Local Community Mobilization Against Corporate Social Irresponsibility: Emotions and Sensemaking-Through-Action as Drivers of Mobilization

Abstract In this paper, we employ a sensemaking lens to expand research on when and how local communities mobilize against corporate social irresponsibility. We draw on data from Guji, Ethiopia, where a local community suffered damages caused by a gold mine. We found that community members establish temporarily stable, emotion-driven sensemaking accounts that shape the community’s beliefs about the causes of the damage they experience and the prospects of a potential mobilization. Upsetting such sensemaking accounts requires sense-breaking events, which lead to a shift in dominant emotions and a re-evaluation of company behavior, whereupon the community settles into new, again relatively stable interpretations of events. We discuss how environmental cues, sensemaking, emotions, and actions, on both the individual and the community level, intersect, potentially leading to dominant sensemaking accounts and dominant emotions in the local community. We develop a model depicting how, through action, observation, and discussion, a local community develops an impetus to mobilize. This theorization addresses how emotions shift in local communities subjected to corporate social irresponsibility and how emotions energize or de-energize a community. Thus, the study contributes to our understanding of why and how local communities mobilize against corporate social irresponsibility and extends extant work on emotional dynamics in the transition between individual and collective sensemaking.