{"title":"Cultivating dispersed collectivity: How communities between organizations sustain employee activism","authors":"Anna Stöber, Verena Girschik","doi":"10.1177/00187267241290979","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":48433,"journal":{"name":"Human Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Human Relations","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267241290979","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"MANAGEMENT","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
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.
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.