Seeking social change from the inside out: a cross-country study on employee activism

Silvia Ravazzani (PhD) is Associate Professor in Management at the Department of Business LECB “Carlo A. Ricciardi”, Università IULM, Italy, since 2019. Previously she held the same position at the Department of Management at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research interests include employee communication, employee voice and dissent, risk and crisis communication, whistleblowing, diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace and sustainability communication. Her work has been published in journals such as Group and Organization Management and Business Ethics Quarterly. She is Senior Project Leader of the Centre for Employee Relations and Communication at Università IULM.

Yan Jin (PhD) is the C. Richard Yarbrough Professor in Crisis Communication Leadership and Professor of Public Relations in Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia (UGA). She is Director and Co-founder of UGA’s Crisis Communication Think Tank. She has authored more than 110 journal articles and over 40 book chapters, as well as edited scholarly books including Advancing Crisis Communication Effectiveness: Integrating Public Relations Scholarship with Practice and Social Media and Crisis Communication. She received the Association for Business Communication’s 2019 Kitty O. Locker Outstanding Researcher Award.

Sara Conti is a PhD candidate in the Communication, Markets and Society program at the Università IULM Doctoral School. She is also research assistant at the Centre for Employee Relations and Communication, operating at the Department of Business LECB “Carlo A. Ricciardi”, Università IULM, Italy. Her main research interests are corporate communication, employee voice, silence and dissent, whistleblowing and newcomers onboarding in hybrid working contexts.

Anna Rachwalski is an undergraduate researcher within the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Crisis Communication Think Tank. She is set to graduate in May 2026 with a B.A. in Economics, English and Political Science, as well as a Public Affairs Professional Certificate. Her research interests include corporate crisis management, misinformation and propaganda. Anna has interned at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Economic and Risk Analysis and the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center, which focuses on combating foreign propaganda and disinformation.

Sonny Glenn Robinson is an undergraduate Public Relations student and a researcher of the Crisis Insights and Analytics Lab at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.