TY - JOUR
T1 - Catalyzing Action on Social and Environmental Challenges
T2 - An Integrative Review of Insider Social Change Agents
AU - Heucher, Katrin
AU - Alt, Elisa
AU - Soderstrom, Sara
AU - Scully, Maureen
AU - Glavas, Ante
N1 - Funding Information:
Huising, Grace Augustine, and Forrest Briscoe for their supportive feedback, and Erin Fitzgerald, Nancy McGaw, Claudy Jules, and Andy Ruben for their perspectives from practice. We are grateful for support by librarian Hailey Mooney and the University of Michigan library system. We thank Katie Collins and undergraduate research assistants Kelsie Imus and Connor Zahler from Sara Soder-strom’s group. Our team has continuously been inspired by the insider social change agents we have studied and worked with and other scholars who have worked as insider social change agents within our field. We hope that this piece helps catalyze future work across both research and practice. Correspondence concerning this article should be directed to Katrin Heucher. Accepted by Denise Rousseau As an organizer, I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be—it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.
Publisher Copyright:
© Academy of Management Annals.
PY - 2024/1
Y1 - 2024/1
N2 - Urgent societal issues require corporations to make changes and contribute solutions. Insider social change agents are uniquely poised to propel this work. Operating from within their workplaces, they can advance changes that are linked to external social concerns but have purposes distinct from the organization’s core strategies and operations. They undertake mobilization activities, making local moves that aim toward more broadly impactful changes. These efforts form the micro-foundations of organizational approaches to positive social change. We review and integrate five streams in which such insider social change agents have increasingly appeared: employee activism, issue selling, tempered radicalism, micro-corporate social responsibility, and social intrapreneurship. Our framework maps the features of change efforts, with elements of persons, issues, places, activities, and outcomes. With a shared framework, researchers can better characterize the multiplicity of insider change efforts and ascertain how they compare, collaborate, or compete. Research will benefit from taking a more integrative view, especially toward the aim of understanding how local efforts aggregate to broader social impacts. To understand how change is inhibited or supported, future research can theorize blockers of societal change alongside insider social change agents and look to the ecosystem level for reciprocal and amplifying processes.
AB - Urgent societal issues require corporations to make changes and contribute solutions. Insider social change agents are uniquely poised to propel this work. Operating from within their workplaces, they can advance changes that are linked to external social concerns but have purposes distinct from the organization’s core strategies and operations. They undertake mobilization activities, making local moves that aim toward more broadly impactful changes. These efforts form the micro-foundations of organizational approaches to positive social change. We review and integrate five streams in which such insider social change agents have increasingly appeared: employee activism, issue selling, tempered radicalism, micro-corporate social responsibility, and social intrapreneurship. Our framework maps the features of change efforts, with elements of persons, issues, places, activities, and outcomes. With a shared framework, researchers can better characterize the multiplicity of insider change efforts and ascertain how they compare, collaborate, or compete. Research will benefit from taking a more integrative view, especially toward the aim of understanding how local efforts aggregate to broader social impacts. To understand how change is inhibited or supported, future research can theorize blockers of societal change alongside insider social change agents and look to the ecosystem level for reciprocal and amplifying processes.
KW - Insider social change agents
KW - social issues in management
KW - Issue selling
KW - Micro-CSR
KW - Tempered radicalism
KW - Employee activism
KW - Social intrapreneurship
KW - Positive social change
KW - Environmental issues
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85183930909&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.5465/annals.2022.0205
DO - 10.5465/annals.2022.0205
M3 - Article
SN - 1941-6520
VL - 18
SP - 295
EP - 397
JO - Academy of management annals
JF - Academy of management annals
IS - 1
ER -
