filings, and court cases, students develop an analysis of what lead to movement emergence, how shareholders developed their strategies (including framing), and what factors influenced the eventual impact of the activism. Depending on the case, instructors may also encourage students to locate and interview key activists in the campaign. For graduate courses, final projects on different corporations might be created by individual students or small groups; for undergraduate courses, instructors might choose a single case and have all the students contribute to a joint analysis. This project would be particularly well suited to courses in business or management that take organizational change and insider activism as topics of inquiry.

Note

* Correspondence address: Rhode Island College, Department of Sociology, 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence, RI 02908. E‐mail: marthur@ric.edu.