Management and Organizations professors Sue Ashford and Jane Dutton invented the concept of "issue selling," arguing that most middle managers don’t simply wait for the organization’s strategy to come down from on high but also actively try to influence what that strategy might be. These active middle managers recognize that organizations have limited attentional capacity, and they try to influence what issues get on the organization’s agenda and gain the attention of top decision-makers for issues such as the need to be more ecologically sensitive, the experiences of gender mistreatment and other social issues. In other words, whereas the literature to that point had construed middle managers as passive recipients, these scholars gave them agency and engaged in several studies to better understand how they use that agency to affect bottom-up change. The impact of this idea can be seen in both the popularity of the advice given to middle managers derived from it and in its anticipation of the larger literature on social movements. Social movements were first studied outside of organizations in society, but scholars later proposed that such movements could also occur within organizations, as in issue selling.