Activism

Conceptual Overview

Activism is not new. It has a long history and, for the sake of brevity, a very broad sketch through which activism has evolved in Western democracies is provided here. In the early industrial period, a range of social movements emerged; e.g., the labor movement, the Suffragettes, the antislavery movement, and movements for democracy. By and large these activists coalesced around the framework of class relations. As [Page 25]affluence and abundance sets in, new cultural values prompted questions about the ends of personal and social life. In particular, it seeks to provide an understanding of contemporary social lives as people struggle against regimes micromanaging their lives.

This search for meaning created a new language of practice and legitimacy. It calls into question the way we live and organize ourselves in society. Inevitably, these questions provide us with frameworks, resources, and opportunities to express ourselves. However, there is a tendency in most accounts of social activism to emphasize the individual as actor and protagonist of social change. This often detracts and minimizes the collective base that inspires many of these “new” activist movements. As such, the concept of activism can be better understood within a larger discussion of social creativity, identity, and attempts to change power relationships.

In contemporary social theorizing, social actors themselves are assumed to produce and reproduce the institutional order in which they live and, as such, they are in principle also free to change its structure. Indeed, in organizations there is a long history of competing cultural change and values—members within organizations compete constantly to act, effect, create, and maintain both organizational strategies and identities in their daily lives. Hence, organizational conflict is not only normal but also expected. This is compounded in a globalized economy; social actors find themselves disembedded from familiar organizational structures and practices and are reinserted and reembedded within new societal structures and arrangements. Consequently, there is both acceptance and resistance to these changes, bringing into effect a number of different activist campaigns, e.g., unemployment and labor campaigns, relocating, and labor and environmental effects.

In contemporary business arrangements, organizational members actively create functional and corporate strategies congruent with their organizational culture. At the same time, they mediate competing societal demands for greater accountability and control, e.g., corporate social responsibility, human rights concerns, consumerism, environmental audits, and sustainability, among others. For other social actors, active engagement and participation provides them with an affirmative (and moral) self and identity. In the process, although both sets of actors may appear to have different agendas, they are both intricately bound up with the politics of identity and the competing logics of power and action.

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