Empowering Issue Sellers through EDF Climate Corps

Abstract

The efforts of midlevel employees to focus organizational attention on particular initiatives are central to organizational change. Accordingly, researchers have investigated the political and discursive tactics that enable such issue sellers to succeed. However, little attention has been paid to organizational structures that promote issue selling or to external actors with an interest in encouraging changes, such as social movements. Likewise, research on social movements as agents of organizational change has largely not attended to the role of internal change agents at targeted organizations. In this paper, we contribute to filling these gaps by investigating the consequences of a network spanning issue sellers and external activists on organizations’ climate change reforms. We combine survey, interview, and archival data on the EDF Climate Corps program to show that internal organizational contexts and external ties cumulatively shape the ambitions of issue sellers at participating organizations. The results strengthen research on issue selling, organizational change, and social movements, as well as contribute to the urgent problem of understanding how organizations can adapt to mitigate climate change.