Social Movements & Employee Activism

Employees are increasingly attempting to affect societal change via or through the organizations they work for. Through staging public walkouts at their places of work to using their organizations’ communication channels to reach broader stakeholder audiences, employees are relying on and using their organizations to promote change more than ever before.While employee activism and social movements have previously been examined in management research, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the predictors and outcomes of such public and far-reaching employee activism. This research program uses a novel dataset stemming fromthe National Football League’s “Take a Knee” movement–a protest movement aligned with the larger Black Lives Matter movement–to introduce the concept of “organization-as-platform”activism as well as unpack the antecedents and outcomes of such activism.