Insider social change agents can spur action on urgent societal issues
“To address societal and environmental challenges, organizations need to move beyond symbolic gestures and greenwashing. The key is to integrate change across all aspects of the organization,” and insider social change agents are poised to make this happen, according to the authors of “Catalyzing Action on Social and Environmental Challenges: An Integrative Review of Insider Social Change Agents,” published in 2024 in Academy of Management Annals.
While change efforts limited to a specific department or signaled only through top-level management are unlikely to make a difference, insider social change agents “can advance changes that are linked to external social concerns but have purposes distinct from the organization’s core strategies and operations.” And they can extend change efforts to all functions in an organization, say study authors Katrin Heucher, Elisa Alt, Sara Soderstrom, Maureen Scully, and Ante Glavas. Soderstrom is Erb Undergraduate Fellows Faculty Director and associate professor of Organizational Studies and Program in the Environment at U-M.
Although 95 percent of S&P 500 companies have publicly committed to action on positive social change, research has shown that “most corporate approaches to positive social change have been symbolic and peripheral, only loosely coupled with core strategy and operations,” the researchers note. “Corporations are not designed to deliver on societal problems, but can be used to do so with some savvy and perseverance.”
The researchers’ review includes a sample of 409 articles, and they looked at five literature streams where insider social change agents have appeared increasingly: employee activism, issue selling, tempered radicalism, micro-corporate social responsibility and social intrapreneurship. They created a model that helps appraise how insider social change agents can best influence their organizations on social change.
Insider social change agents work against the grain to advance broad social change goals. Examples of these change agents include:
- someone operating with the mandate of a formal sustainability role, focusing on the activities of preparing and implementing, and toward producing structural changes in production methods that could scale across production lines
- someone propelled by their social identity and the inequities they experience, focusing on motivating kindred people and allies to join their effort and connecting to mobilized colleagues in other organizations, working toward cultural change
- someone with deep personal motivations about saving the planet from peril, using compelling frames, and evaluating change efforts to make sure there is real change, not greenwashing
“[W]hile each change effort is a building block toward positive social change, no building block is an isolated entity. The building blocks can be arrayed together so researchers can better see the overall socially constructed space. Insider social change agents have some skill at surveying a landscape to see where there are gaps, unexpected opportunities, other blocks to build upon, or precariously toppling blocks,” the researchers note.
Previous research has focused mostly on insider social change efforts leading to important but insular small wins, but the study authors argue that future research needs to focus on how these change agents’ efforts can aggregate to catalyze positive social change.
These findings have implications for business students. “Many students are unaware that they have the capacity to drive change from any position within an organization. Even though this generation of business school students exhibits a growing passion for addressing social and environmental challenges, they often lack the confidence to venture beyond the boundaries of their anticipated job roles,” the researchers note as they call for enhancing support for insider change agents.
Other necessary forms of support include communities of practice—such as those facilitated by nonprofits, professional associations, and business schools—where insiders can connect. “Platforms like the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program’s First Movers Fellowship provide ideation and design resources, as well as the space for sharing strategies for overcoming challenges,” and they allow insiders to inspire one another in their efforts to drive positive social change from within organizations.