Course Schedule

Veranstaltungen von Dr Katharina Hug


Lehrveranstaltungen

Activisim in Organisations (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Katharina Hug

Termin:
 14-täglich | Montag | 10:15 - 13:45 | 20.10.2025 - 30.01.2026 | C 12.010 Seminarraum

Inhalt: Activism in organisations is becoming more and more prevalent. As we are living in a polycrisis world, employees increasingly seek to impact society and the environment positively either through aiming for a formal responsible career, e.g. as sustainability or CSR managers or becoming involved as an internal activist or social change agent. Recent examples are Microsoft employees protesting against military contracts over AI and cloud services provided to the Israeli military amid the Gaza conflict or Dutch university staff protests institution’s ties with Israeli entities. However, activism can penetrate organisations from more angles. CEOs can be activistic and include a political dimension to their organisational practices. Here examples include Ben & Jerries‘ founders who from the onset included political messages in their marketing and setup of the company. Other forms of activism include shareholder activism, that tries to stir the organisation into a for the shareholder favoured direction or brand activism which at times can be used as a marketing stunt. In this course we will dissect activism in organisations from all these different angles and discuss literature on responsible careers, employee activism/ internal social change agents, CEO, shareholder and brand activism. We will critically examine if activism always has to be for the greater social good or if there can also be a downside of activism for the wider public. The students will learn about the broad set of activisms in organisations and critically distinguish different forms and their purposes. Presentations about current examples of each form and a final project work about this example will help students to link theory learned in class with the practical reality outside.