Using this rock-climbing metaphor, Laurie Regelbrugge, then a manager of corporate responsibility at the oil and gas operator Unocal, described how she found ‘handholds’ to establish traction and create opportunities to align and integrate citizenship throughout her company. This is an account of how she and other middle managers led change in their companies, not from the typical planned, top-down model but rather through what some term an ‘emergent-pragmatic’ or catalytic approach.

Here we first look at the problems these practitioners faced, some of the tactics employed and their rationale for adopting the catalytic versus top-down model of change. The chapter then examines several key components of this model in action and what insights emerged about leading change from the middle. The data were gathered in the Executive Forum – a multi-year business/university learning group that brought these practitioners together to swap knowledge and offer one another advice and that provided the basis for this research on integrating corporate citizenship into firms.