Scholars often analyze how activists need to conceal their own political ideals and agendas in their workplace: gender equality consultants feel compelled to hide their feminist perspectives to clients, sustainability professionals distance themselves from their political ideals, insider activists curb their own claims, adopt less disruptive tactics and a ”tempered” attitude in their workplace. Yet, recent research is exploring the major benefits that these “insider activists”—meaning activists who strive to mobilize and bring about change inside their own workplace—bring to their organization when they can freely work on the social and environmental causes that they care about inside corporate walls.

Adopting Proactive Measures to Stay Ahead of the Laws

In a context where laws are increasingly stringent to compel organizations to address social and environmental challenges, and where the reputation of firms (both internally and externally) depends increasingly on their ability to engage meaningfully with social and environmental stakes, recognizing and valuing better the work of insider activists might be highly beneficial for a wide range of organizations. Such recognition can enable activists to substantively implement laws and international standards, develop impactful programs, and mobilize authentically other employees. Substantive and even proactive compliance is necessary to avoid being criticized for greenwashing, pinkwashing, discrimination laundering, or other merely symbolic forms of compliance, which are both harmful for society, and can tarnish the reputation of organizations. Activists can also help companies truly do “better than the laws,” which can enable them to be at the vanguard of progressive social change, or stay on top of upcoming legislative changes.

Raising Awareness and Mobilizing Colleagues

But legal compliance is often insufficient to truly transform organization. Changing deeply organizational routines and implementing reforms requires a significant mobilization of most employees, and therefore having key stakeholders mobilized inside companies to promote this change can be a crucial help to create collective emulation on social and environmental issues. Insider activists can both strive to develop new resonance on social and environmental questions for people to get involved and develop hotline systems or reporting to truly monitor illegal or detrimental practices (e.g., discrimination or harassment) that still often occur under the radar in organizations. Indeed, Corporate Social Responsibility or Diversity Department can sometimes operate in a bubble, unable to truly transform the broader functioning of an organization. What is necessary therefore is to disseminate ideas more meaningfully in the organization through informal mobilization. Activists often find ways to challenge other people’s perception of climate emergency, foster new forms of solidarity by prefiguring other ways to interact with one another, and undermine oppressive behaviors.

Developing Relevant Resources

A lot of activists are providing free, easy-to-use resources for their organizations to address environmental challenges and fight against discrimination in the workplace. Because they are passionate about their causes, they engage in high-quality work, do not count their hours, and craft programs, policies, and organizational practices that are truly relevant to address social and environmental challenges. Labor union activists for instance crafted sophisticated measures to help promote professional equality between men and women. Listening to the voice of the people concerned is often a crucial step in implementing meaningful inclusion programs, and such a perspective has been longstanding in activist circles.

Recognition and Valorization: not Exploitation

In this blog post, I contend that the work that these activists are doing should be better valued in workplaces: recognized instead of erased, officially valued in job descriptions and not as a free extra-work that companies sometimes reappropriate without proper acknowledgements. These actors often improve their workplace on top of their official job, and their employer will appear as exploitative if they simply benefit from their hard work without valuing or officializing these forms of labor.