Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 18, 2007

Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting

Frank den Hond, Frank G. A. de Bakker, Patricia de Hann
Pages 437-442

The Sequential Patterning of Tactics
Institutional Activism in the Global Sports Apparel Industry, 1988-2002

How do activist groups instigate institutional change within an organizational field? Studying the global sports and apparel industry, we explore how activist groups applied different tactics over time, including conflict and collaboration, and how the accumulation of these tactics led to the build-up of pressure on firms within the industry to change their policies and activities on labor issues in their supply chains. Building on interorganizational conflict literature, we show how an industry-level approach is helpful to understand the sequential patterning of tactical choices in evoking institutional change. These findings contribute to the growing literature of activists’ influence strategies.