Speaking Up, Speaking Out, and Making Movements: How Employee Activists Raise Social, Political, and Moral Concerns at Work

This dissertation explores how employee activists raise social, political, and moral concerns at work. To do this, I draw on interviews with employee activists, an archival database of white-collar employee activism events between 2018-2022, a three-day participant observation in employee activism training, and employee activist documents. In the first chapter, I examine how employee activists experienced the voice processes inside of their organizations as they attempted to raise social, political, and moral concerns. Despite describing companies that valued openness and leaders that encouraged employee voice, employee activists believed internal, individual voice channels were insufficient in addressing their concerns, prompting them to instead engage in collective action and public protests. I explore how internal voice processes broke down when activist raised social, political, and moral concerns as well as the types of social, political, and moral issues activists felt compelled to express. Finally, I examine how societal factors, including political polarization and pressure for companies to grow, fueled this phenomenon. In the second chapter, I explore how employee activists used internal communications tools to mobilize for collective action and to amplify their noisy exits from firms. Here, I describe how employee activists mobilized large-scale collective action quickly, often shortening the time leaders had to respond to their movements. I also examine how employee activists used internal communications tools and external social media to amplify their noisy exit messages, creating artifacts of dissent within their organizations, attracting mainstream media attention, and at times, laying the groundwork for future movements. Finally, I consider how organizational leaders responded to employee activists’ use of internal communication tools by placing new restrictions on these platforms. In the third chapter, I consider the direct effects and secondary consequences of employee activism by exploring how employee activists framed leaders’ responses to their contentious activism in ways that either constrained or fueled their movement’s momentum. Here, I examine three categories of outcomes: big wins—when organizational leaders acquiesced to all activist demands, partial wins—when organizational leaders offered some concessions or made meaningful gestures to acknowledge activists’ concerns, and losses—when leaders rejected activists’ demands and doubled down on the business practice in question. Finally, I show that regardless of a movement’s outcome, employee activists sought to build lasting capacity across movements and organizations by using internet technologies to improve resource mobilization for future employee activists.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Kessinger, Raquel

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kellogg, Katherine

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/155916

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/155916