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Public health crises test the robustness of institutions, and the current COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. The spread of the virus and subsequent hospitalizations and deaths have laid bare the fragility of governments' capacities to protect their citizens, and it has strained otherwise normally functioning institutions like higher education. The pandemic has exposed dramatic economic and racial inequalities, especially in countries without strong welfare infrastructure. Grievances that were once contained by relatively prosperous times are now raging on the surface. The Black Lives Matter protests that emerged throughout the world during the pandemic may be about enduring problems with racism, but their timing is clearly connected to citizens' frustrations with institutions they are supposed to trust, but that have undeniably failed them during a time of public crisis. If governments cannot protect their citizens from harm, and in some cases actually contribute to that harm, then, people must find ways to express their frustrations with those institutions. Individuals have had to learn new ways of coping, interacting, and functioning, as they have recognized that existing institutions are less stable and less well functioning than they were in the past. Social movements have and will continue to rise up in order to fill that void and articulate what the institutions of the future should look like. Organizations, as key purveyors of culture and institutional stability, are caught up in this contentious environment. They are often the targets of social movements seeking change. Protestors are also employees, consumers, and investors in corporations that they now see as problematic for various reasons. Latent grievances have risen to the surface as protestors have highlighted the role that organizations play in the perpetuation of inequalities of all sorts. Naturally, they become one of the first lines of reform during a time when everything seems open to question and scrutiny. As organizational scholars, it is our unique opportunity to observe the role that social movements will play in reforming society during this extraordinary time of institutional malleability. Social movements consist of individuals engaging in collective action with the explicit purpose of creating social change. Movements come in many forms including the highly visible protests we associate with mass movements and those that coalesce inside organizations, led by employees seeking to reform their workplaces. Naturally, the pandemic has created obstacles for this sort of internal organizing. Collective action is more difficult to lead when people work remotely and come into contact with their co-workers less frequently. But, at the same time, the grievances expressed by mass movements have never been more visible. People can sit at home and watch the unrest of the world around them and wonder, what is happening inside my own workplace? Perhaps just as important are the perceptions that individuals have that change is possible. Two structural changes to institutions create a sense of openness for change, or what movement scholars refer to as an open 'political opportunity structure'. One is a sudden and abrupt change to norms and habits. The second is the instability of highly central institutions, like the government. Together, these two shifts create both a sense of frustration with existing institutions that were once highly taken-for-granted and a sense of hope that radical change is possible. The pandemic's destabilization of institutional life has been disruptive, but it has also made clear that things can and should change. If we can, for example, develop overnight and out of necessity completely new work life habits, then, we can also reform the workplace in other ways. The pandemic and associated societal disruption are reshaping the way we think about the relationship between business and society. A resurgent wave of societal activism raises a number of theoretical questions for not only scholars of movements and organizations, but also for organizational and management theorists. The immediate questions relate to how activism unfolds, the effects of activism, and the mechanisms that explain these effects. Briscoe and Gupta (2016) categorize activists who target organizations on a continuum from insiders to outsiders. Insiders, such as employees, have high levels of resource dependence on the organization and in-depth knowledge about the organization. Outsiders, such as social movement organizations, have low levels of resource dependence and less knowledge about the organization. Insiders are less likely to use more disruptive, anger-inducing tactics for fear of retaliation by an organization on which they depend (DeCelles et al., 2020). In contrast, outsiders use more disruptive tactics, which can pose more of a threat, but may be less effective because outsiders lack insider knowledge about which tactics might be most effective in relation to the organization's culture, leadership, informal networks, and routines. This framework suggests a number of questions about a resurgence of societal activism. As grievances intensify, will activists become more disruptive in their tactics as they engage in more collaboration with outsider movements? Will new tactics emerge and become more sophisticated? Will insiders become emboldened by broader societal movements, shifting towards more disruptive tactics? The pandemic may also alter cultural expectations about corporate behaviour, leading to changes in the issues on which activists focus, and how they frame their grievances and potential solutions. Although the distinction between insider and outsiders provides analytical leverage, our understanding of parallel efforts and direct collaboration between these two types remains underdeveloped. The recent wave of activism targeting large technology firms like Google and Amazon included coordinated action between insiders and outsiders, and such collaboration may become more salient as the pandemic and its economic consequences persist. Since coalitions of insiders and outsiders are both knowledgeable and well-positioned to engage in disruptive tactics that garner media attention, are they more effective than either alone in propelling change? How does such collaboration develop and does it create new types of tactics? DeJordy et al. (forthcoming) have recently highlighted that the distinction between insiders and outsiders might be more ambiguous than we assume. They encourage researchers to focus more attention on 'inhabited ecosystems' of activists who take on different roles as they move between and through multiple organizations. The distinction between insiders and outsiders also becomes problematic in the case of non-standard employment, which will likely increase as firms seek to cut costs and remain flexible in the face of ongoing economic shutdowns to contain the virus. While higher skilled contractors may not be as dependent on the organizations that hire them as traditional full-time employees, this dependency may strengthen if unemployment remains at high levels. Diminished labour market opportunities will likely also strengthen the dependency of lower wage workers on temporary employment with companies such as Uber and Doordash. The challenging working conditions and lower pay of these companies, however, may propel their workers toward activism and lead them to seek greater regulation of the 'gig economy'. This also suggests the possibility that activists may need to target corporations and the state simultaneously, collaborating with activists in both domains. The recent political activism around racial injustice provides a good example of this type of two-tiered activism. Although in the past scholars have mainly focused on activism in one or the other domain, the ubiquity of the current employment dilemmas facing workers should lead scholars to consider the variety of venues through which movement activists seek change. As corporations, like every dominant institution, experience severe disruptions to their core practices as a result of this pandemic, we may be witnessing a reconfiguring of their internal political dynamics that leads to sustained change. One of the main questions facing organizational scholars is, to what extent does the instability of and sudden changes to the norms and habits of corporations create opportunities for activists to promote change? Despite research demonstrating the effectiveness of activists in pushing corporations to change, another line of research has demonstrated the increasingly sophisticated counter-mobilization tactics that corporations use to resist activism, such as the symbolic adoption of practices (Carberry and King, 2012), AstroTurf organizing (Walker, 2014), and lobbying (Werner, 2012). In addition, to the extent that insider activism intensifies, we will likely see more sophisticated acts of retaliation against employees. As movement activity against corporations becomes more intense, it is likely that they will develop innovative tactics to derail, defang, and diminish employees' voices. The reality of corporate counter-mobilization highlights the importance of an interactionist approaches that take seriously the relationships between movements and their targets and the organizational factors that shape how firms respond to activism and which, in turn, influences how activists perceive and react to corporations (McDonnell et al., 2015). An interactionist approach raises deeper questions about the limits of movements in the face of the entrenched power of corporations. Since movements usually have little formal power, they face severe limits in their ability to effect change in corporations. Activists often focus on specific issues, but with the exception of some forms of shareholder activism, these efforts usually do not target the internal governance of corporations, which is the ultimate driver of corporate social and environmental strategies and behaviour. If activism around specific issues is blunted by more intensive counter-mobilization tactics, activists may begin to push for the democratization of ownership and control of the firm by extending power to key stakeholders such as workers. This highlights the importance of connecting research on movements and organizations more directly to work on shareholder activism and corporate governance (Carberry and Zajac, forthcoming), as well research on traditional and emerging forms of labour organizing. The institutional disruptions created by the pandemic and the likely intensification of social movement activity across a number of organizational and societal fields will provide important opportunities not only for scholars of movements and organizations, but also for organizational and management theorists across a range of subdisciplines. We propose a theoretical approach to studying activism and organizations that emphasizes the interactions between the two, the relationships between insider and outsider activists, and the broader political and cultural structures in which they are embedded. The approach we advocate is informed by macrotheoretical frameworks within organizational theory that, like social movement theory, have emerged over the last decade that take structure and agency seriously. Focusing on the relationship between activism and organizations, however, places the contested nature of corporations and their consequences for critical societal issues like inequality, environmental sustainability, and democracy front and centre. As our species struggles to contain the virus and construct more resilient economic systems in the face of the even more significant challenges posed by climate change, placing these issues at the forefront has never been more important for organizational scholars.
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