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The authors of this paper are a group of academic activists from a French business school (BS) who aim to resist mainstream management education by trying to integrate social and environmental issues in the various activities of their BS environment. We joined the BS at approximately the same time as young academics and spontaneously began to meet regularly as we found that we shared similar professional identities and aimed to engage in impactful scholarship, encourage knowledge-infused change in academic environments, and critically self-question our roles as academics in society.

Coming from different backgrounds and disciplines in management sciences (strategy, human resources, marketing and economics), we all completed our PhDs in topics related to ethics, sustainability or corporate social responsibility (CSR). While engaging in these topics as early-career academics, we realized that they represented an opportunity to transform our BS from the inside and to resist neoliberal influences within our school. We identified the importance of promoting social and environmental issues in management while resisting their instrumentalization from a mere business-case perspective. In doing so, we have gradually taken on the role of CSR activists within our school.

This collective positioning was not obvious given the controversies surrounding the political nature of CSR (Fooks et., 2013) and its contribution to the legitimation of capitalism through the commodification of ethics. Our collective choice was explained, however, by the desire to act on a topic—CSR—that was supported by the mission of the top management of our BS and increasingly institutionalized in the landscape of French BSs. In response to worldwide criticism—especially for training the managers involved in the corporate scandals that shook the business world in the early 21st century (Swanson and Frederick, 2003)—French BSs have simultaneously tried to serve the dual purposes of fostering CSR practices and improving organizational performance (Alajoutsijärvi et al., 2015). While some have gradually integrated courses related to CSR, others, such as our school, have chosen to include CSR at the heart of the school’s mission and to integrate it in different activities (e.g., teaching, learning objectives, research).

Our collective positioning forces us to lead our actions both by defending the primacy of our topic of resistance in practice and by conducting critical work on the construction and deconstruction of its meaning over time. Our actions therefore involve important identity work between compliance and resistance (Bristow et al., 2017) to fight against mainstream education while collectively mobilizing its codes and discourses. Because of the importance of the identity issues associated with a form of resistance through CSR, many authors have questioned its performative potential (Fleming and Banerjee, 2016), that is, its capacity to produce change in practice. Consequently, academic activism around this topic has sometimes been described as fragmented and of little use, while other authors have suggested that collective practices of resistance could facilitate identity work and thus increase the performativity of such resistance actions (Ramboarisata and Gendron, 2019).

Consequently, our paper investigates: how in-group dynamics can support the identity work of CSR academic activists and strengthen their micro-resistance practices within a BS context? While prior research has largely explored individual forms of resistance (Beaujolin-Bellet and Grima, 2011; Rowlinson and Hassard, 2011), our paper focuses on the collective dynamics of micro-resistance that have been studied more recently (Gagnon and Collinson, 2017). We approach resistance as a process through which we self-identify as academics who are activists for CSR in the French BS where we work. To understand this role over the past eight years, we performed collective autoethnography (Chang et al., 2016; Ngunjiri et Hernandez, 2017) to guide the reflexive analysis of our experiences. We collaboratively surveyed our own identity work constructs and our own collective questioning of the ways in which our group is driven and deals with tensions. We investigated the forms of resistance that we undertook at both the individual and the collective levels, the conditions for resistance manifestation, and how we managed to sustain our collective dynamics over time.

The contributions of our paper are twofold. First, we contribute to the literature on collective micro-resistance by emphasizing our collective dynamics and their role throughout our resistance process. In particular, we describe how we created a legitimate identity for our group by combining resistant and compliant behaviors (Bristow et al., 2017; Ybema and Horvers, 2017) and how tensions between members have been regulated to sustain the group’s vibrancy and impact. We show how specific spaces and collective projects were useful in taking on the role of “objects of resistance” (Courpasson et al., 2012) to sustain our collective dynamics throughout the years. Second, we contribute to the literature on resistance within business schools by questioning the capacity of academics to reappropriate their professional identity and their profession while highlighting the conflicting logics at stake. We contribute to the understanding of the contested place of CSR within business schools and show how resistance around this topic implies a transformation of meaning in the midst of various stakeholder groups to produce incremental change.

The paper is organized as follows. First, in our theoretical background, we outline how individual and collective academic micro-resistance practices occur in a BS context, particularly in relation to CSR issues. We then describe our methods and proceed to the analysis of our personal narratives as academic CSR activists before discussing our findings and concluding.

Theoretical Background

In this theoretical background, we explain the dynamics of micro-resistance of academics—between resistance and compliance—that are likely to occur within business schools to counter neoliberal pressures and to fight mainstream education. We explain how CSR can be viewed as an object of resistance within business schools while highlighting its limits and controversies in producing change. We emphasize the importance of the identity work that we had to undertake in this context.

Academic Micro-Resistance Practices in Business Schools

Business schools worldwide have faced the ascendancy of “managerialism” and associated neoliberal pressures that have reinforced control mechanisms and quantitative performance objectives for academics (Anderson et al., 2018). These pressures are embodied in practice by quantitative requirements for excellence (Butler and Spoelstra, 2012; Bristow et al., 2017), for example, in relation to the number of research publications, student evaluations, the amount of funds raised or compliance with national and international quality standards. Several academics have discussed these increasing pressures, which threaten the autonomy that is so central to the identity of the profession (Anderson, 2008) and their capacity to exercise in a qualitative manner. These quantitative requirements have been described as incompatible with impactful scholarship within society and with genuine critical inquiry (Butler et al., 2017).

Management researchers and educators thus find themselves coping with paradoxical injunctions (Harris, 2005) that can create uncertainties or frustrations when the possibility to resolve tensions is lacking. One result is that self-protection runs high in the academic landscape (Archer, 2008), which explains why many academics do not actively resist but often escape through cynicism or disengagement when disappointment occurs. Resistance—when it occurs—often takes place in the midst of tensions and contradictions between prescribed and desired behaviors, often with a dialectic between resistance and compliance (Kalfa et al., 2018). This is especially the case for early-career academics, who must conform to expectations as they start their careers and as quantitative standards of performance are spread worldwide (Bristow et al., 2017). For these reasons, most academic resistance work occurs at the micro-level and neglects macro-resistance practices or formal opposition that could threaten academic positions (Grey, 2010; Leathwood and Read, 2013). Academics acknowledge a multitude of less visible and often unplanned oppositional practices in their everyday life. These so-called micro-resistance practices may be hidden, and they exist to offer some freedom in the work that must be done and to make it more bearable (Linhart, 2009). These practices offer the possibility for academics to renew and take control of their professional identity and their profession in the service of emancipation (Knights and Clarke, 2014).

This means that academics reflect on their own identity performance, recognizing contradictions and tensions (Bristow et al., 2017) and, in so doing, perverting and subtly shifting meanings and understandings (Thomas and Davies, 2005). For example, Bristow et al. (2017) defined different narratives of identity work between resistance and compliance for early-career critical management studies (CMS) academics: (i) diplomatic narratives, when academics negotiate, network, compromise and engage in secret politics; (ii) combative narratives, when behaviors of heroism, radicalism, sacrifice and combat are described; and (iii) idealistic narratives, when the objective is to stay true to certain beliefs and principles and uphold values. These authors focus on the identity issues associated with a posture between resistance and compliance and in their more recent papers acknowledge the difficulties in supporting this posture individually, without change or collective action at work (Bristow et al. 2019). Their work is however particularly useful to qualify the various coping strategies that academics can use to counterbalance academic arrhythmia, managerialism and individualism and associated forms of violence.

Although resistance is likely to occur at the individual level (Beaujolin-Bellet and Grima, 2011; Rowlinson and Hassard, 2011), collective forms of micro-resistance are also likely to emerge in the academic world (Cruz et al., 2018; Iqbal, 2013; Raaper, 2016). Collective forms of micro-resistance are called “collective infrapolitics” and focus on forms of collective yet quiet, disguised, hidden or anonymous resistance that serve to challenge or unsettle the dominant discourse (Mumby et al., 2017). Collective forms of infrapolitics are hidden mobilizations that do not publicly display political intent (Gagnon and Collinson, 2017). They carve out spaces, such as creative projects, which allow academics to “practise with integrity” (Clegg, 2008).

Collective forms of resistance are important because they can make the work more bearable and provide the group with the necessary strength to perform its tasks and build a better identity at work. Resisting collectively can be a powerful means to achieve recognition for a group when a feeling of dissatisfaction or scorn has been shared by the group members (Pierson, 2011). In the academic world of management education, these forms of resistance might be useful for creating a solid collective identity, solidarity and mutual support (Courpasson, 2017), which can be seen as a form of resistance itself and a citizenship experience with regard to the growing individualism in academia (Anderson, 2008; Butler et al., 2017; Clegg, 2008; Jain et al., 2009). These forms of resistance have been less studied in the resistance literature, and more attention to their conditions of emergence and their forms and effects is needed (Mumby et al., 2015).

CSR as an Object of Resistance Within Business Schools

Prior to the 2000s, the top BSs worldwide were not particularly interested in CSR activities. While these organizations were engaged in the mission of education, they were not encouraged to address other social or environmental issues or prove their contribution to sustainable development (Gioia and Corley, 2002). They were instead expected to focus on criteria such as the level of selectivity for school admission and employability and pay rate upon graduation. The mission and “raison d’être” of BSs naturally led them to concentrate on financial performance and training generations of top managers for entrepreneurial and financial success (Ortiz and Muniesa, 2018).

However, the legitimacy of these schools has been and remains threatened by the scandals arising from the ethical failings of the managers they have trained and their standardization and reproduction of a neoliberal model (Alajoutsijarvi et al., 2015). A call was thus launched to rethink BSs as organizations situated within a community that is aware of their potential to meet societal challenges by training a new generation of responsible managers. These organizations play a key social role in training future managers (Gardiner and Lacy, 2005) and producing and disseminating management knowledge (Pfeffer and Fong, 2004; Gioia and Corley, 2002; Laszlo et al., 2017). They have been criticized by their stakeholders and the academic world and are increasingly cognizant of their social responsibility and the consequences of their activities on society (Gardiner and Lacy, 2005).

Consequently, CSR has been largely institutionalized within the BS environment (e.g., teaching subjects, development of this stream of research, relationships with stakeholders) and integrated into the criteria of evaluation by international bodies. While some schools have only marginally integrated CSR into their practices (e.g., with dedicated courses integrated into the curriculum or with the integration of actions popularized by accreditation bodies), others—such as our school—have chosen to put CSR at the heart of the school’s mission and to integrate it in different activities (e.g., teaching, learning objectives, research). However, BSs remain vulnerable to pressure for academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 2001) or neoliberal normalization, and CSR is often implemented from a business-case perspective (Ramboarisata and Gendron, 2019). A change in paradigm has not yet occurred, and many critical scholars see CSR as a way to reintegrate a social critique of capitalism into capitalism itself, thereby making it even stronger (Fleming and Banerjee, 2016). From this standpoint, researchers have made strong calls to repoliticize social and environmental issues within business schools to fight against mainstream management education (Manteaw, 2008; Toft, 2015) and to overcome the limited performativity of CSR (Fleming and Banerjee, 2016).

CSR might represent a rich area of inquiry for both academics and practitioners (Lindgreen and Swaen, 2010). This is particularly the case in France, where CSR has been strongly institutionalized and included in French laws and regulations (Antal and Sobczak, 2007). The academic community appears to be a creator, translator and mediator in the debate about CSR (Gardiner and Lacy, 2006). Indeed, academics, especially in management education, have a strong role in shaping and facilitating proper and meaningful learning for today’s and tomorrow’s managers (Swanson and Frederick, 2003). Academics have a role in society and a duty to question the social and environmental impacts of the management knowledge they produce (Khalili, 2015).

Despite the criticisms presented above, we believe that CSR offers academic actors leverage for change by challenging the hegemonic discourse, attempting to avoid the complexity of this concept and seeking to subordinate it to economic performance (Tregidga et al., 2018). In particular, by conceiving the CSR business-case as a discourse of power, recent studies have shown how CSR activists can align CSR programs more closely with their personal convictions and eventually bring about incremental change (Grisard et al., 2020). In this regard, we acknowledge that academics in BSs may have an opportunity to resist mainstream management education through CSR, particularly by engaging in strong identity work between compliance and resistance at a collective level.

Methods

Collective Autoethnography

As mentioned in our introduction, we are a collective of four women, all of whom are academic CSR activists who joined a French BS at the beginning of their academic careers. The group has lasted for eight years and has continued to promote CSR values in the French BS context and the workplace by endorsing and carrying out different forms of micro-resistance at the collective level. Although our BS has been very committed to social values mainly geared toward students, we have collectively worked to develop research, teaching and academic activities to create and sustain a CSR approach beyond a mere business-case perspective. We thus adopted a collective autoethnographic approach to characterize our collective resistance practices.

Autoethnography is a nontraditional qualitative research method that has been well explored in management studies and in the context of academic organizations and their members (e.g., Essén and Värlander, 2013; Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012; Malsch and Tessier, 2015). This approach is rooted in autobiography and is self-focused; the researcher is simultaneously the subject who performs the investigation and the participant who is investigated. It is also context-focused because it is rooted in ethnography, which investigates social and cultural contexts (Jones et al., 2016). Autoethnography is a powerful method to enrich our understanding of how researchers interact with their environment and the social/cultural phenomenon they are studying (Denshire, 2014). This method also enables a focus on emotions and role conflicts or identity work through the experiences that can be explored by the autoethnographers (e.g., Ashlee et al., 2017; Cruz et al., 2018; Fernando et al., 2019; Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012). For these reasons, this method is particularly valuable for the study of resistance through a critical lens, as noted by Denzin (2006, p. 423).

Because our research concerns collective resistance and is in line with the academic articles cited above, we chose the collective approach to autoethnography (Chang et al., 2016; Ngunjiri et Hernandez, 2017), which involves two or more participant-researchers who make decisions about the research process, data collection and analysis. We also adopted a concurrent collaboration model, according to which autobiographers follow successive stages, some based on individual work and others on collective work (Ngunjiri et al., 2017), as indicated in Figure 1.

figure 1

Conducting a collective autoethnography: a step-by-step approach

Conducting a collective autoethnography: a step-by-step approach
Source: Ngunjiri et al. (2017)

-> See the list of figures

Data Collection And Analysis

To answer our research question, we focused on the meanings that the four of us have given to our individual and collective resistance practices. We began with a step-by-step writing process to clarify our perceptions of what we have lived and experienced over the years. For three months, we worked individually and collectively to assemble our data, which are based on our individual stories. This collaboration was facilitated by our geographical proximity. We organized four meetings to share our individual stories and question each other to draw out further individual data. Our data collection process thus combined collective sharing and meaning-making with individual writing. Our group’s story started in 2011, and we possess a vast number of reports, written works, articles, and meeting notes that document and describe our collaboration. We used this material during our data collection and even organized informal interviews and conversations with other collaborators to further specify the autoethnography, as recommended by Denshire (2014).

In our first meeting, our discussions were oriented toward defining the project and the research question that would guide our first step of individual autobiographic data collection. To prepare for our second meeting, each of us shared her story and read the stories of her cowriters. Our discussions during this meeting focused on identifying the historical phases and both the individual and collective resistance activities. We probed each other to better define our resistance positioning and its reasons and objects. At that stage, we found useful to get back to the literature to better circumscribe and define our resistance actions that we sometimes had difficulty to characterize. The framework of Bristow et al. (2017) has been useful to us to put words on our forms of resistance but also to extend our representation of our practices of resistance at work. This framework thus appeared as a very useful reflective and structuring tool to give meaning to our reality.

After another round of individual writing, we collectively shared and reviewed our stories in a third meeting, in which we explored specific resistance activities and objects. This helped us to write about how each of us perceived the role of the other members of our group and how we work together. Our discussions in the fourth meeting focused on probing the individual autobiographies to discern tensions and how we coped with them within the group and during our resistance activities. After the fourth iteration of this data collection, we devoted our last step to group meaning-making and data coding as recommended by Ngunjiri et al. (2017). Our collaboration lasted throughout the entire process, from data collection and analysis to the writing of this paper. At some points, however, we also worked in pairs.

Our coding process followed two steps. In the first step, we described our identity-work and associated resistance practices using the framework of Bristow et al. (2017) that was useful for our collective reflexivity. We gave meaning and sometimes reframed some categories of their grid to make it better bear to our reality and shared experience. Our second step consisted in characterizing our collective dynamics of resistance. Following a multistage inductive coding approach (Kuhn, 2009), we analyzed the discourses about our collective functioning as a group, the factors that were likely to unite us, the tensions that we encountered, and how we strategically dealt with them. By adopting a flexible coding strategy and making multiple round trips, we grouped our raw discursive materials into second-order and first-order categories (see Table 1).

Through discursive positioning, we authored our own experiences to create particular versions of reality. In this regard, we were able to give meaning and embed our findings within our own individual and collective experiences in our BS over time and throughout the phases that we freely determined to set the context. On the basis of these phases and our coding grid, we wrote—together as four authors—a collective and common narrative to give meaning to our singular experiences over the course of multiple exchanges. This process of collective writing consisted in listening to each other voices, challenging and balancing our diverse perspectives; we then defined a collective interpretation of the facts and were able to build a common narrative. We illustrated our collective narrative with some quotes from our personal stories which were coded in order to respect our anonymity. Finally, to give substance to our data, we used graphic representations such as vignettes and timelines to illustrate specific results (Jones et al., 2016).

Table 1

Coding scheme: Identity work between compliance and resistance and in-group dynamics

Coding scheme: Identity work between compliance and resistance and in-group dynamics

Table 1 (continuation)

Coding scheme: Identity work between compliance and resistance and in-group dynamics

Table 1 (continuation)

Coding scheme: Identity work between compliance and resistance and in-group dynamics

Table 1 (continuation)

Coding scheme: Identity work between compliance and resistance and in-group dynamics
Source: Authors

-> See the list of tables

Findings

In our stories, we identified three main phases in our group dynamics as academic CSR activists in the French BS that employs us (see Figure 2): induction (Phase 1), strengthening (Phase 2) and development (Phase 3). Throughout these three phases, we found that our identity work construct was balanced between resistance and compliance at both the individual and the collective level. The three contingent narratives of resistance and identity—diplomatic, combative and idealistic—identified by Bristow et al. (2017) permitted us to describe our specific mode of engaging in micro-resistance practices based on objects of resistance we had built together and oriented toward targeted BS stakeholders. Our narratives revealed that our identity work was embedded in a challenging and demanding BS context that compelled us to mobilize specific group-unity drivers to support our resistance. The narratives also highlighted the tensions we encountered and the strategies we used to address them.

Phase 1. Induction Phase (2010–2013)

In this period, the BS redefined its mission statement by strengthening CSR dimensions that matched its values and trying to obtain a competitive advantage. This repositioning relied on all the activities of the BS, including recruitment of CSR-oriented lecturers, development of the equal opportunities policy (apprenticeship and various scholarships), and the creation of a dedicated HR and CSR department. Our arrival was part of this dynamic.

The induction phase characterized the birth of our group of academic CSR activists and the first stage of our collective resistance, as we made efforts to learn the dominant discourse while also trying to find our place within the BS and build a certain legitimacy for our CSR views. Originally, we were six women with the same academic status who had joined the BS between 2010 and 2011. Some of us were initially quite reluctant to work for a business school, an institution whose goal is to train students in the dominant economic model and a traditional approach to CSR: “At that time, I had several reservations and prejudices toward business schools (e.g., commodification of knowledge, privileged student public…)” (A1). However, the discovery of our common research interests before and after our integration reassured us and helped us to overcome our personal doubts. We had academic profiles in economics, human resource management (HRM) and organizational behavior, strategic management and marketing, and we had addressed a wide range of CSR topics in our PhD work and emerging research activities, such as environmental policy, fair trade, social and solidarity-based economies, and top managers’ responsibilities. Our PhDs were focused on an alternative approach to corporate sustainability, overcoming the business-case perspective and developing a particular interest in tensions, contradictions or complex stakeholder strategies coming from a systemic approach of organizations. The topics of our research or teaching were the first things that gathered us: “I find my colleagues’ thesis topics exciting and promising. I am surprised at the intellectual closeness that exists between us” (A2). From our first meetings and discussions, we quickly realized that we shared the same professional and personal objectives. The search for meaning in our academic activities has held us together from the beginning to the present: “I definitely wanted to find meaning in my activities as a teacher-researcher and develop my research and teaching projects around a responsible HR management” (A2).

Figure 2

Chronology of our identity work between resistance and compliance to disseminate CSR within our business school

Chronology of our identity work between resistance and compliance to disseminate CSR within our business school

-> See the list of figures

As we discovered our intellectual proximity in research based on a shared interest in alterity and believed in the value and advantages of the collective, we began to consider common projects. We were also driven by the same teaching objectives oriented toward our students’ self-development and innovation: “For me, it is about giving students the keys to position themselves on societal issues as future organizational managers, stimulating critical thinking and increasing their skills. In fact, I feel I am learning with them almost as much as I am teaching them… In addition, I truly like it” (A4). Our common point was considering CSR not only as a specific field but also as a way to transform management as a whole. Thus, we integrated CSR issues into the content of existing courses for which we were responsible: HRM, international trade, strategy and marketing. However, our purpose was not merely to teach ethical codes and norms and spread the good word but rather to truly encourage our students toward authentic responsible leadership and management practices that would contribute to the complex endeavor of social transformation. We were and remain convinced that CSR should be an integral part of the manager’s mindset. However, at this time, it was not easy to defend this approach because the BS students seemed uninterested and unwilling to learn about it. They were still very “business-oriented” and saw little value in following CSR teachings in a BS context. Students often objected during our first classes that CSR was not a core topic for enterprises whose objective is, above all, to make profits. Some of them believed that even if some managers may feel personally concerned about sustainable development, they will not necessarily change their way of doing business by considering social or environmental issues. To overcome this approach, we adapted our vocabulary and integrated case studies of both nonprofit and for-profit organizations, which permitted open discussions. We wanted our students to take a more critical stance toward the conventional approach to business and to become aware that other ways of “doing business” were both possible and effective. Nevertheless, tensions coming from the neoliberal BS context have continued to exist, and exchanges between us helped to improve our teaching practices: “I find myself increasingly attached to critical thinking and the desire to pursue alternatives. I feel tensions between a very business-case view of my executive trainings and my willingness to defend a strong responsible commitment. These debates are rich with my colleagues, and they feed me because we do not always agree on positions” (A1).

In meetings and talks with our peers in the BS, we also observed that some of them were quite skeptical about CSR and its usefulness for teaching and research. According to this view, CSR should remain peripheral to the firm’s bottom line. Other colleagues were more open to CSR concerns and introduced them in their teaching, but they still focused on the business-case perspective, which is the dominant CSR view in BSs.

One episode of our story is particularly revealing of the way we managed tensions that arose regarding what CSR meant in the BS and even within our own group as we tried to find our academical legitimacy. In 2012, we were asked by the General Director (GD) to conduct a study on the link between diversity and performance in our BS, which has long been engaged in a diversity policy. Throughout the consulting mission, the GD’s ambition was to demonstrate that a diversity policy is a source of organizational performance principally to convince the BS stakeholders to remain engaged in the policy. We were enthusiastic about a collective project based on a CSR value that would enable us to work together and structure our action. However, we wanted to work in our way, and we openly refused to conduct a quantitative study on this topic, as initially expected by the GD, to primarily prove the economic benefits of a diversity policy. We instead suggested a qualitative approach that we believed would better reflect the complexity and richness of the topic. Although we mostly shared the same approach to CSR, one of us defended a more business case-oriented vision that made it difficult for us to work together. Our mutual trust and friendship permitted us to develop open communication based on an authentic and free sharing of our personal arguments in a spirit of debate that finally and quite rapidly permitted us to reach agreement. This did not work with two other colleagues who were also involved in the mission but with whom we had less intellectual and personal proximity. We clearly understood that they did not wish to defend this kind of subject in the school and preferred to adapt to the GD’s requirements. This mission was indisputably our first object of resistance that helped to legitimate our group identity work to our colleagues and to the GD in particular. Through this mission, we positioned to resist in a more combative way by not compromising on what we believed was an essential point: maintaining a scientific positioning and not considering a single business-case-oriented vision. Here, the difficulty was in implementing resistance to a demand coming from our hierarchy. It was risky and difficult to implement, but the in-group dynamics clearly permitted us to affirm this positioning, which was finally accepted: “The contract [results of the diversity and performance mission] seems to us to have been respected, even though we did not meet their initial expectations. From this moment, we also became more legitimate in their eyes in terms of the school representations on diversity and CSR issues because they asked us to do more such work” (A4).

All the events that took place during our induction phase were deeply linked to the natural alignment of our personal values with our professional positions, which helped to create strong mutual understanding, listening and protection in the group. Personal friendships have developed and further cemented our group and have permitted collective positioning, as mentioned above. They were embedded in a dedicated gathering space, a small room near our offices called “the Aquarium” (see Figure 3). This room that we chose as “ours” became a space for daily chats on our professional and personal lives, which reinforced our collective identity and solidarity: “We share a common space for work but also for relaxation and meals (organic herbal teas, interest in quality of life and food) that allows us to exchange personally. We share crazy laughs, good times, outings outside school; we share our lives” (A1); “In my opinion, at that time, the Aquarium was a ‘haven of peace’ where we are now all gathered thanks to the sharing of offices, a sphere of protection with a desire to protect our somewhat ‘heterodox’ approach” (A2).

Figure 3

The Aquarium

The Aquarium

-> See the list of figures

Sharing a physical space also meant that we came to be identified by our colleagues as an intimate and exclusive group of “the girls” defending social values; few of them dared enter this space, especially during our animated discussions. We felt that some colleagues considered our collective of young female academics with a certain kindness but also sometimes with a lack of professional consideration: “I feel that our colleagues do not always understand why we do things other than teaching and research, and the name ‘dream team’ is sometimes also associated with a little mockery that we are young women” (A4).

As early-career academics, we thus adopted in that phase both a diplomatic strategy by maneuvering tensions to be recognized as CSR academics and a combative approach by refusing to compromise on the essentials.

Phase 2. Strengthening Phase (2014–2016)

The second period was characterized by an increasingly challenging environment of the BS, which prompted us to engage in more targeted actions. Both our private and professional contexts become more demanding. We shared happy family events such as the arrival of our first children and painful personal moments, while the BS climate hardened with the definition of increasingly demanding research objectives and the dissemination of disturbing managerial discourses about academic excellence strategies. In this turbulent context that worried us all, we took on new compliant roles while creating objects of resistance.

First, we continued our diplomatic resistance by acting as “CSR marketers” and networking with our managers and colleagues during crucial moments of involvement in the BS’s internal institutions. We formalized our group identity in 2014 by creating the first internal research group on CSR issues. This was an essential object of resistance that enabled us to build our network inside the school and made our CSR engagement more visible and tangible to both our internal and external peers. This collective initiative was positively perceived by our managers because it was aligned with the strategy of the BS and permitted us to demonstrate its CSR commitment: “The creation of the research group represents, in my opinion, an opportunity to strengthen the collective dynamic around our research axes, to make ourselves more visible internally, to encourage new collaborations both internally and externally” (A2). In addition, two of us (A4 & A2) became permanent members of the Assurance of Learning (AOL) committee, an internal body that drives the assessment of students’ learning outcomes, and volunteered to be specifically in charge of promoting CSR topics in the school curriculum: “We (A2 & I) will then invest ourselves thoroughly in the AOL process and sometimes become its ambassadors. However, it is not just a matter of compliance, but really of advocating to simplify the processes and ensure that the societal values defended by the school are truly reflected in the learning framework…” (A4). Moreover, three of us were systematically asked to participate in the academic or AOL sessions organized during accreditation audits, where we had another opportunity to defend our CSR teaching and research approach in a diplomatic manner.

After a curriculum review by accreditors, the faculty was encouraged to create new values-based teachings coherent with our school’s mission. We took this opportunity to develop new teachings that act as powerful idealistic objects of resistance. This marked a key episode of our group story because it offered us a real space to treat CSR in dedicated teachings; we no longer had to integrate a CSR dimension into business fundamentals courses such as HRM, international trade or strategy. This led to a decrease in our personal tensions while satisfying the BS requirements. We were enthusiastic and interpreted this as a sign of confidence from our managers because we were free to develop the topics we wanted to address with our own pedagogical approach: “I felt like a burst of collective oxygen” (A3). This opportunity allowed us to take some distance from the dominant neoliberal discourse within the BS and to draw closer to our students, who were becoming more sensitive to CSR issues, probably because of societal and generational changes.

At this time, we nevertheless adopted a more combative form of resistance when we perceived that CSR might be jeopardized both in our research activity and in the BS’s operations and governance. We faced some critical situations where we had to confront decision-makers such as the Academic Dean (AD) or the GD. For example, one of us fought for the school’s recognition of some of the academic journals in which we are able to publish our type of CSR research. We also had to struggle against a new internal policy that endangered our collective dynamic of publication because the research premium was now limited to two internal co-authors to encourage external collaboration. After the announcement of this new rule, we had a few bilateral exchanges that confirmed that the rule made no sense to us and that it was not fair to individually publish with only some members of our group. We finally all converged on the idea that we would continue to work together on different projects and decided to change the order of authors on our publications in turn to allow equity in the distribution of bonuses and recognition. We maintained this position up to now…

Moreover, one of us, in the name of the collective, suggested contacting the AD to avoid this rule, highlighting the nesting of our contributions that would not permit us to follow the rule. Our demand was accepted, but only for works in progress. In our view, this episode clearly put us in uncomfortable positions regarding our academic identity construct with the BS, but we overcame these tensions thanks to our solidarity, and we reinforced our group dynamics by finding a collective position.

However, at the end of this period, we did feel not equally recognized by our managers, particularly due to different individual achievements of academic objectives in research or pedagogy, which tended to generate intrapersonal tensions. Our identity work construct, which was balanced between resistance and compliance, also led us to professional fatigue, sometimes associated with overinvestment in BS activities: “I am involved in too many projects and activities within the school: (…), AOL committee, accreditations, meetings and juries of all kinds…” (A4). Furthermore, the move of the faculty department to new premises marked the end of our common preserved space, and we feared that the unity of the group could be jeopardized: “The Aquarium is dissolved (…) We no longer have a space to find each other and we no longer have this bubble that kept us together (…) The group is a little bit loose, and I feel less supported” (A3).

Despite these difficulties, we managed to reinforce our group identity in that phase by disseminating our own CSR discourse toward internal BS stakeholders, students, academic peers and managers, in a more idealistic and combative manner.

Phase 3: Development Phase (2017-)

In the beginning of 2017, our group faced renewed pressures from the BS and its top managers with the implementation of a new faculty handbook. Pressure for academic excellence with regard to the number of publications intensified, as did other expectations about teaching and overall investment in the school. Most of our group members felt pulled in different directions by the numerous and often conflicting demands. We experienced strong tensions between recognition and efficiency: “Some members of the academic direction question our legitimacy … and urge me (in particular during the performance appraisal review) not to lock myself in this collective and ‘to open up better prospects through collaborations’ (…) I feel the contradictions between doing serious work, in accordance with my values, and the institutional requirements of publications and reputation” (A1). This context invited a deep self-questioning about what kind of projects we wanted to develop in the future, with whom and how. We thus got involved in different spheres to diversify our free-spirit spaces. Some of us endorsed more responsibilities together to display the positioning of the group and to undertake more targeted actions. We also mobilized external spaces such as research groups or associative working groups to develop new collaborations. In that dynamic, we developed more individual projects; for example, one of us engaged in the achievement of a postdoctoral degree, allowing us to supervise PhD students, while another decided to leave the BS to join another school. It seems that at this time, each of us made the bet that our individual initiatives would not endanger our collective; we remain close and still develop common research and teaching projects.

In parallel, we created an important object of resistance that enabled us to both comply with the BS requirements and gain a new free-spirit space: the Values & Diversity Committee. In response to a top management demand for every faculty member to be more involved in the BS activities, we collectively decided to propose the creation of a new committee to coordinate and structure our various individual and collective initiatives around diversity and, more broadly, CSR issues. Thanks to this, we began to work more closely with the CSR department, particularly the HR&CSR Director, combining our mutual interests and developing new projects with different partners (e.g., AFMD/French Association of Diversity Managers Face Hérault[1], the University), such as surveys, teachings, conferences, and events. Our group became stronger, but we all remained aware that our institutional positioning on values was risky and required us to be cautious regarding the different demands from our managers and not to be instrumentalized to represent the BS “moral guarantor”: “I deplore the confusion that many colleagues make between our values committee and an ethics committee, which would aim to ensure that ethics are respected in all BS activities. We are aware that our positioning on values is risky and remains cautious. We don’t want to be associated with certain directions taken by the school that would not be in line with our own values” (A2).

The end of this period was marked by the departure of two important figures who had deeply defended CSR values within our BS: the GD and the HR&CSR Director. This event, combined with the development of more individual projects that could weaken the collective, began an uncertain period. We wonder whether the school would maintain its strong engagement in CSR or be more focused on neoliberal approaches. Our actions will thus consist of strengthening our internal lobbying to convince our managers of the importance of pursuing CSR actions and our external lobbying to increase awareness among other BS stakeholders.

Finally, we can observe that from this period to the present, we were able to maintain our CSR initiatives within the BS, and we are still working together. We managed to clearly identify the importance of what each of us can bring to the group; in that way, individual projects can ultimately reinforce our actions and enrich our collective projects: “I believe that the strength of our collective is that each of us manages to take the leadership one after the other on a project. We always agree on the nature of the projects to be carried out and the direction we want to give them, but our form and level of commitment vary according to our priorities” (A2).

To conclude, in these three main phases, our group was built and has developed over time by combining actions between compliance and resistance. Our findings demonstrate the existence of a strong collective dynamic that acts as a virtuous circle that both permits resistance to BS stakeholders and supports our CSR academic identity construct.

Discussion and Conclusion

This paper sheds light on our collective experience of micro-resistance as academic activists through CSR in a BS and describes the forms of resistance that we undertook, the conditions in which it manifested, and how we managed to sustain our collective in-group dynamics over time. We discuss here with transparency and humility our lessons and impacts throughout our process of resistance. As our results show, we believe that our action has been a vector of incremental change within our business school, even though we recognize the ambivalences and the limits of our actions. Our contributions bear witness to this reality.

First, our study contributes to the literature on collective micro-resistance practices by describing our collective dynamics over time. Our paper provides insights into the reality of a collective resistance movement and the conditions of its existence and sustainability over time (Bristow et al., 2017; Ybema and Horvers, 2017). We confirm that a resistance group can have a life of its own within an organization. Our group, for example, developed specific strategies and constituted “places of organization” for resistance (Soparnot, 2013) to defend certain interests without displaying political intent. For example, the Aquarium that we described shows that our collective resistance could even be structured within a shared physical space (Donis and Taskin, 2017) to enhance and protect our collective identity. Moreover, we emphasize the importance of mobilizing objects of resistance to make our resistance actions tangible and our collective engagement visible (Batac and Maymo, 2019). These objects were useful to institutionalize our resistance within our school and to give to the outside world a collective meaning for and evidence of the existence of our actions. These inclusive objects were related to common spaces (e.g., the Aquarium), to common development through the emergence of collective projects (e.g., research, teaching) and to power when we created groups to gain power and resources for our actions (e.g., research groups, creation of committees). This helped us to sustain sisterhood and learning (Deschner et al., 2020).

Our experience also supports some of the results of Courpasson (2017) on how to structure a group of resisters and the results of Gagnon and Collinson (2017) on the factors that help to create the dynamics of collective resistance, such as nonhierarchical practices or recognition of the uniqueness of each member. We confirm the importance of these factors and note that they can be enriched by other strategies to deal with collective tensions. For example, we show the importance of letting each group member keep her own free space for resistance or action. Within this noncollective space, the members are free to express different values, projects or personal expectations that are not shared by the whole group. Our findings shed light on the crucial importance of collective reflexivity (Hibbert and Cunliffe, 2015) to deal with tensions. These tensions are often caused by paradoxical injunctions within our school and liberal pressures (e.g., objectives of performance, individualization of work) (Soparnot, 2013) were often translated at the intrapersonal level instead of being expressed at the interpersonal level. While this issue is complicated to address at an individual level causing stress, anger and terrorization (Ratle et al., 2020), it often allowed us to stay united while adjusting our individual roles and expectations (Jain et al., 2009). In our experience, accepting and living with tensions seems synonymous with our capacity for resilience as a group—that is, our capacity to absorb external changes by relying on what unites us. We show that effective collaboration emerges in a two-step process where we first produce discursive resources through conversation that creates a collective identity and that then allows us to effectively collaborate (Beech et al., 2012; Hardy et al., 2005).

Our collective strategies of resistance enabled us to protect ourselves from managerial and liberal pressures from our school and to guarantee an experience based on pleasure, scientific sharing and conviviality. In a way, the group allowed us to give meaning to our work and to make it more bearable within our school. It allowed us to dis-identify with cultural prescriptions while often performing them (Fleming and Spicer, 2003).

Consequently, our findings also contribute to the literature on resistance within business schools while discussing the role of CSR in the French context as an object of resistance that can enable academic activists to combine conformity and resistance behaviors while reshaping meaning and the power relations at stake. We show how early-career academics try to produce change within their BS by conducting identity work between resistance and compliance (Bristow et al., 2017). Our experience bears witness to a learning process and a progressive awareness of our resistance (Pierson, 2011). Indeed, we show how the expression of our personal agencies has, over time, encountered organizational constraints that have been reinforced and how this meeting between constraints and our values has gradually shaped our behavior at a microlevel as well as our consciousness of our opposition (Cohen and Taylor, 2003; Summers-Effler, 2002). We note that the tensions were related to our opposition to quantitative performance requirements (Malsch and Tessier, 2015) that led us to a position where we were more vulnerable to our top management and forced us increase our efficiency inside and outside the school (Butler et al., 2017). This has led us to a frantic pace of work to put us in capacity to deal with the paradoxical injunctions that we faced with the associated risks of exhaustion, loss of motivation and self-perception of hypocrisy (Bristow et al., 2019).

We also show how conflicts were likely to occur due to our defense of the primacy of social and environmental issues within education from colleagues or partners who did not share the same vision. In our case, we show that the struggle against mainstream education is not only aimed at changing the policy of our school but also consists of changing the representations of all stakeholders. For example, at the start of our careers, we had to convince students of the interest of our subjects more than our management. Even today, our colleagues and external partners (companies, associations) remain those whose representations remain the most anchored in a neo-liberal perspective. We thus describe how a protean resistance strategy unfolded in the midst of various power interests and expectations and how it aimed to change the representations of all members of a mainstream neoliberal education management system (Laszlo et al., 2017). BSs are systems or communities embedded in the BS market and society, and resistance efforts should thus target the key stakeholders that build them (Gardiner and Lacy, 2005) amidst political and managerial logics (Gaidos et al., 2017).

In this regard, CSR appeared as a boundary object at the very heart of various stakeholder interests and was useful to drive change (Benn and Martin, 2010). Although contested in its neo-liberal definition, this object can also represent—in our experience—an opportunity to re-politicize social and environmental issues in a BS context, particularly by deconstructing its utilitarian approach. If this has allowed us to open up discretion for our resistance actions and to produce incremental change, we modestly recognize the performative limits of this object in leading more significant change and the need to go beyond it to alternative discourses (Contu, 2020).

In conclusion, our study provides a rich description of what can be done by a group of academics searching for emancipation from neoliberal pressures in a French BS context. We highlight the importance of the identity work that we undertook between compliance and resistance, particularly at the beginning of our careers (Bristow et al., 2017). We show the difficulty of intervening in changing the management education sector without targeting the wide range of stakeholders that shape the reality of BSs. We emphasize the importance of mobilizing common objects of resistance to make our resistance actions tangible and our collective engagement visible.

To date, our actions, as those of our colleagues, have made possible to include in our school’s mission an organizational commitment to societal and environmental transition and to inclusion. Although this represents progress, we nonetheless consider this stage to be fragile and this will have to be very largely consolidated by collective actions of resistance on a larger scale, in particular to guarantee the continuity of this mission but also to avoid its recuperation and denaturation by the neoliberal agenda (Bristow et al., 2019; Ratle et al., 2020). By clarifying our vision of CSR, its role in management education and our resistance practices, we acknowledge the importance to defend a broader political project anchored in a collective ethics of care and empathy for the living while encouraging slow scholarship and collective action to counterbalance individualism, managerialism and arrogance in academia and within the neoliberal BS environment (Deschner et al., 2020; Mountz et al., 2015). Our experience—whatever the encountered difficulties—has fortified our resolve to continue this work building new coalitions, creating more equitable and less exploitative organizational and management alternatives with others (Contu, 2018).

We hope that future studies will address the same topic and shed light on their unique experiences in different contexts. It might also be fruitful to adopt a longitudinal approach.