Abstract:
Advocating for strategic initiatives aimed at sustainable business practices has so far been studied either as an internal change process or as the efforts of external actors, such as environmental movement groups. Based on a comparative case study, we show how insider activists draw both on the social movement rationale that the world needs to change and utilise the business continuity rationale that relevant risks need to be managed from the perspective of the company. While the underlying aims and moral basis are different and the literatures on social movements and social issue selling remain largely unconnected, our findings show that insider activists utilize both to pursue their initiatives. The moral reasoning serves to identify like-minded peers externally, while the business continuity reasoning helps them to align with organizational concerns. Failure to connect and to align led to abandoned initiatives and left insider activists disenfranchised. Those who succeeded utilized their external network as they sought to promote sustainable business practices internally, thereby interweaving external and internal legitimizing efforts.
Kristina Lauche is the Chair of Organizational Development and Design and the Head of the Doctoral School at Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University, The Netherlands. Previously, she held research and teaching positions at the University of Munich, ETH Zurich, University of Aberdeen, and Delft University of Technology. Her research draws on practice approaches to understand how people address complex problems that require inter-organizational collaboration and how they engage in issue selling to pursue organizational or field-level change. She has investigated such processes in the context of new product development, sustainability, healthcare, and creative industries. Her work has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and MIS Quarterly.