Inhabited Ecosystems: Propelling Transformative Social Change Between and Through Organizations

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: DeJordy, Rich; Scully, Maureen; Ventresca, Marc J.; Creed, W. E. Douglas
• 署名单位: California State University System; California State University Fresno; University of Massachusetts System; University of Massachusetts Boston; University of Oxford; University of Rhode Island; University of Melbourne
• 刊物名称: ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0001-8392
• DOI: 10.1177/0001839219899613
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 931-971
• 关键词: HIGH-RISK ACTIVISM; MOVEMENT PERSPECTIVE; institutional change; UNITED-STATES; diffusion; INNOVATION; IDENTITY; POLITICS; protests; CONSTRUCTION

摘要

Two research streams examine how social movements operate both in and around organizations. We probe the empirical spaces between these streams, asking how activism situated in multi-organizational contexts contributes to transformative social change. By exploring activities in the mid-1990s related to advocacy for domestic partner benefits at 24 organizations in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, we develop the concept of inhabited ecosystems to explore the relational processes by which employee activists advance change. These activists faced a variety of structural opportunities and restraints, and we identify five mechanisms that sustained their efforts during protracted contestation: learning even from thwarted activism, borrowing from one another's more or less radical approaches, helping one another avoid the traps of stagnation, fostering solidarity and ecosystem capabilities, and collaboratively expanding the social movement domain. We thus reveal how activism situated in multi-organizational contexts animates an inhabited ecosystem of challengers that propels change efforts between and through organizations. These efforts, even when exploratory or incomplete, generate an ecosystem's capacity to sustain, resource, and even reshape the larger transformative social change effort.