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Climate Activism - How Communities Take Renewable Energy Actions Across Business and Society
Abstract
What is activism? The answer is, typically, that it is a form of opposition, often expressed on the streets. Skoglund and Böhm argue differently. They identify forms of 'insider activism' within corporations, state agencies and villages, showing how people seek to transform society by working within the system, rather than outright opposing it. Using extensive empirical data, Skoglund and Böhm analyze the transformation of climate activism in a rapidly changing political landscape, arguing that it is time to think beyond the tensions between activism and enterprise. They trace the everyday renewable energy actions of a growing 'epistemic community' of climate activists who are dispersed across organizational boundaries and domains. This book is testament to a new way of understanding activism as an organizational force that brings about the transition towards sustainability across business and society and is of interest to social science scholars of business, renewable energy and sustainable development.
... The activism of CEOs is, as Branicki et al. (2021) show, almost always directed toward progressive socio-political causes (see also Feix & Wernicke, 2024). And it is becoming more and more common for businesses to (seek to) align their interests with progressive platforms of, e.g., social justice and climate activism (Gulbrandsen et al., 2022;Skoglund & Böhm, 2022). Whilst such alignment may be celebrated as key to positive societal change (Sarkar & Kotler, 2018), scholars more commonly take a critical stance towards purportedly activist practices that regard corporations' commercial interests as the boundary of intelligibility for activism (Branicki et al., 2021;Girschik et al., 2022;Nyberg, 2021). ...
Based on a qualitative study of Copenhagen 2021 WorldPride, this article explores collaboration between the local organiser and its corporate partners, focusing on the tensions involved in this collaboration, which emerge from and uphold relations between the extremes of unethical pinkwashing, on the one hand, and ethical purity, on the other. Here, pinkwashing is understood as a looming risk, and purity as an unrealizable ideal. As such, corporate sponsorships of Pride are conceptualized as inherently impure—and productive because of their very impurity rather than despite it. Analytically, we identify and explore three productive tensions where the first involves emergent normativities for what constitutes good, right, or proper corporate engagement in Pride, the second revolves around queer(ed) practices and products that open normativities, and the third centres on the role of internal LGBTI+ employee-driven networks whose activism pushes organisations to become further involved in Pride, developing aspirational solidarity. Reading across literatures on corporate activism and queer organisation, we introduce Alexis Shotwell’s notion of constitutive impurity to suggest that the potential for ethical corporate Pride partnerships arises when accepting the risk of pinkwashing rather than seeking to overcome it.
... As is evident, the paradigm shift in business requires a society-wide effort of re-imagining our future (Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022). It is an effort of cross-sectoral activism Skoglund & Böhm, 2022) that is focused on co-creation and collaboration, rather than only competition. We cannot solve many of today's ecological and social challenges without collective efforts that include diverse perspectives from around the world (Antonacopoulou, 2022). ...
This Agenda 2050 piece is a call to action for management scholars to follow the lead of business associations , foundations, and businesses in studying and understanding the transformative change needed to bring about a more equitable and flourishing world for all living beings-including humans and other-than-humans. These entities advocate for a significant paradigm shift in how business is practiced as a way of responding to 'polycrisis'-the interrelated set of civilization-threatening crises that includes climate change, social inequality, and biodiversity loss. Yet management scholars lag behind business discourse with issues of sustainability and ecological flourishing, adapting to the type of leadership needed for the future, and understanding the need for system change. We provide four keystone pathways to help scholars shape future discourse in business scholarship, practice , and curricula: 1) structural changes to management education, 2) piloting social impact, 3) development of regenerative business models, and 4) moral, legal, and financial cases for action.
... They have also analysed institutional entrepreneurs (Battilana et al., 2009), social intrapreneurs (Davis & White, 2015), tempered radicals (Meyerson & Scully 1995) and employees' environmental activism (Skoglund & Böhm, 2020). These internal activists often have unique knowledge and expertise, as they are often embedded in wider communities of action, epistemic communities and social movements (Skoglund & Böhm, 2022). They use their unique position to bring about institutional change, sometimes using resources and networks from outside the organisation (Den Hond & De Bakker, 2007). ...
Circular Economy (CE) is predominately approached through a technical and engineering paradigm, which aims to radically reduce waste by redesigning resource flows. This often ignores the CE’s social dimension. While the entrepreneurship and business model literatures do recognise the importance of people in CE transitions, this chapter goes a step further by understanding CE through an activism lens. Our argument builds on social movement perspectives of societal transitions, showing that change is often enacted by grassroots communities in everyday settings. We provide three examples of what we term circular society activism, illustrating our argument. We contribute to the CE literature by conceptualising circular society as a form of prefigurative action that can be enacted by communities in the here and now.
Pushing for social change at work is frustrating and precarious. Many employee activists therefore seek support in communities that form around their aspirations and reside ‘between’ organizations. This article advances our understanding of how community participation shapes employee activists’ experiences of their change agency as they return to and pursue their social purpose in their corporate lives. Grounded in an in-depth qualitative study of an inter-organizational community of employee activists, we introduce the notion of ‘dispersed collectivity’: employee activists generate a shared sense of collectivity that they maintain even as they disperse into their workplaces. Dispersed collectivity enables subtle agentic experiences by emboldening employee activists to endure their often-challenging corporate lives, unsettle corporate norms, and detach from their corporate positions. Even without mobilizing a collective push for change across firms, communities can thus play a critical role in sustaining employee activism. Our study contributes a more nuanced account of employee activists’ change agency and offers new theoretical insights into the role of inter-organizational communities in social change, the practices they can use to build collective momentum and empathic connections, and their impact on employee activists’ determination to drive social change from within.
Some communities in the Veneto Region (Italy) are facing a major technological disaster due to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) pollution. In response to this serious problem, a group of ordinary mothers exposed to PFAS contamination came together under the name MammeNoPfas (MothersNoPfas) to address this environmental disaster moving towards activism. They started to develop the epistemic capacity to understand these substances and disseminate this knowledge within their communities. The purpose of this study was to explore the experience of these mothers as an epistemic community and a minority group, engaged in an accidental form of environmental activism. Based on in-depth narrative interviews, 23 mothers were involved in the study. A grounded theory and thematic analysis methods were used. Four major themes emerged: (1) health surveillance, (2) collective ignorance, (3) collective learning, (4) community practices. Nine sub-themes were associated with the emerging themes. This study demonstrated that the skills acquired by MammeNoPfas enabled significant participation in environmental and health issues. Social mobilisation, fighting for legal justice against those who poisoned their land and bodies and establishing themselves as an epistemic community are the three main dimensions characterising the struggle of MammeNoPfas.
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