The Effect of Sustainability Manager’s Field Engagement on Organizational Adoption of Sustainability

Social activists are often successful in their disputes with target organizations, as is evident from the concessions targeted organizations often make. However, concessions do not necessarily result in substantive changes. This is because over a longer period of time, activists are not fully capable of monitoring and maintaining direct pressure on targets or continuing to generate negative publicity. This paper contributes to research at the intersection of movements and organizations by investigating if, and if so, how individuals that are formally tasked with instituting movement-aligned changes, termed “insider allies,” achieve subsequent and substantive changes in their organization. Using data on U.S. higher education organizations, we examine the effect of field-level engagement from sustainability managers—the insider allies, in our case—on adopting a voluntary sustainability reporting tool which is an indicator of change beyond initial commitments. The results of a longitudinal quantitative analysis of 622 schools demonstrate that the more sustainability managers have participated in field interactions, the greater the likelihood that their school adopts the voluntary reporting tool. Our findings indicate that engagement in field-level interactions with a range of actors around central issues that are pertinent to the movement enables insider allies to mobilize resources and craft identities as change agents that enable them to drive substantive change within their organizations.