Cultivating dispersed collectivity: How communities between organizations sustain employee activism

IF 4.5 2区 管理学 Q1 MANAGEMENT Human Relations Pub Date : 2024-10-27 DOI:10.1177/00187267241290979
Anna Stöber, Verena Girschik
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Abstract

Pushing for social change at work is frustrating and precarious. Many employee activists therefore seek support in communities that form around their aspirations and reside ‘between’ organizations. This article advances our understanding of how community participation shapes employee activists’ experiences of their change agency as they return to and pursue their social purpose in their corporate lives. Grounded in an in-depth qualitative study of an inter-organizational community of employee activists, we introduce the notion of ‘dispersed collectivity’: employee activists generate a shared sense of collectivity that they maintain even as they disperse into their workplaces. Dispersed collectivity enables subtle agentic experiences by emboldening employee activists to endure their often-challenging corporate lives, unsettle corporate norms, and detach from their corporate positions. Even without mobilizing a collective push for change across firms, communities can thus play a critical role in sustaining employee activism. Our study contributes a more nuanced account of employee activists’ change agency and offers new theoretical insights into the role of inter-organizational communities in social change, the practices they can use to build collective momentum and empathic connections, and their impact on employee activists’ determination to drive social change from within.
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培养分散的集体主义:组织间的社区如何维持员工的积极性
在工作中推动社会变革既令人沮丧,又岌岌可危。因此,许多员工积极分子在围绕他们的愿望而形成的社区中寻求支持,这些社区位于 "组织之间"。这篇文章有助于我们理解,当员工积极分子回归并在企业生活中追求他们的社会目标时,社区参与是如何塑造他们的变革机构经验的。基于对一个员工积极分子组织间社区的深入定性研究,我们提出了 "分散集体性 "的概念:员工积极分子产生了一种共同的集体感,即使他们分散到各自的工作场所,也能保持这种集体感。分散的集体性使员工积极分子有勇气忍受其经常充满挑战的企业生活、打破企业规范并脱离企业立场,从而实现微妙的代理体验。因此,即使没有动员集体推动企业变革,社区也能在维持员工积极性方面发挥关键作用。我们的研究对员工积极分子的变革机构做出了更细致的描述,并对组织间社区在社会变革中的作用、他们用来建立集体动力和共鸣联系的做法,以及他们对员工积极分子从内部推动社会变革的决心的影响提供了新的理论见解。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Human Relations
Human Relations Multiple-
CiteScore
12.60
自引率
7.00%
发文量
82
期刊介绍: Human Relations is an international peer reviewed journal, which publishes the highest quality original research to advance our understanding of social relationships at and around work through theoretical development and empirical investigation. Scope Human Relations seeks high quality research papers that extend our knowledge of social relationships at work and organizational forms, practices and processes that affect the nature, structure and conditions of work and work organizations. Human Relations welcomes manuscripts that seek to cross disciplinary boundaries in order to develop new perspectives and insights into social relationships and relationships between people and organizations. Human Relations encourages strong empirical contributions that develop and extend theory as well as more conceptual papers that integrate, critique and expand existing theory. Human Relations welcomes critical reviews and essays: - Critical reviews advance a field through new theory, new methods, a novel synthesis of extant evidence, or a combination of two or three of these elements. Reviews that identify new research questions and that make links between management and organizations and the wider social sciences are particularly welcome. Surveys or overviews of a field are unlikely to meet these criteria. - Critical essays address contemporary scholarly issues and debates within the journal''s scope. They are more controversial than conventional papers or reviews, and can be shorter. They argue a point of view, but must meet standards of academic rigour. Anyone with an idea for a critical essay is particularly encouraged to discuss it at an early stage with the Editor-in-Chief. Human Relations encourages research that relates social theory to social practice and translates knowledge about human relations into prospects for social action and policy-making that aims to improve working lives.
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