Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Benchmarking Diversity: Social Movement Outcomes in the Workplace

Tue, August 19, 10:30am to 12:10pm, TBA

Abstract

Despite increased scholarly attention to the impact of social movements, there has been almost no attention paid to the impact of social movements on institutions. In this paper, we draw from an original dataset to conduct a hierarchical linear analysis of changes in corporate equality policies related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people within Fortune 1000 and Amlaw 200 law firms as well as some non-profits. We draw from the social movements literature to test the ability of political process theory to explain change in non-state institutions. We also draw from the literature on social movements within the workplace to understand how activists seek to create change within the workplace through strategies such as benchmarking. Finally, we test theories derived from the feminist literature on gendered organizations on how social change within companies can occur. Following Armstrong and Bernstein (2008), we find that a multi-institutional politics approach to social movements provides the tools with which to understand the impact of social movements within institutions, by focusing attention on how a given institution functions, the relationship between groups within that institution, between institutions, and between that institution and the state.

Authors