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https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267241290979
human relations
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DOI: 10.1177/00187267241290979
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human relations
Cultivating dispersed collectivity:
How communities between
organizations sustain employee
activism
Anna Stöber
Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
Verena Girschik
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Abstract
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.
Corresponding author:
Anna Stöber, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Universitätsalle 1, 21335 Lüneburg, Germany.
Email: anna.stoeber@leuphana.de
1290979HUM0010.1177/00187267241290979Human RelationsStöber and Girschik
research-article2024
2 Human Relations 00(0)
Keywords
activism in and around organizations, change agency, employee activism, inter-
organizational communities
Introduction
A growing body of research has explored the transformative potential of efforts by
employee activists passionate about a social purpose to change corporate practices from
within firms (Girschik et al., 2022; Heucher et al., 2024; Schifeling and Soderstrom,
2022; Wickert and de Bakker, 2018). As corporate insiders with access to internal knowl-
edge and political processes, employee activists are in a unique position to micro-mobi-
lize others more effectively than activists agitating as ‘outsiders’ (Briscoe and Gupta,
2016; Gond and Moser, 2021). Despite these advantages, employee activists often face
harsh headwinds in their efforts to bring about change, and their portrayal as ‘activists in
suits’ (Carollo and Guerci, 2018) or ‘tempered radicals’ (Meyerson and Scully, 1995)
alerts us to the difficulties of being an activist within corporate walls. In addition to
social exclusion, ridicule, and shaming from colleagues (Kenny et al., 2020; Scully and
Segal, 2002), employees who break with corporate social norms and practices often
experience opposition and even sanctions from managers and colleagues (Kellogg, 2012;
Soule, 2012). To avert such upsetting and potentially career-threatening social sanctions,
activists may feel compelled to conceal their non-conformist values and ideals behind a
‘corporate mask’ (Scully, 2015).
Many employee activists seek support in communities that center on a shared social
purpose but are outside their organizations. Inter-organizational ties are well known to
provide external legitimacy and leverage for employee activists (Buchter, 2021; DeJordy
et al., 2020). In addition to strategic mobilization purposes, communities ‘between’
organizations matter to individual members because they allow them to remove their
corporate masks and connect with people who share their concerns (Meyerson and
Scully, 1995). Residing outside members’ workplaces means these communities can
function as free spaces that liberate activists from the challenging and sometimes dire
constraints of their daily working lives (Furnari, 2014; Rao and Dutta, 2012; Reedy
et al., 2016). As such, communities can provide opportunities for members to define new
courses of action aimed at challenging the status quo (Creed et al., 2022; Villesèche
et al., 2022). While these communities undoubtedly make a difference, employee activ-
ists likely face difficulties carrying community practices and resources into their change
efforts at work. To better understand the significance of inter-organizational communi-
ties for employee activism, we ask whether and how community participation shapes
employee activists’ experiences of their change agency as they pursue their social pur-
pose in their corporate lives.
Foregrounding employee activists’ experiences, we adopt a phenomenological view
of change agency that sensitizes us to how they conceive of and feel about their ‘place in
the world’ and the courses of action they can meaningfully undertake to drive change
(Creed et al., 2022; see also Coole, 2005). Our research is grounded in an in-depth quali-
tative study of an inter-organizational community of employee activists advocating – as
Stöber and Girschik 3
stated on the community’s website – for a more ‘self-organizing and meaningful world
of work’. We find that employee activists carry these community experiences into their
corporate lives through what we term ‘dispersed collectivity’: a sense of collectivity that
carries across contexts. Theorizing from our findings, we develop a model explaining
how employee activists cultivate dispersed collectivity in their community and how dis-
persed collectivity offers them a repertoire of interconnected agentic experiences they
can draw upon, transforming how they experience their change agency at work.
By providing a nuanced view of the potential and limitations of inter-organizational
communities for mobilizing and sustaining employee activism, our study contributes to
the literature on employee activism by highlighting how inter-organizational communi-
ties matter even when they do not develop a collective push for change: they can offer a
space for employee activists to cultivate a sense of collectivity that strengthens and sus-
tains their change efforts as they disperse to their firms. Theorizing individual change
agency and collectivity as recursively co-constituted, we offer a novel explanation of
how communities can contribute to social change as a collective resource, not merely as
a resource for individuals. In so doing, our study also provides a new perspective on the
role of self-care practices for social change efforts by explaining how a community can
use such practices strategically to generate collective momentum. Lastly, our study
addresses persisting questions regarding the impact of community participation on
employee activists’ commitment to driving change from within, as opposed to leaving
the corporate world to pursue their aspirations elsewhere. While community participa-
tion may not lessen the constraints employee activists face when trying to drive change
in their workplaces, it emboldens them to relate to their constraints more agentically.
Employee activism: Transformational aspirations meet
corporate reality
Employee activism is fraught with tensions. On the one hand, employee activists are well
positioned to act on their aspirations by leveraging their insider knowledge, access to
political channels, and other resources to promote their social purposes (Briscoe and
Gupta, 2016; Rheinhardt et al., 2023; Wickert and de Bakker, 2018). On the other hand,
being positioned ‘under the umbrella of management’ means they find themselves lim-
ited in their scope for action (Scully and Segal, 2002). Firms generally uphold strong
norms as to which roles and courses of action are considered viable and desirable, impos-
ing constraints on what roles employees can construct and perform. Illustrating the com-
plex challenges faced by employee activists, Wright et al. (2012) have shown how
sustainability managers engage in identity work to negotiate the tensions between their
sense of self and the constraints of the work context.
Activist roles tend to be most acceptable when mandated by management or tied to
‘feel good’ initiatives, such as recycling programs (Boiral, 2009; Norton et al., 2015).
Employee activists may then enjoy the support of management because they are seen as
contributing to the firm’s strategy and reputation (Scully and Segal, 2002). Not unlike
corporate mindfulness programs, however, such initiatives often provide employees with
a sense of fulfillment while stopping well short of granting them any transformative
4 Human Relations 00(0)
efficacy (Bell and Taylor, 2004; Islam et al., 2022). These roles may formally appear
agentic but are de facto co-opted into corporate agendas, conforming with and reinforc-
ing the organization’s prevailing practices and norms (Girschik et al., 2022). Instead of
being put in a position to challenge the status quo in any way meaningful to them, they
typically find their aspirations curtailed and rewritten to perpetuate business-as-usual
(see, for example, Wright and Nyberg, 2017).
When employee activists deviate from their mandates to challenge power relations
and dominant ways of thinking and doing, they and their efforts are likely to become the
targets of ‘institutional blockers’ invested in defending the status quo (see also Lawrence
and Suddaby, 2006; Levy and Scully, 2007). Such blocking may take the form of col-
leagues and managers rolling their eyes at them and other acts of dismissive, patronizing,
and even shaming micro-aggression (Carollo and Guerci, 2018; Scully and Segal, 2002).
They may be silenced, degraded, and excluded (DeCelles et al., 2020; Hafenbradl and
Waeger, 2017; Kenny et al., 2020). In extreme cases, opponents of change may actively
seek to undermine activists’ careers or to have them dismissed (Meyerson, 2008). Since
employee activists depend on their firms for their missions (Briscoe and Gupta, 2016),
they must walk a tightrope between passionately pursuing their aspirations and pragmati-
cally adjusting to corporate realities.
Overall, the dependence of employee activists on their firms renders their activism
inherently frustrating and precarious. Often, they must settle for piecemeal changes
despite their transformative aspirations (Scully and Segal, 2002; Skoglund and Böhm,
2020). Furthermore, employee activists are usually well aware of and reflexive about the
instrumentalization and cooptation of these aspirations to serve corporate agendas. They
therefore experience dissonance between their aspirations and corporate reality, which
dampens their experience of meaning and purpose and renders it challenging to sustain
their change efforts (Carollo and Guerci, 2018; Driscoll, 2020; Wright and Nyberg,
2012). Hoping to reinvigorate their activism, many employee activists seek out commu-
nities outside their firms where they can connect with like-minded people.
How communities matter for employee activists
The concept of ‘communities’ remains somewhat fuzzy in organizational scholarship.
As O’Mahony and Lakhani (2011) have shown, a plethora of definitions circulate across
multiple subfields of research, reflecting the different manifestations and affordances of
communities in and around organizations. Following Brint (2001: 8), we define com-
munities as ‘aggregates of people who share common activities and/or beliefs and who
are bound together principally by relations of affect, loyalty, common values, and/or
personal concern (i.e., interest in the personalities and life events of one another)’. In
professional contexts, communities have long been recognized as important social units
for collective learning, as when people define and build competencies and shared
knowledge that can help them develop their skills and solve problems more quickly
(Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; for a review, see Nicolini et al., 2022). Such
communities are often rather informal, consisting of self-selected members meeting
over lunch every other week or merely maintaining a shared messenger thread (Wenger
and Snyder, 2000). Even when organized more formally with established meeting
Stöber and Girschik 5
schedules, what distinguishes such communities from other forms of organizing, such
as project teams or employee resource groups, is that they are developed bottom–up and
driven exclusively by their members rather than being mandated or controlled by top–
down management (Wenger, 1998).
In this study, we are specifically interested in communities that reside between organi-
zations in which activists from different firms come together around a shared purpose of
driving change in their workplaces. Perhaps because they are work-related, such inter-
organizational communities are often presented as ‘networks’ even when they constitute
change-oriented spaces. For example, research on feminist business networks has shown
that participants use online spaces not only for exchanging business knowledge and
career opportunities but also for negotiating meanings and identities, thereby creating
new discursive resources and imaginaries for their advocacy work (Villesèche et al.,
2022). Conceptually, we consider such professional networks to be communities when-
ever they center around a shared purpose and their members develop reciprocal relations
(O’Mahony and Lakhani, 2011). Illustrating these aspects, Petrucci’s (2020) study of
gender-inclusive meetup groups has described how the members of such groups develop
safe spaces where people provide each other with the support they find lacking in their
workplaces. Not all professional networks constitute communities, however, and as dem-
onstrated in these prior studies, building and sustaining communities where people can
be ‘different together’ requires persistent efforts to nurture trusting relations (Husted and
Just, 2022).
Studies of social movements similarly suggest that communities can be a crucial force
for change by providing alternative spaces at a distance from the institutions that other-
wise dominate members’ daily lives (Furnari, 2014; Rao and Dutta, 2012; Reedy et al.,
2016). As trusting spaces in which participants are invited to reflect upon, challenge, and
redefine prevailing social norms without fear of social sanctions, communities afford
activists rare opportunities to experiment with prefigurative practices. That is, they can
jointly enact in the here and now the values and ideas to which they are committed
(Graeber, 2002; Maeckelbergh, 2011). While usually small-scale, such experimentation
with alternative ways of doing and thinking can provide a fertile ground for mobilizing
collective action that targets the status quo more contentiously (De Coster and Zanoni,
2023; Skoglund and Böhm, 2022). For employee activists, their aspiration to drive
change in their firms makes any collective action more difficult to achieve. Yet, even
without a direct strategic promise, prefigurative practices can support activists’ change
efforts by cultivating relationships and counterculture (Yates, 2015, 2021) and by ena-
bling activists to envision new possibilities (Ehrnström-Fuentes and Biese, 2022;
Reinecke, 2018; Skoglund and Böhm, 2020).
Communities can also come to ‘matter’ for employee activists through their affective
impacts. As emphasized by Meyerson and Scully (1995: 597) in their influential work
on ‘tempered radicals’, external communities can serve as crucial sources of ‘emotional
support, and, perhaps most important, empathy’. Feminist scholars have long cautioned,
however, not to take empathy for granted: empathy may grow as part of affective soli-
darity, which is nurtured when individuals share embodied experiences such as frustra-
tions or anger and thereby move toward the collective (Hemmings, 2012; Vachhani and
Pullen, 2019). It is through these embodied experiences of affective solidarity that
6 Human Relations 00(0)
people can replenish their emotional energy (McCarthy and Glozer, 2022). As Creed
et al. (2022) have argued, such embodied experiences can transform how people con-
ceive of themselves and ‘their place in the world’, shaping why and how they feel com-
pelled to drive change.
For employee activists, realizing the transformative potential of inter-organizational
communities and integrating their experiences of community participation in their cor-
porate lives is far from free of complications. To begin with, their strong professional
identities and dependence on firms for achieving their missions make it more difficult
for them to cultivate an alternative and affective space. Further, the more they succeed,
the more their community will differ from their workplaces. As such, it is unclear how
they can make their community experiences matter for their corporate jobs. Against this
backdrop, we set out to explore an inter-organizational community of employee activ-
ists empirically.
Empirical approach and methods
To unfold how community participation shapes employee activists’ agentic experiences in
their corporate lives, we conducted an in-depth case study of an inter-organizational com-
munity of employees in Germany. Grounded in a phenomenological perspective of change
agency, our approach emphasizes the relational and context-dependent (and hence poten-
tially precarious) construction of employee activists’ experiences of change agency. Beyond
generally conceptualizing agency as entailing certain degrees of reflexivity and potency, a
phenomenological perspective is not focused on how idealist forms of agency manifest in
the real world but instead privileges the more ‘ambiguous signs of agentic expression as
they emerge within a shared lifeworld’ (Coole, 2005: 125). In what follows, we present the
community and how we captured and analyzed our participants’ experiences.
Research context
The inter-organizational community we studied was founded by and comprised of
employee activists advocating in their respective firms for what the community website
describes as a more ‘self-organizing and meaningful [selbstorganisiert und sinnorienti-
ert] world of work’. As declared on this website, the community’s collective aim is to
help bring about a societal-level transformation of how we work, including in terms of
‘space, time, the employer–employee relationship, working hours, collaboration, infor-
mation, communication, and responsibility’. Although definitions of ‘self-organizing’
and related terms such as ‘democratic organizing’ and ‘collectivist organizing’ may vary
in practice (Lee and Edmondson, 2017), they all generally refer to employees having a
greater say in task allocation and decision making in the workplace (Diefenbach, 2020),
while ‘meaningful’ pertains to people’s subjective assessments of their work and tasks as
having value and purpose (Michaelson et al., 2014). Again, in the community’s own
words, they wanted to ‘establish work that is characterized by self-organization and
-responsibility’ because ‘people want to see meaning in their work, identify with the
values of their working environment, and take on responsibility’ (quotes from website).
Stöber and Girschik 7
The community was founded in 2017 by 12 employees of different well-known
German firms. The founding members had come together at different meetups about
self-organization that often linked to then-popular approaches of self-management and
decentralized managerial authority (e.g. Laloux, 2014; Robertson, 2015). They had
found that most of the discussions at such meetups focused on startups and smaller busi-
nesses. They shared the perception that the challenges of promoting more democratic
and self-managing forms of organizing were different and more formidable in the corpo-
rate sphere. Germany has a ‘collaborative business system’ (Whitley, 1999) character-
ized by strong ‘horizontal’ forms of association, in particular strong unions and systems
of co-determination. Compared with other EU countries, however, Germany has low
levels of direct participation in management decision making in white-collar environ-
ments, with employees having little influence on how work is organized within their
department or organization (Eurofound, 2015). Overall, workplace well-being is among
the lowest among firms in EU countries (Eurofound, 2019). The community’s purpose
and transformative aspirations were thus motivated by but also clashed with the deeply
engrained German workplace norms.
By the time the first author joined the community, it had grown to around 200 mem-
bers from more than 90 firms. A precondition for membership is that people must be
employed in a firm or a similarly large and complex organization at the time of joining
the community. One can generally not become a member if one works as an external
consultant to avoid the community becoming a marketplace for consultancy services.
Membership is free and held by individual members rather than their organizations,
allowing members to stay members even if they change jobs. Members have different
roles in their firms. While many of them are, as per their organizational role, change
agents of some sort, their exact job functions vary and include, for example, generalist
inhouse consultants, IT professionals, facilitators in the transition toward more sustain-
able business practices, or union representatives. Comprised solely of individuals in
employee or lower- to middle-management roles, the community operates on a grass-
roots and non-profit basis. The firms do not support the community financially and are
not involved in its agenda setting. However, there is a degree of indirect or tacit backing,
as in-person meetups are usually hosted in corporate facilities, and many members attend
these meetups during work hours.
We decided to focus our study on this community because it publicly espouses its
purpose of bringing together employee activists and making a difference for society by
joining efforts across and between organizations. The transformative aspirations to
change how we work on a societal level are conveyed in the publicly available data and
were described during initial conversations the first author had with several members.
Despite limited resources, the community has achieved a high level of maturity with a
stable core, formal membership procedures, and consistent activities. This is noteworthy
in the hierarchical German corporate context, where such grassroots initiatives are
uncommon without management facilitation. Overall, we thus consider the community
an ‘intense case’ (Patton, 2002), which offers a valuable opportunity to advance our
understanding of how participation in inter-organizational communities matters for
employee activists.
8 Human Relations 00(0)
Data collection
The first author joined the community and its online platform as a participant observer
in March 2021 and attended online and offline community events until January 2023.
This researcher’s interest in the community had been sparked by public comments and
contributions made by its members on social media and in various podcasts and maga-
zine articles. Having initially joined the community to understand how it was organ-
ized and how its members pushed collectively for different work practices in their
firms, the first author soon noticed that the community’s practices seemed in some
respects disconnected from its publicly espoused aspirations and that the community
struggled to mobilize collective change activities. Exploratory interviews with mem-
bers suggested this struggle had its origins in the very setup of the community since
individual activists repeatedly experienced tensions between the shared aspirations
they nurtured in the community and the constraints of their corporate roles, with dis-
sonance commonly arising from their efforts to reconcile such tensions. Notwithstanding
these apparent challenges, however, many members seemed exceptionally committed
to the community.
It was during this early stage that the second author joined the project. Together, we
discussed our shared first impressions and set about refining our research focus and plan-
ning how best to continue with data collection. To better capture and understand the
tensions we observed between members’ community experiences and their limited room
for maneuver within their firms, we adopted a phenomenological perspective of agency
to sensitize us to the more subtle ways in which participating in the community mattered
to its members. In line with this approach, it was crucial for us to tap into the embodied
and affective experiences of the community and hence for the first author to let them-
selves become ‘enchanted’ in the course of their participant observation (Bell et al.,
2021), not least to avoid succumbing to the urge to critique or even judge our partici-
pants’ practice, but rather foreground their experiences and understand their significance
– even if sometimes tacit (see also Ashcraft, 2018). Accordingly, the first author immersed
themselves in the online platform, including participating in the main community events
that took place once or twice a year at which members came together in larger groups of
50–70 participants.
The first author had worked in the corporate context in Germany before taking up
a position in academia and could thus relate to how the participants experienced
power dynamics in their workplaces. While their role as a researcher was transparent
throughout the data-collection process, their previous corporate experience meant
they could speak the same language as the community members and empathize with
their challenges. As this prior experience facilitated access to the field and helped
build trusting relationships, they soon felt like part of the community and had the
impression that the members saw them as ‘one of their own’. The second author delib-
erately stayed at a distance and did not participate directly in data collection. We took
this decision so that the second author could remain ‘unenchanted’ (Bell et al., 2021)
and take a more analytical stance as we continuously discussed emerging findings.
Our contrasting positions made for constructive dialogue with each other, especially
Stöber and Girschik 9
in helping us – as Bell and Willmott (2020) advise – to resist early closure in our
analysis, as we detail below.
The first author kept detailed notes of observations while participating in community
events and engaging with the online platform throughout the study, taking particular care
to note expressions of individual experiences and how social dynamics unfolded within the
group. In addition, they formally interviewed 15 members from 14 different firms, begin-
ning with members who were central to the community and most active at events and on
the online platform, including several of the founding members. Later interviews were
conducted with people who had been members for at least two years and actively contrib-
uted beyond the main events (e.g. by organizing sub-group initiatives or joining regular
small-group activities). Such purposive selection was important as it emerged early on that
only some of the 200-plus members regularly attended and contributed to the community’s
development and initiatives. Table 1 displays an overview of the interviewees.
Following a semi-structured interview guide we jointly developed, the interviews
sought further insights into how members experienced community participation and
change agency at their workplaces, and how these experiences had developed interde-
pendently over time. To this end, the interviews benefitted greatly from the shared ground
and trusting relationships established by the first author through participant observation.
Lasting between 60 and 90 minutes, the interviews were conducted, recorded, and tran-
scribed in German. Since both authors are native speakers, we could discuss our partici-
pants’ experiences in German and only translated the selected quotes into English after
we had completed and written up our analysis. Table 2 provides an overview of all col-
lected data.
Table 1. Overview of interviews.
Pseudonym Gender Position Industrya
Jana F Inhouse consulting Utilities, logistics &
telecommunications
Claudia F Inhouse consulting Professional & financial services
Frank M Inhouse consulting Technology
Philip M IT project management Professional & financial services
Peter M Inhouse coach Professional & financial services
Inka F Learning and development Utilities and logistics
Sebastian M Learning and development IT/communications
Niels M Project management Technology
Hans M Process engineering Automotive
David M Self-employed Professional & financial services
Christian M Operations management Technology
Stefanie F Learning and development Automotive
Oliver M Strategic project management Utilities, logistics &
telecommunications
Simon M Organizational development Technology
Jennifer F Organizational development Automotive
aPlease note that we aggregated some of the industries for the sake of anonymity.
10 Human Relations 00(0)
Data analysis
Adopting an interpretive and inductive approach, we first read through the interview
transcripts and observational data. We annotated these independently before discussing
our emerging findings in the original language, staying as close as possible to the terms
used by participants. This was consistent with our phenomenological perspective and
commitment to privileging the perspectives of people in the community so as not to let
theoretical concepts take over early in the analysis. As the data collection and analysis
progressed in parallel, we increasingly related empirical observations to emerging theo-
retical ideas, with the ongoing interplay between our different positions shaping our
analytical approach.
Throughout our dialogue, the first author endeavored as an ‘enchanted’ insider to
ensure our analysis reflected a deep respect and understanding of our participants’ expe-
riences and their affective embodiment, while the second author maintained a ‘disen-
chanted’ and theoretically informed outsider position. These distinct positions often led
us to divergent ideas about how best to make sense of our case, enabling us to maintain
openness in our data analysis through constant dialogue between empirics and theory.
This openness prevented us from jumping to early conclusions. To ensure accuracy, the
first author discussed emerging findings with various community members throughout
the analytical process (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).
Engaging with the data more analytically, we focused on teasing out how and why
people experienced tensions between their aspirations and their experiences at work.
Through open coding of our data, we captured how members experienced the commu-
nity, how they felt participating in its various activities, and how they experienced the
community as mattering to them when returning to their corporate settings. Discussing
the coded sections in several iterations, we eventually summarized them into 23 first-
order concepts and sorted these into three sets of second-order themes, totaling seven
themes. To identify and understand the dynamic relationships between the second-order
themes, we distilled three aggregate dimensions (Gioia et al., 2013). For example (and as
shown in our data structure in Figure 1), after subsuming the first-order concept of
Table 2. Overview of data.
Type of data Description
Publicly available data Podcasts (157 min)
Videos (48 min)
LinkedIn posts (12 pages)
Website
Participant observation 4.5 days of events (3 days online and 1.5 days in person), ca. 32 h
(fieldnotes, photos and screenshots of (digital) artifacts such as
agendas)
Posts from internal
online platform
ca. 190 pages covering a period from November 2020 to
January 2023
Interviews with
community members
15 recorded and transcribed, 60–90 min per interview
Stöber and Girschik 11
Figure 1. Data structure.
12 Human Relations 00(0)
‘experimenting with alternatives’ within the second-order theme of ‘cultivating collec-
tive momentum’, we sorted this theme together with ‘experiencing empathic connec-
tions’ into the aggregate dimension labelled ‘transformative experience of collectivity’.
As the final step of our analysis, we developed a theoretical model that presents the
transformative community experience and employee activists’ individual agentic experi-
ences in their workplaces as recursively constituted. The model theorizes how our sec-
ond-order themes and aggregate dimensions are connected, thereby capturing the
non-linearity of participants’ experiences. To explain how community participation ena-
bles people to carry a sense of collectivity with them as they return to work, we develop
the notion of dispersed collectivity, a concept latent in our analysis. We then emphasize
the recursive constitution of individual and community experiences by explaining how
employee activists’ agentic experiences at work move them back toward the collective,
thereby shaping the community.
Findings
In what follows, we detail the tensions around their aspirations that employee activists
encounter daily, how the community provides an antithetical space to such tensions, and
how the juxtaposition of their experiences in the community enables a repertoire of agen-
tic experiences after the employee activists return to work. Specifically, we identify three
distinct experiences in which this reconceived sense of change agency manifests for
employee activists: ‘enduring’, ‘unsettling’, and ‘detaching?’
Employee activists’ aspirational conceptions of change agency
The employee activists we encountered during our study had different backgrounds and
motivations for joining the community, but they shared conceptions of their aspired
change agency. We summarize these aspirations as ‘longing for meaningful work’ and a
‘wanting to belong in their firms’.
Longing for meaningful work. Many community members, also before joining the com-
munity, expressed that what made their work meaningful was the pursuit of a social
purpose beyond their corporate mandate and to ‘question the system’ (quote from online
chat). Or, as Frank said: ‘I am doing [this] because I want to make a difference for Ger-
many.’ They shared a belief in the power of people to transform society for the better by
promoting work practices that enable more participation and democracy in the work-
place and help to harness the power and resources of corporations to transform the way
we work on a societal level, as Simon explained: ‘. . . make the world better every day
[sic]. That’s the goal. . . . I have relatively good access to the organization. And I want to
position the organization in a more effective way to accomplish this goal’.
Work, from the participants’ perspectives, should not only advance their careers, but
they sought to spend their time at work – a large part of many people’s lifetimes – using
their talents in meaningful ways as well as enabling others to do so, too: ‘What motivates
me, also based on my own experience, is to enable people to do something meaningful in
a holistic sense . . . What can we contribute beyond what is expected in a job description?’
Stöber and Girschik 13
(Niels). Many members believed they could advance their societal purpose through their
work and emphasized that they felt obliged to act on their aspirations as a matter of per-
sonal integrity, like Inka put it: ‘I stand by what I do, that I can do it with a good feeling . . .
that I can say “what I’m doing is appropriate, it is consistent, it is right, I can stay true to
myself”.’ As this quote illustrates, the aspiration to drive change and their longing for
meaningful work was tied to members’ sense of self and their place in the world.
In practice, however, members struggled in their corporate roles. Many of those who
joined the community worked to some extent with organizational change in their corpo-
rate roles, and those roles ranged from ‘compliance and CSR’, ‘quality management’,
and ‘organizational development and agile coaching’ to ‘process development’ (posts on
online platform). Our data, however, show that they often found themselves preoccupied
with fulfilling their roles and tasks given to them by management, and struggled to find
time and energy to pursue the causes important to them. Others explained that they could
not integrate their aspirations within their roles. As Hans describes: ‘[My] main respon-
sibility is laboratory analysis. And I have an agreement with my boss that I get some
freedom to learn more about all the other things that are important to me.’ Longing for
meaningful work, many employee activists joined the community in the hope of foster-
ing their ability to pursue their social purpose in their firms.
Wanting to belong in their firms. The employee activists in the community saw their firm
not only as a lever for societal change but also as part of their social identity. One person
introduced herself in the community chat on the online platform: ‘During the pandemic,
it became clear to me again and again what a great firm I work for. We produce . . . eve-
rything you need in a hospital, improving the health of people all over the world.’ This
quote illustrates the pride many participants expressed in their firms. Participants’ iden-
tification with their firms was also reflected in that they commonly referred to them as
‘mother’, ‘parent’, or ‘home organization’ (quotes from the online platform). Partici-
pants shared the understanding that they would return to their ‘home port’.
Yet, in practice, participants’ relations with their firms were often strained, especially
when they vigorously pursued their social purpose. As Stefanie put it: ‘I believe the
greatest tension for me at this point is to stay true to myself but to fit in still.’ As in this
quote, many members expressed that they struggled to experience a sense of belonging
in their work lives, feeling ‘like a penguin in the desert’ (Claudia). Some members shared
that they were alienated and ridiculed by colleagues when they were more upfront about
their transformative ideas. Further, they described efforts to nurture grassroots momen-
tum as dangerous or irresponsible because there was a price to be paid: ‘I’ve seen many
colleagues pushed out of [the firm] because they were suddenly odd characters’ (Frank).
As Peter described: ‘. . . they lost a piece of home in their organization because some are
even being marginalized. Some say, “they are nuts!” or “that’s a no-go!”’. Despite want-
ing to belong in their firms, many participants thus experienced that they did not fit in.
These tensions between their aspired change agency and the reality of their work-
places, however big or small, motivated the employee activists to seek out the commu-
nity in the hope of meeting like-minded people who would understand them and support
them in dealing with the practical and emotional challenges that advocating for change
in a highly institutionalized setting entailed, as Sebastian explained: ‘I’m pretty sure that
14 Human Relations 00(0)
I’m not the only one who is part of a corporate setting and faces a lot of resistance, chal-
lenges, and tensions. And [in the community], we meet people with the same tensions
and challenges.’ Next, we unfold how people experienced such connections with like-
minded others as they participated in the community.
Community participation as a transformative experience of collectivity
Mirroring members’ aspirational change agency, the community was founded, as found-
ing member Jana put it:
. . . deliberately in [the context of] established corporations, because I think – and many others
in the community do, too – that we will, at least in Germany, need corporations in the future . . .
knowing full well what is and isn’t possible in a corporate context.
The aspiration to use corporations as levers for change was what brought the founding
members together as a community in the first place. As Philip explained: ‘Our purpose
[in this community] has always been to use the power of our network because we assume
that corporations, in particular, have power in the world of work.’ Indeed, the main idea
was that the community would strengthen efforts to change firms from within and to
‘combine the potential of our parent organizations in collaboration’ (post in chat).
The community’s declared motto was to ‘be the change’, which features prominently
on its website and attracts many members. Many joined because they expected to ‘share
experiences and learn from each other’ (post on online platform), to find a ‘shared learn-
ing space’, as one interviewee calls it, and ‘to work together on challenges, maybe also
competencies . . . to acquire competencies that we all deem increasingly relevant’
(Niels). Others joined looking for emotional support. As one member said: ‘I was very
much hoping to find something like an energy station. Or to find like-minded people and
no longer feel so alone. That was my hope’ (Christian). Our analysis shows that espe-
cially the experience within the community (at meetups and events) exceeded such
hopes: members experienced the community as transformative because they cultivated
collective momentum and empathic human connections.
Cultivating collective momentum. Members who joined and stayed in the community
throughout our study emphasized how much they valued the exchange with like-minded
others. As Inka put it, she appreciated how the community enabled her ‘to exchange with
other people on a topic that preoccupies you, that bothers you, that you can’t seem to
make progress on, and thereby get new ideas’. Their shared aspiration enabled such
exchanges because people had a common ground to build on and did not feel that they
had as much explaining to do but could instead address the issues they wanted to discuss
right on, as Hans described: ‘There is so much mutual support. No matter the question I
throw into the room, I get answers, always. Just like that. No tactics, no financial gain, or
something like that.’ This quote emphasizes that open exchange among employees from
different firms without hidden agendas was a new experience for him. Similarly, Sebas-
tian hinted at the fact that he was somewhat stuck in his bubble before becoming a com-
munity member, partly because it was frowned upon as an employee to seek exchange
Stöber and Girschik 15
with employees from other firms: ‘To meet people from other firms. Because up until
then, we were really in our own [firm’s] bubble. So, you were only allowed to, you only
spoke with suppliers and other business partners.’ Meeting all these other individuals
interested in the same topic offered new experiences of exchanging with like-minded
people that many had hoped for when joining the community.
At the regular community meetups, participants experimented with new practices and
ideas. Even the agenda for such meetups was set experimentally, in a so-called ‘barcamp’
style, as the first author could observe, meaning that any member could offer a session, and
the others could spontaneously decide which sessions to attend. The topics could range
from ‘How to measure team resilience’ or ‘The performance management system is bro-
ken’ to topics beyond corporate life such as ‘Autocracy and power and loss of control in
times of war in Europe’ or ‘Youth work and education’. Members also used the very plan-
ning of community events to run such experiments. For instance, during the pandemic, a
group of volunteers designed a very elaborate online experience for a day-long meetup:
I’m impressed by the whole online setup. They use this very elaborate tool where they build
different virtual rooms for the event (there is a plenary space called ‘arena’ where everyone ‘sits
down’ upon arrival and posts a photo and sometimes a fact about themselves or the topics they
are interested in talking about). There’s an open space, a lounge, pinboards where people post
ideas, etc. (Fieldnote, March 2021)
These experiments offered members a sense of progress in their aspirations in the here
and now. They were important, especially considering the barriers that people experience
in their corporate lives. As Frank put it: ‘We notice the barriers, right? We’re not finding
support. And if we join forces, then we’re stronger. That was the idea.’ While members
shared the experience that efforts in their firms were frustrated, they experienced pride
when participating in community activities, as Claudia explained:
And in the community, ultimately, I co-created something . . . and it was important to me to see
what develops from it. And I think the motivation behind it was also a little bit, something like,
a sense of pride in my work. Something that apparently was missing in my job.
Through its activities, the community fostered an experience of collective momen-
tum. For one, putting a shared aspiration into practice offered them novel imaginaries of
what might be possible. Furthermore, the very engagement in the active community
provided a sense of collective achievement that they often found lacking in their firms.
Experiencing empathic connections. Beyond seeking and finding practical support by join-
ing the community, we also found that members experienced the community as trans-
formative because it allowed them to connect empathically with each other. Many
described a feeling of strong connection that was noticeable right from the start, as Inka
described:
We were and are very diverse when it comes to our backgrounds, but . . . I stepped into that
room and immediately felt that they were not foreigners, but that we knew each other. You
almost wanted to hug each other immediately, you know?
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This sense of connection was often expressed after community meetups, as in the follow-
ing chat post after an online meeting: ‘It is so nice to see friendly faces and to share
what’s on our minds. It felt like such a nice and nurturing connection that developed, a
sense of connection after just a few minutes.’ Our data show that even those who
described joining the community for instrumental reasons and who were not necessarily
searching for human connection in the first place felt ‘at home’ and ‘secure’ (video log
after meetup) in the community.
Indeed, a shared yearning for empathic connection was core to what brought people
together in this community, and members actively cultivated this experience in the com-
munity over time:
So, what I really like is the space that we have created in [the community]. It’s usually a very,
very appreciative, open, trusting, and safe space. . . . That’s what we always wanted to create
– in our organizations, too. There is so much appreciation, so much openness, so much diversity,
and yet a lot of constructive dialogue and a lot of humanity. (Philip)
Many activities were set up so that members could relate to one another empathically and
in a way that would encourage them to show their vulnerabilities, as the first author
observed during events. There, they experienced activities such as ‘collective medita-
tion’ or practicing ‘prolonged eye contact’ (Fieldnote, June 2022) to foster connection at
a deeper level. Conversations often ran deep very quickly, and people openly shared their
struggles:
We start the day in small breakout groups . . . Immediately, a very fluid and deep conversation
develops in the small group. We talk about how we feel insecure after Covid when events
take place offline again and we feel our bodies at work again or moving in space. . . . At the
end of this round, one of our group says, ‘I have felt deep trust here in the group . . .’, another
person says, ‘I have experienced a really beautiful way of being listened to here.’ (Fieldnote,
November 2021)
This openness to show one’s vulnerabilities also manifested in the formation of a sub-
group that meets online weekly, as Inka explained: ‘There was this really close proximity
that developed, where you would open up so much and say things or talk about things
and reveal things – you wouldn’t normally do that.’ This quote shows that members
experienced that they could take off their corporate masks, revealing things that usually
remain hidden in a work context. Similarly, one person posted in the chat after one of the
online community meetups that how they opened up to each other ‘immediately made
me tear up again. I don’t have that back in the corporation . . . we are without masks
here. Safe.’
These experiences of belonging and feeling safe in the community were very different
from how people experienced their relations with colleagues in their firms. As Peter
described: ‘Here they meet like-minded people and that makes you feel good – you hear
that a lot in the community, “we don’t want to go back [to corporate life],” so it gives you
strength and validation, it is home.’ These quotes show that by providing a shared space
of human connection that makes members feel at home, the community stood in sharp
Stöber and Girschik 17
contrast to their workplaces, and many began to prefer their ‘new home’ to their ‘old
home’. Despite these experiences, because they still depended on their firms for their
missions, they returned to their firms to drive change.
Reconceived sense of agency: From collective experience to dispersed
collectivity
While the community cultivated a sense of collective momentum, members did not
mobilize action together to the extent that some members had hoped for: ‘[The commu-
nity] does not live up to its potential. We could do so much more. We could use a sys-
temic approach to make change happen everywhere at once’ (Sebastian). Claudia flagged
that the heterogenous corporate realities made it difficult to push for change together:
‘[The community members] have totally different regimes in their heads . . . even to
reconcile those when working in the community! . . . Such diverse perspectives. And
such diverse experiences.’ Instead of driving change together, they thus returned to their
many different firms and focused on driving change there.
One challenge arose from the sharp contrast members experienced between the com-
munity and their corporate realities, and they felt that it was difficult to transfer some of
the more experimental learnings into their daily lives. Members expressed that many of
the community activities that made their participation so valuable would be completely
impossible to implement in their firms, as the first author’s field notes document:
During the online session, some members write in the chat, making fun of how they would
NEVER be able to try some of the things and tools discussed or tried out in the community in
their corporate role. One person writes: ‘You are crazy! We are not allowed to use any of that
here . . . Best regards from reality.’ (Fieldnote, March 2021)
David experienced this firsthand when he tried to implement some of the community
practices he had learned and enjoyed in his organization: ‘They would tell me, like “now
is not a good time”. And that of course is super hard, when you experience all those valu-
able approaches and cool ideas and then you bring it into the organization and it’s
rejected.’ Upon returning to their respective firms, members thus still found their aspired
change agency frustrated and continued to grapple with a tension between their longing
for meaningful work and their wanting to belong in their firms.
Despite lacking direct applicability of experiences to their daily lives in their home
organizations, employee activists found community participation extremely valuable
because it gave them a sense of collectivity, even as they dispersed back into their
firms. The transformative experience radiated beyond the community, constituting a
repertoire through which people reconceived the tensions around their conception of
purpose inherent in employee activism and what they considered viable, desirable, and
sustainable courses of action to undertake when back in the firm. As Jennifer put it:
‘The community expands my solution space.’ Specifically, we found three interrelated
ways in which activists reconceived their sense of agency: ‘enduring’, ‘unsettling’,
and ‘detaching’.
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Enduring: Feeling recharged to play the corporate game. Agency experienced as enduring
entailed that members could keep going in the ‘hamster wheel’ as they gained new per-
spectives on the tensions they faced and felt renewed strength to sustain their activism.
The knowledge and experience acquired in the community enabled them to accept that
there are many situations in which one must color within the lines. As Niels described:
‘Knowing what needs to be done and finding the best way to approach it . . . I wasn’t
always successful with that in the past, and it still isn’t easy today.’ The community expe-
rience played an important role in enabling this agentic experience. Because members
openly shared their struggles within the community, some could see that the grass was
not necessarily greener on the other side:
It helped me to put my own organization into perspective. You often hear things like: ‘Everything
is super difficult for us. Other firms are doing much better.’ And if you hear directly from other
firms, you notice that they struggle too. (Simon)
Hearing about similar experiences in other organizations enabled members to put their
struggles in perspective, reenergizing their commitment to driving change in their firms.
Emotionally, community members found it more bearable to face their constraints and
keep playing the corporate game because they experienced that the community allowed
them to recharge. As Stefanie explained, such recharging was often much needed:
[The work I do] requires huge amounts of self-reflection but also energy. . . . And I can sense
that occasionally I need regeneration. And I cannot get that within my team, because if I talk to
my colleagues, I know what will happen: everyone gets stuck in some form of self-pity loop,
like ‘oh my god, oh my god, oh my god’.
The community provided a way to recharge among like-minded people: ‘. . . and then we
refuel. That’s absolutely how I feel when I attend the events’ (Sebastian). Or, as someone
wrote in the chat after an event, they were done ‘recharging [their] batteries’. Yet, many
also described that they recharged in the community just to be depleted again in their
firm, leading to a circle of recharging and depleting:
The community backs me up. I have experienced that again and again, that sometimes you’re
in despair because you fail to push for change, because of some higher-ups or just the general
conditions. That’s tedious and sometimes you lose faith even though you know deep down that
it is the right path. And the community supports me to keep going and not give up. (Hans)
Other members echoed this, saying that the community experience helped them ‘to
refuel and then go back into the not always easy corporate setting’ (Niels) and to ‘keep
at it’ (Claudia). As Frank put it, it helps to ‘stay in the game, you could say’, albeit, as this
quote also indicates, playing by corporate rules when they felt it was required. Community
participation thus allowed members to sustain their efforts despite enduring pervasive
challenges in their firms.
Unsettling: Feeling confident to twist the rules of the corporate game. The agentic experience
of unsettling entailed that employee activists enacted and experimented with alternative
behaviors, thus moving beyond the tensions inherent in employee activism and instead
Stöber and Girschik 19
– when needed – disobeying or subverting corporate norms and expectations. We found
that community participation enabled members to proactively engage with tensions as
they experimented with or even tried to change the rules of the corporate game. Members
used their new knowledge and insights in other firms as leverage to push for more pro-
gressive practices in their firms, as Frank explained:
[The management] can’t imagine it . . . So I thought, okay, if we showed them: ‘Look, [this
firm is already doing it] and [that firm] is doing it . . .’ Then we’d have some leverage to say:
‘Why aren’t we doing it? We have the same problems, after all.’
As this quote illustrates, the community offered an external point of reference that they
could mobilize in their efforts. Further, some members experimented with bringing some
of the more unusual community activities into their firms to consciously trouble corpo-
rate norms:
I was fascinated by the laughter yoga we tried out at a meetup, so I brought it with me to the
firm. And we said, let’s just try it. . . . And to find that, yes, maybe this creates a big tension for
the organization. But then we said in the team, ok let’s face that tension head-on and work with
it. (Christian)
Community members were aware that such experimental activities (such as laughter
yoga) would break with what was commonly expected in their firm and would cause
tension. Rather than avoiding tensions, activists were thus sometimes willing to create
and confront them when they thought it would stimulate change.
Our interviewees described that it was the community that gave them the confidence
to confront their firm’s practices and their colleagues and managers:
I have allies in the community. And if people question why I do certain things, why I am the
way I am, why I want to do certain things now, then I always feel like I have the community
and the people behind me. . . . So, it strengthens me. To bring new ideas into my organization.
(Hans)
Similarly, Stefanie described how they brought the community spirit with them as they
dispersed into their firms:
A colleague from another department and me . . . We came back from a meetup and brought
this energy back to the office. And that was awesome because it was so disconcerting for
everyone [in the office]. After all, they weren’t used to that at all.
One reason why such energy was disconcerting for colleagues in their firms was that
people now dared to drop their corporate masks, as Hans describes it:
In my experience, the community honestly is mask-free. In the corporate context, people
sometimes check out which role you have. And then, depending on the role, you cannot say
what you really think or feel. And for some time now I very consciously don’t do that anymore,
even in meetings with the board. There is no haze over what I say anymore. I say what I think
and what I feel. Like in the community.
20 Human Relations 00(0)
Many of our interviewees echoed the new sense of daring to unsettle the rules of the
corporate game because the community backed them up.
Detaching: Feeling independent to play one’s own game. In some instances, participation in
the community had even more far-reaching significance. Agency experienced as detach-
ing entailed that activists felt empowered to consider or explore other positions from
which they could drive change, including the possibility of leaving their corporate jobs.
We found that community participation could open new horizons and invited members
to consider venturing toward what they hoped were greener pastures. Indeed, some
members experienced that the grass was truly greener on the other side, as Inka said:
I want to make an impact in my [corporate] context but I also notice there is a world out there
where things seem to be working – just not at my home, not in my corporate context. That can
give you strength on the one hand, because everyone else is dealing with similar issues but
maybe it’s even more dramatic at my home and that can be frustrating in the worst case, you
know?
Sebastian described how the community made him aware of new opportunities:
Opportunities [t]hat weren’t so obvious before . . . either something would have had to be
extremely bad, or I would have had to desperately want to take the next step in my career and
work toward it. But that wasn’t the case, so it was a gift to notice, hey, this could also be an
option for you.
Such new opportunities were especially attractive for those who questioned the extent to
which they were in a position to effectuate change effectively, as Philip explained:
We notice that many of us . . . then rather say, I can’t be effective here [in the corporate context]
or the wheel I have to turn is so huge and it’s so frustrating . . . that many then tend to give up
and say I’d rather get out of this and try to be effective somewhere else.
Through their exchange with others, some realized that they could indeed be more effec-
tive elsewhere and work in a more constructive environment. David stated:
Then you can put as much of your energy into it, it will always fizzle out. And that is, I think, a
realization I took away from the community. If I want to use my energy not only to a limited
extent in a meaningful way but beyond, then I need to take another path. Because there are
firms and people and clients who do want change. And who are willing to make space for it.
The community enabled these experiences by supporting people in loosening their
attachment to their firm. The agentic experience of detaching was constituted through the
collective community experience because it offered them a sense of collective momen-
tum and empathic connections. As Claudia described, the community endowed her with
‘a sense of pride that was missing in my job’. Further, community practices also made
members more attentive to their well-being:
Stöber and Girschik 21
This desire to push for change . . . beyond [organizational] boundaries, as we do in the
community. And to then notice how quickly you’re pushed back into silos in the firms – that
does hurt. So, I believe that some just cannot take that anymore and therefore go their own way.
(Hans)
This quote illustrates that some members no longer felt defined by their current job and
instead began to consider leaving their firm, where they faced many constraints, in favor
of assuming other jobs where their efforts would be valued – and this change was noticed
by others in the community.
Detaching as agentic experience did not necessarily mean that people left their jobs:
many stayed in their firms but felt no longer defined by them. Some community mem-
bers did decide to move into new positions at other firms or left their firms to work
more self-determinedly, for example as independent consultants. As Peter explained
such decisions:
They became aware of their skills and gained the confidence to say, I can achieve more if I can
provide my experience to more organizations and to those who actually want it instead of being
met with rejection all the time.
Regardless of whether members stayed in or left their firms, their participation in the
community enabled them to gain sufficient distance to consider a broader range of posi-
tions as viable, thereby reminding them that they could decide which game to play.
Importantly, our data show that mentally and sometimes more literally detaching from
the firms they worked for did not mean they abandoned the shared cause of changing
how work is organized in the corporate world or giving their aspirations of changing
corporate practices from within. But by enabling members to loosen their attachment to
their firm, the community opened new positions and pathways for change.
Discussion: Communities as a source of dispersed
collectivity
Aiming to advance our understanding of how participation in inter-organizational com-
munities of like-minded people matters for employee activists, we found that the com-
munity did not mobilize strategic action targeted at their members’ firms. Instead,
employee activists cultivated collective momentum and empathic connections, which
constituted transformative experiences of collectivity for the employee activists. These
experiences were transformative because they maintained a sense of collectivity even as
the activists dispersed into their firms, enabling them to reconceive their change agency.
In what follows, we theorize our notion of dispersed collectivity in a model and explain
how our study advances our understanding of employee activism.
Theorizing dispersed collectivity: Toward a model
Our model (Figure 2) displays the recursive co-constitution of the transformative experi-
ence of collectivity that employee activists created in their community and the change
22 Human Relations 00(0)
agency they experience in their corporate workplace. It consists of the two constitutive
themes of employee activists’ aspirational change agency: longing for meaningfulness
and wanting to belong, as well as the transformative community experience and their
reconceived sense of change agency. We now explain how employee activists can culti-
vate dispersed collectivity within their community; how this dispersed collectivity trans-
forms their experience of change agency at work; and how they continue to move toward
the collective.
Employee activists achieve a transformative experience in their community by culti-
vating collective momentum and empathic connections. The community experience thus
includes but extends beyond the replenishing of emotional energy (see also McCarthy
and Glozer, 2022; Meyerson and Scully, 1995). By engaging in activities intentionally
designed for sharing affective experiences and that prefigure new horizons, the commu-
nity generates a strong sense of collectivity. Our study has illustrated that employee
activists can maintain and draw on this sense of collectivity even as they disperse into
their respective firms. Dispersed collectivity thus entails that a sense of collectivity is
carried across contexts and provides employee activists with a repertoire of three inter-
related agentic experiences that they can access, depending on the situation they find
themselves in at their workplace. Specifically, dispersed collectivity allows them to feel
recharged to endure in the corporate game, to feel confident to unsettle the rules of the
game, and/or to feel independent to detach themselves mentally and emotionally from
the firm and play their own game. These agentic experiences alleviate the intensity of
their struggles temporarily, thereby enabling employee activists to sustain and even
strengthen their change efforts at work.
Dispersed collectivity wears off, however, as people are back at their workplaces,
and it gets exhausted over time (as signified in the model by the fading color). Whereas
Figure 2. Theoretical model of dispersed collectivity.
Stöber and Girschik 23
activists experience collective momentum and empathic connections to be mutually
reinforcing within the community, in their corporate lives, their longing for meaningful-
ness produces tensions with their need for belonging. The community enables its mem-
bers to work with these tensions more agentically in the workplace. Yet, it also renders
such tensions more salient and perhaps more difficult to bear, thus maintaining or even
heightening employee activists’ frustrations or ‘affective dissonance’ (Hemmings 2012;
Vachhani and Pullen, 2019). It is this affective dissonance (signified by stars in our
model) and the desire to re-experience a sense of momentum and connection that drives
people back toward the community. Dispersed collectivity thus emboldens employee
activists to feel more agentic at work while reinforcing and sustaining community
participation.
Theoretical contributions
We contribute to the literature on employee activism by introducing the notion of dis-
persed collectivity to advance our understanding of how communities between organiza-
tions matter for employee activists. Previous literature has emphasized that employee
activists can strategically use external ties and resources to pursue change in their firms
(Briscoe and Gupta, 2016; Buchter, 2021; DeJordy et al., 2020; Heucher et al., 2024). We
expected the community to be especially beneficial in mobilizing action, such as by ena-
bling activists to join forces in their pursuit of social movement tactics (Briscoe and
Safford, 2008; Soule, 2009) or even to generate a ‘bureaucratic insurgency’ (Zald and
Berger, 1978). In our study, despite the collective momentum for sometimes insurgent
ideas and experiments within the community, employee activists did not build a move-
ment for more radical change across firms. Rather, we show that inter-organizational
communities matter even when they do not develop a collective push for change because
they can offer a space for employee activists to cultivate a sense of collectivity that
strengthens and sustains their change efforts as they disperse to their firms.
Previous research on the role of communities in social change has grappled with the
concern that such communities favor individual advancement over collective pursuits,
thereby weakening the purpose that originally united them (Petrucci, 2020). We have
long known that individuals seek out communities to access new knowledge and
resources as well as for emotional support (McCarthy and Glozer, 2022; Meyerson and
Scully, 1995; Villesèche et al., 2022). To cultivate empathy and solidarity, however,
communities must commit sustained efforts (Hemmings, 2012; Husted and Just, 2022;
Vachhani and Pullen, 2019). Perhaps somewhat unexpectedly in professional contexts,
the employee activists in our study intently cultivated empathic connections to
strengthen a sense of collectivity around their shared purpose. Out theoretical model
explains that while their sense of collectivity affords the employee activists an experi-
ence of emboldened change agency even as they disperse back to their workplaces, this
feeling wears out and needs to be restored through continued community participation.
Accordingly, instead of merely instrumentalizing the community for their individual
advancement, people feel the strong need to move back toward and nurture their com-
munity and its shared purpose. By presenting individual change agency and collectivity
as recursively constituted, our model offers a new theoretical explanation of how com-
munities can contribute to social change.
24 Human Relations 00(0)
To critical management scholarship, our study offers a new perspective on how prac-
tices that center on restoring people’s well-being can matter for social change efforts.
Scholars have warned that in professional contexts such self-care practices tend to distract
from or make people feel better about the status quo, in the worst case denying the need
for real change (Bell and Taylor, 2004; Islam et al., 2022; McGee, 2005). Our study shows
that activists, within a community that resides outside their workplaces, can strategically
use such practices to build empathic relations and foster activities that generate collective
momentum. Instead of merely easing the employee activists’ distress, these practices con-
tributed to developing a strong sense of social purpose and change-orientation as the
shared basis for collectivity. Overall, because community participation can revitalize their
aspirations and heighten the affective dissonance people experience when attempting to
drive change at work, employee activists may find it more – not less – important to chal-
lenge the status quo. We thus caution against categorically evaluating ‘softer’ and perhaps
more self-centered practices as counterproductive to the change agenda and instead invite
curiosity into how employee activists may skillfully and reflexively resort to a wide vari-
ety of activities to boost and sustain their collective cause.
Finally, our study addresses a critical question: if the employee activists are so discon-
tented, why do they stay in corporate jobs? As others have argued before us, changing a
firm from within may require that activists settle on subtle activist tactics aimed at piece-
meal change (Meyerson and Scully, 1995; Scully and Segal, 2002). Given the limited
‘transformative efficacy’ (Coole, 2005) of their agentic experiences in their firms, one
might indeed expect that employee activists who deeply feel a calling for their purpose
sooner or later decide to pursue it elsewhere, for example by joining alternative spaces
outside the system (Kociatkiewicz et al., 2021). Yet, most of the employee activists in our
study did not fundamentally question their ‘place in the world’ (Creed et al., 2022). The
majority of those with agentic experiences characterized by detachment from their firms
did not remove themselves from the cause; they remained committed to effecting change
from within and using corporations as potential levers for societal transformation. This
commitment persisted even among people who questioned whether community members’
efforts were radical enough. Our model suggests that while community participation does
not lessen the constraints on employee activists’ change efforts in their firms, it emboldens
them to relate to these constraints more agentically and thereby strengthens their under-
standing of themselves as activists who push for social change from within.
Boundary conditions and future research
Our study has two important boundary conditions that open avenues for further research.
First, the inter-organizational community we studied consists of people whose interest in
more autonomous and meaningful work is tightly linked to an interest in and openness for
new and alternative modes of organizing. This circumstance likely influenced how they
experienced and engaged in the community, especially with the more experimental and
prefigurative activities. These elements were crucial in generating collective momentum,
possibly rendering the transformative experience more potent. Communities focusing on
purposes not as closely connected with alternative ways of organizing or for other reasons
not lending themselves to such experimentation may struggle to build a sense of collective
Stöber and Girschik 25
momentum. Additional empirical studies are needed to understand how and to what extent
experimentation is necessary for employee activists to experience collective momentum.
Second, the study was situated in Germany, a ‘collaborative business system’ (Whitley,
1999). As such, this context is characterized by strong ‘horizontal’ forms of association,
in particular, strong unions and systems of co-determination providing formal channels
of employee representation. With a strong tradition of such forms of association, the
German context is relatively more conducive to employee organizing. For example, in
our study, employee activists sometimes met during working hours and on several firms’
premises, indicating that some of our participants had received support or at least permis-
sion from their managers to participate in the community. Such participation, and hence
the creation and sustenance of a community, might be more difficult in contexts where
firms are generally more opposed to employee organizing, as often observed with con-
testation around unionization. Future research may usefully explore how employee
activists can organize across organizational boundaries when their firms are opposed to
and even punish such connections.
Besides future research to explore the boundary conditions of our study, we also
encourage research that addresses questions about the ambition and inclusiveness of
employee activists’ inter-organizational communities. In this article, we studied a com-
munity that welcomed new members even when their motivations were instrumental.
Perhaps because of the variance in members’ ambitions, we found that some members
expressed discontent and kept pushing for more radical activities. If individuals with
more radical approaches formed a community, it is unclear whether they would find
more subtle agentic experiences sufficient for sustaining their activism. Furthermore, the
community we studied was relatively homogenous, consisting of German-speaking
white-collar employees. We still need to better understand whether and how employee
activists can build inclusive communities in which diverse perspectives are represented
and in which they can cultivate dispersed collectivity across gender, class, and race.
Overall, a key challenge for communities is to balance members’ experiences of mean-
ingfulness and belonging with inviting diversity.
Our call to reappreciate nuanced experiences of change agency backed up by a sense of
dispersed collectivity is topic- and context-specific. Depending on the purpose or context,
dispersed collectivity and piecemeal change or social movement tactics and radical change
may be the most efficacious pathway forward. Transformative efficacy could be affected,
for instance, by the degree of societal attention and awareness of a topic or by the extent to
which it is possible to formulate tangible and attainable goals. Moreover, which type of
employee activism is more likely to emerge and gain traction could also depend on whether
activists work for positive change or against corporate wrongdoing. Our findings indicate
that when working for positive change, employee activists may be more invested in the
firm they work for and, therefore, opt for collaborative instead of antagonistic forms of
activism. More research is needed, however, to understand these dynamics.
Conclusion
In this study, we set out to understand how communities matter for employee activists
seeking to drive change from within their firms. Our study reiterates that even though the
26 Human Relations 00(0)
community helps them to develop new meanings and experiment with alternatives,
employee activists cannot directly translate community practices and resources into their
change efforts at work. Community participation thus does not directly help them enact
the change agency they originally aspired to. Instead, our study shows that employee
activists cultivate what we have coined ‘dispersed collectivity’: a sense of collectivity
that they take with them when dispersing into their workplaces. Dispersed collectivity
enables subtle agentic experiences of enduring, unsettling, and detaching from the cor-
porate status quo. Even though they do not form a powerful social movement or emerge
as individual heroes, they do not abandon their radical aspirations for change. Instead, by
reconceiving their individual role within the bigger picture, they can more agentically
walk the tightrope between their aspirations and the constraints of the corporate setting.
The community experience thus allows them to sustain their activism as part of a collec-
tive albeit distributed change effort.
Our study suggests that, as scholars, we must respect and look for these more subtle
manifestations of agency. While one may be tempted to consider the absence of strategic
action a limitation, the employee activists in our study did not find such collective action
desirable or viable at all costs. Notably, their firms remained the main reference points for
many of these activists and the context in which they sought to drive change. Because they
were so invested in contributing to positive change from within their firms, they had to act
differently from social movements to sustain their activism over time. Instead of mobiliz-
ing collective action, the employee activists in our study found that they could best
advance their causes by sustaining their efforts in dispersed ways. While extant theoretical
assumptions would have led us to evaluate the community’s activities as a failed attempt,
our phenomenological perspective has allowed us to gain insight into their strategic and
skillful efforts. Our study thus emphasizes the importance of empirically grounded
research that prioritizes participants’ epistemic privilege. Doing so helped us develop a
more nuanced understanding of employee activists as neither unquestioning followers nor
heroes: they drive change that is meaningful, practical, and realistic for them.
Practical implications
For practice, our study has re-emphasized that employee activists and all those seeking
to effectuate change from within benefit immensely from connecting with others across
organizational boundaries and cultivating a community. To sustain their efforts, we
encourage employee activists and anyone seeking to effectuate change within their
organization to move beyond bilateral relations with like-minded colleagues, as is com-
mon in professional networks, and instead gather allies in or join a community. As schol-
ars, we should consider how universities can facilitate such spaces for practitioners.
Moreover, we know that many colleagues can relate to the experiences of our research
participants. In very similar ways, we often find our aspirations to contribute to positive
change through our research, teaching, and service frustrated. We should continue to
experiment with re-orienting our scholarly communities toward cultivating momentum
and empathy. By building communities that strengthen and sustain efforts aimed at
building a more humane academia (Korica, 2022), we might be able to unsettle dysfunc-
tional and unjust practices from within – one step at a time.
Stöber and Girschik 27
Acknowledgements
We would like to extend our thanks to Associate Editor Professor Melanie Simms and the three
anonymous reviewers for their dedicated engagement with our work and a truly inspiring conver-
sation throughout the review process. We also express our sincere gratitude to Sine Nørholm Just
for her formative comments during the early stages of the manuscript, as well as Iben Stjerne, Gazi
Islam, and Hannah Trittin-Ulbrich for their helpful input on later drafts. Special thanks to Dennis
Schoeneborn for catalyzing our collaboration and for his support along the way. Finally, we are
deeply grateful to The Community for allowing us to immerse ourselves in their world, which has
been both an inspiration and a privilege.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iDs
Anna Stöber https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6445-8913
Verena Girschik https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0351-3341
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Anna Stöber (PhD, Copenhagen Business School) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of
Business in Society at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Anna’s research focuses on employee
activism and how change efforts from within emerge and are sustained. Additionally, Anna’s
research explores new and alternative forms of organizing, with a particular interest in self-organ-
izing and democratic collaboration. [Email: anna.stoeber@leuphana.de]
Verena Girschik is Associate Professor of Business and Society at Copenhagen Business School.
Her research explores how companies negotiate their social responsibilities in the context of com-
plex societal problems and humanitarian crises. She is passionate about conducting in-depth quali-
tative studies that dive into novel phenomena, especially in the areas of employee activism and
business–humanitarian collaboration. Her research has been published in Business & Society,
Journal of Management Studies, and Human Relations, among others. [Email: vg.msc@cbs.dk]
