Organization-as-Platform Activism: Theory and Evidence from the National Football League Take a Knee Movement

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Rheinhardt, Alexandra; Briscoe, Forrest; Joshi, Aparna
• 署名单位: University of Connecticut; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University - University Park; University of Connecticut
• 刊物名称: ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0001-8392
• DOI: 10.1177/00018392221148725
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 395-428
• 关键词: collective action; SOCIAL-MOVEMENTS; OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURE; POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES; TOP MANAGEMENT; protest; MODEL; egalitarianism; PARTICIPATION; antecedents

摘要

Social activists sometimes engage in a form of workplace activism that involves using their employer organization as an unofficial platform to communicate social issue messages to external stakeholders. This type of activism follows a different logic from that of more-familiar citizen activism, in which citizens directly target society and its institutions, and that of organizational-change activism, in which employees aim to influence their employer organization. This article develops and tests theory to understand this phenomenon of organization-as-platform activism, using the National Football League Take a Knee employee athlete protests as an empirical context. Drawing on past research on social movements and employee activism, we offer a theoretical comparison of these three forms of activism-citizen, organizational-change, and organization-as-platform-to conceptually distinguish them and to theorize factors that uniquely predict the occurrence of platform activism. We find evidence of predictors associated with the attributes of the organizational platform and those of the intended stakeholder audience. Organization-as-platform activism is associated with the accessibility and openness of the organizational platform for messaging use, the visibility of the organizational platform for message transmission, and the receptivity of the targeted stakeholder audience. As employees increasingly bring their non-work identities and beliefs into the workplace, our findings invite new research on the outcomes of platform activism for organizations, the implications of such activism for organizational stakeholder strategy, and the relation between platform activism and employee prosocial voice.