Understanding Activism Within Institutions: The Case of LGBT Employee Resource Groups

• In Event: 474 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 08. Institutions, Opportunities, and Change

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a general theoretical model that can be used to understand how both institutional and political contexts affect social movements within institutions in terms of their emergence, strategies, and choice of goals. Our model integrates the insights of research on political opportunity structure, social movements within institutions, and neo-institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell 1991) to explain activism within institutions. In this way, we further the theoretical agenda of understanding social movement activism in the context of multi-institutional politics (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008). We first present our theoretical model and then use it to explain the emergence, strategies and goals used by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) workplace movement. Our study is based on interviews with leaders, members and allies of 24 LGBT employee resource groups that were formed between 1999 and 2011 in Fortune 1000 and other large business corporations.

Authors

• Apoorva Ghosh, University of California-Irvine

• Mary Bernstein, University of Connecticut