Pushing for social change at work is frustrating and precarious. Many employee activists therefore seek support in communities that form around their aspirations and reside ‘between’ organizations. This article advances our understanding of how community participation shapes employee activists’ experiences of their change agency as they return to and pursue their social purpose in their corporate lives. Grounded in an in-depth qualitative study of an inter-organizational community of employee activists, we introduce the notion of ‘dispersed collectivity’: employee activists generate a shared sense of collectivity that they maintain even as they disperse into their workplaces. Dispersed collectivity enables subtle agentic experiences by emboldening employee activists to endure their often-challenging corporate lives, unsettle corporate norms, and detach from their corporate positions. Even without mobilizing a collective push for change across firms, communities can thus play a critical role in sustaining employee activism. Our study contributes a more nuanced account of employee activists’ change agency and offers new theoretical insights into the role of inter-organizational communities in social change, the practices they can use to build collective momentum and empathic connections, and their impact on employee activists’ determination to drive social change from within.

中文翻译：

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培养分散的集体：组织之间的社区如何维持员工积极性


在工作中推动社会变革是令人沮丧和不稳定的。因此，许多员工活动家在围绕他们的抱负形成并位于“组织之间”的社区中寻求支持。本文促进了我们对社区参与如何影响员工活动家在回归并追求企业生活中的社会目标时对其变革机构的体验的理解。基于对员工活动家组织间社区的深入定性研究，我们引入了“分散的集体”的概念：员工活动家产生了一种共同的集体意识，即使他们分散到工作场所，他们也会保持这种集体意识。分散的集体通过鼓励员工活动家忍受他们经常具有挑战性的公司生活、动摇公司规范并脱离他们的公司职位，从而实现微妙的代理体验。因此，即使没有动员跨公司集体推动变革，社区也可以在维持员工积极性方面发挥关键作用。我们的研究对员工活动家的变革能动性进行了更细致的描述，并为组织间社区在社会变革中的作用、他们可以用来建立集体动力和同理心联系的做法，以及它们对员工活动家从内部推动社会变革的决心的影响提供了新的理论见解。