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David Barberá-Tomás, Itziar Castello, Frank G.A. de Bakker, Charlene Zietsma

We know little about how social entrepreneurs try to induce enactment of their cause, especially when this cause is difficult to embrace. Through a longitudinal study, we analyze how anti-plastic pollution social entrepreneurs use multimodal (visual and verbal) interactions to influence their targets and promote their cause. Our findings reveal that these social entrepreneurs used what we call emotion-symbolic work, which involved using visuals and words to elicit negative emotions through moral shock, and then transforming those emotions into emotional energy for enactment. The emotional transformation process entailed connecting target actors to a cause, a collective identity and the social entrepreneurs themselves. The exploration of emotion-symbolic work offers new ways of seeing by emphasizing the use of multimodal interactions to affect emotions in efforts to influence target actors to enact a cause.

Additional data

Year of publication 2019
Journal Academy of Management Journal
DOI https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2017.1488
Reference David Barberá-Tomás, Itziar Castello, Frank G.A. de Bakker, Charlene Zietsma (), . Academy of Management Journal, 0, p. 1