The force of mobilization

What can strategic management learn from social movements? Can a company's strategy-making process benefit from the way in which movements like the environmentalists or the globalization critics do things? It can indeed, as Thorsten Voigt argues, because the achievements of these movements are quite remarkable. They manage to mobilize tens of thousands of highly diverse individuals to organize themselves in pursuit of common goals - sometimes over decades. And they succeed in influencing political decisions or the behavior of entire societies, even though their target groups do not share a common ideological background. The implications are straightforward but often ignored in both academic theory and managerial practice: the success of every company's strategy hinges on the support of its internal and external stakeholders. The author illustrates with numerous examples from corporate contexts how mobilization in organizations is fuelled - particularly by ideology, issue framing and the orchestration of stakeholder interactions. In so doing, Thorsten Voigt provides a highly fruitful new perspective on strategic management.