The impact of social movements on organizational members’ experiences in the workplace

Abstract

Social movements as presented in literature, can be the cause of organizational change towards fairness and equality in the workplace, yet there is a lack of empirical evidence to understand how organizational members experience this impact in their place of work. The National Women’s Strike (NWS) was a protest that urged women across Mexico to disappear from public life for a day to raise awareness to gender violence in the country and reflect on the value of women in society. As the NWS took place on a Monday, organizations were affected by an estimate of 70% working women joining this protest. This study utilizes the case of the NWS to examine the impact of social movements on the account of organizational members’ experiences. Eleven individual interviews were conducted with working women that experienced the NWS. The impact of the NWS was identified through a wave of employee activism, organizational involvement and sowing seeds through consciousness raising. In addition, multiple obstacles were identified and included in the results that limited the impact of the NWS in the workplace. This research contributes to social movements and employee activism theory by providing empirical evidence on the impact of social movements to the workplace.