(Illustration by David Plunkert)
As a doctoral candidate, Alexandra Rheinhardt studied social media activity around social movements and social issues—in particular, fan responses to the “Take a Knee” movement. The cause began in 2016 when Colin Kaepernick, a National Football League quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, and a teammate knelt during the playing of the US national anthem to protest police killings of unarmed Black people and the persistence of racial inequality in American society.
As Kaepernick’s gesture of protest spread to other players and other NFL teams, Rheinhardt joined forces with Forrest Briscoe and Aparna Joshi, both professors of management and organization at Penn State University’s Smeal College of Business, to conduct a comprehensive quantitative study of the “Take a Knee” protests.
Rheinhardt, now a professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Connecticut School of Business, has a new paper with Briscoe and Joshi that theorizes and tests their proposed framework for the “Take a Knee” movement as a form of “platform activism,” whereby employees use their organization to disseminate a message, not to its executives and other leaders, but to external stakeholders—in this case, football fans and the public at large.
The researchers pursued two main questions: First, was the “Take a Knee” movement a new phenomenon, as far as employee protests and activism go? Second, who was participating in the movement, and what conditions made participation more likely? The researchers collected ample information about which players “took a knee” and when; and they recorded a wide range of attributes, from player positions, experience, salary, and race to data about the team, including owners and management, the city, the fan base, pay disparity in the organization, and more.
Their findings demonstrated not only the increasing prevalence of platform activism, but also how individuals think about the opportunities their organization presents for protest behavior. “The larger the opportunity,” Briscoe says, “the more appealing, because there is a larger and more receptive audience. And an organization that you believe will, if not accept what you’re doing, at least not punish you too harshly for using the organization in this way, will increase the chance of participation.”
Working at several levels of analysis, including the players, their teams, the NFL, fans, the community, and the scale of the event—e.g., playoff game or regular season—the researchers modeled multilevel regressions that showed which attributes were more predictive of participation in the protest movement. Almost all protesting players were Black. The chance of protests by less experienced players and those on teams that were more “egalitarian,” or where pay disparities were less pronounced, was higher. The researchers discovered that egalitarianism served as a proxy for a more inclusive team culture that for players signaled a lower likelihood of punishment for kneeling during the national anthem.
The liberal ideological leanings of a team’s city or owner were also predictive of participation, as were recent high-profile police shootings, which lined up with a temporary surge in protests. “In the process of predicting protest participation,” Briscoe says, “we found many predictors that make sense for employee activism in general: Google employees who demand gender equity; Amazon employees calling attention to climate change and Amazon’s climate footprint; and other examples. From our existing theory, it all made sense.”
Creating a table to compare platform activism with other forms of employee protest, the researchers distill how the attributes of a particular organization—as well as the attributes of the organization’s audience—make it more or less attractive as a message communication device or vehicle for expressing activism in cases where the target is not the organization but its stakeholders. They also point to digital technologies, which amplify the abilities of players to reach through the organization and use its channels, in ways the organization or employer cannot control very well.
“Organizations occupy an increasingly prominent place in society,” says Abhinav Gupta, a professor of management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. “Employees looking to bring about progressive change are trying to leverage the symbolic footprint of their employer organization. Rheinhardt, Briscoe, and Joshi show that employee activists deem some organizations, based on their accessibility and openness, as well as their stakeholders’ ideological receptivity, as particularly attractive platforms to broadcast their message.”
Alexandra Rheinhardt, Forrest Briscoe, and Aparna Joshi, “Organization-as-Platform Activism: Theory and Evidence from the National Football League ‘Take a Knee’ Movement,” Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 2, 2023.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.