The modern career of tikkun olam is documented well enough to trace institution by institution, and doing so shows how a phrase becomes a movement's vocabulary.
Michael Lerner founded the magazine Tikkun in 1986 as a left-leaning Jewish voice organized around the term, giving the word a public brand well beyond synagogue use. Reform Judaism's institutional arm, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, built much of its public advocacy language around tikkun olam from the later twentieth century, and the phrase became standard in Reform, Reconstructionist and much Conservative youth education and confirmation programs, presented as the Jewish name for social action.
The usage has drawn organized criticism as well as promotion. Jonathan Neumann's 2018 book To Heal the World? argued that the movement built on the phrase substitutes progressive political commitments for specifically Jewish legal obligation, and that its appeal to tikkun olam as ancient warrant does not survive the phrase's actual philological history. Defenders, including many Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis, respond that Jewish social justice commitments rest on much older textual ground, the prophetic literature and the laws of gleaning and the sabbatical and jubilee years among them, and that tikkun olam functions as a convenient banner for an independently grounded set of obligations rather than as their sole foundation.
Both the promotion and the criticism now operate mostly at the level of institutions and public argument rather than of textual interpretation, a sign of how far the phrase has traveled from the Mishnah's narrow legal formula.