Professions, Social Movements, and the Sovereign Corporation¹

It is well known that social movements have become professionalized in recent decades. They have CEOs and CFOs, MBAs and CPAs. But it is not so well known that some professions have become social movements. We argue that the professions play two underrecognized roles as social movement actors in the market arena. First, professions have taken over from mature social movements, creating permanent beachheads within the firm for activism. To illustrate we discuss the role of the personnel profession in promoting the civil rights and women's rights agendas, even after the civil rights and women's movements had largely faded (Mansbridge, 1986; McAdam, 1988). Personnel experts devised early equal opportunity measures and soon appointed in-house equal opportunity experts who fought for new rounds of diversity initiatives, and fought to extend protections to new groups, including Hispanics, older workers, and the disabled (Skrentny, 2002). Other social movements have similarly been picked up by professionals within organizations. From the 1930s, labor leaders and labor relations managers institutionalized the labor movement and its corporate opposition. From the 1960s, women's advocates within state and federal governments have promoted the feminist agenda (Harrison, 1988; Vogel, 1993). From the 1970s, environmental engineers carried the green movement forward within the firm.