Identity Switching in Disruptive Organizations: The Microfoundations of Transnational Activism for Economic Justice

Abstract

How do entrepreneurs create organizations intended to disrupt an environment? And how do they stabilize them as organizations once they have made their mark? This talk provides a framework for understanding how issue entrepreneurs propel disruptive organizations by switching identities between different network domains. The talk draws on the emergence of global tax justice campaigns and data from fifteen years of para-ethnography. It identifies conditions for identity switching that highlight the importance and limitations of this strategy for organizational transformation in the world economy