Kindle Notes & Highlights
Skilled tempered radicals, for example, learn how to turn confrontations that arise from expressed differences into opportunities to shift people’s hearts and minds.
When people act on their different selves, they make it possible for others who share their social identities and values to find each other.
Tempered radicals also provoke learning and adaptation through the perspective they bring as people who are not fully assimilated into the system.
Those who have different social identities from the majority and see those differences as setting them apart and excluding them from the mainstream • Those who have different social identities and see those differences as merely cultural and not a basis for exclusion • Those who have not cultural but philosophical differences, which conflict with the prevailing values, beliefs, and agendas operating in their organizations.
Accordingly, they focus their energy toward trying to challenge and change these systems even as they work to succeed within them.
At the very least, talking to others might help her see that she is not alone, and that she is not necessarily to blame for many of her struggles.
Her connections with people in the human rights community outside of Shop.co, particularly with people who are more radical than she is, have become increasingly important to her. These relationships fortify her commitments and remind her why she bothers. This description holds for others as well. Without sustaining relationships, people in this group find it very difficult to maintain their values and agendas amid organizational pressure to put them on hold.
Finally, most of these tempered radicals have explicit agendas for change and are unapologetic about their desire to advance
All types of efforts, including quiet forms of resistance, can and often do contribute to learning and adaptation, even though history’s depiction of social change does not give much credit to the role of these more mundane behind-the-scenes actions.
First and foremost, the tempered radicals I have researched build supportive affiliations with people inside and outside their organizations.
Small actions that demonstrate conformity reinforce the dominant culture; similarly, small actions like Alan’s can disrupt the status quo.
The rippling occurs partly through a process Karl Weick calls “deviation amplification,” in
which a single atypical action sets the stage for others like it to follow.
For this reason, tempered radicals who act primarily backstage are sometimes mistaken for conformists and do
not get the credit they deserve for their efforts.
He claims that his only hope for making lasting change is to chip away slowly and steadily at the practices and beliefs that exclude people like him, not to win a particular battle or to prove his colleagues wrong.
