La lucha por el liderazgo adecuado en las organizaciones de los movimientos sociales: reflexión colectiva y reglas como base para la autonomía

This article analyzes how leadership is practiced in social movement organizations (OMS). Drawing on Critical Leadership Studies, and based on qualitative empirical research conducted in the organizations of the Spanish 15M protest movement, we analyze leadership perceptions, tensions and practices in dealing with these challenges. Our findings indicate that leadership practices in the investigated OMSs are autonomous, reflective and rule-based. Emphasizing collective reflection and rules highlights two aspects of leadership in OMSs that have been largely ignored in the discourses. Nevertheless, they turn out to be important means to address the challenges of autonomous leadership.

At a time when the US federal government failed to act on climate change, California's success as a subnational climate policy leader has been widely celebrated. However, California's landmark climate law drove a wedge between two segments of the state's environmental community. On one side was a coalition of “market-oriented” environmental social movement organizations (SMOs), who allied with private corporations to advance market-friendly climate policy. On the other side was a coalition of “justice-oriented” environmental SMOs, who viewed capitalist markets as the problem and sought climate policy that would mitigate the uneven distribution of environmental harms within the state. The social movement literature is not well equipped to understand this case, in which coalitional politics helped one environmental social movement succeed in its policy objectives at the expense of another. In this chapter, we draw on legislative and regulatory texts, archival material, and interviews with relevant political actors to compare the policymaking influence of each of these coalitions, and we argue that the composition of the two coalitions is the key to understanding why one was more successful than the other. At the same time, we point out the justice-oriented coalition's growing power, as market-oriented SMOs seek to preserve their legitimacy.

IntroductionThe popularity of social networking sites (SNSs) bears witness to thriving movement protests worldwide. The development of new hardware technologies such as mobile devices and digital cameras, in particular, has fast enhanced visual communications among users that help document and broadcast contemporary social movements. Using social media with these technologies thus presents new opportunities for grassroots social movement organisations (SMOs) and activist groups to become narrators of their activist lives, and to promote solidarity and recognition for advancing varied civic and political agendas. With the case of a student activist group that led and organised a 10-day occupation protest in Hong Kong, this article examines the idea of new media-savvy SMOs as political curators that employ SNS platforms to (co-)create digital narratives at large-scale movement protests. Invoking the concepts of curation and choreography, it highlights how these processes can work together to encourage contentious engagement and collaboration in contemporary social movements.The New Media-Savvy SMO as Political CuratorWhereas traditional social movement studies stressed the importance of pre-existing social networks and organisational structures for collective action, developments in new information and communication technologies (ICTs) challenge the common theories of how people are drawn into and participate in social movements. In recent years, a spate of research has particularly emphasised the ability of individuals and small groups to self-organise on the Internet (e.g. Rheingold). Lately, observing the use of SNSs such as Facebook and Twitter in contemporary social movements, work in this area has focused on how SNSs enable movement diffusion through personal networks and individuals’ online activities even without either the aid or the oversight of an organisation (e.g. Shirky).However, horizontal activism self-organised by atomised new media users seems insufficient as an explanation of how many recent protest movements achieved their high tides. While the flourishing literature shows writers have correctly centred their study on the changing dynamics in control over information and the growing importance of individual users’ contributions, it fails to account for the crucial role that SMOs continue to play. In fact, recent studies consistently observe the continuing importance of SMOs in mobilising and coordinating collective actions in online environments (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, Collective). Whereas new ICTs have provided activist groups with the instrument to deal with their contentious activities with less cueing and leadership from conventional institutionalised structures, SMOs have created their own new media resources. Nowadays, a significant percentage of protest participants have received their information from online platforms that are run by or affiliated with these organisations. The critical questions remain about the kinds of communication methods they utilise to activate and integrate independent activists’ networks and participation, especially in emerging social media environments.Unfortunately, existing research tends to overlook the discursive potentials and cultural dimensions in online activism while emphasising the cost-effectiveness and organisational function of new ICTs. In particular, social movement and new media scholars merely attended to the ways in which digital media enable widescale, relatively un-coordinated contributions to repositories of resources for networks of activists and interest groups, as SNS applications stress the importance of user participation, openness, and network effects in the processes of content production and sharing. However, the mere existence or even “surplus” (Shirky 27) of “second-order communal goods” (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, “Reconceptualizing” 372)—a collection of resources created collectively but without a bounded community, through video-posting, tagging, and circulation practices engaged in by individuals—does not accidentally result in critical publics that come to take part in political activism. Rather, social movements are, above all, the space for manifesting ideas, choices, and a collective will, in which people produce their own history through their cultural creations and social struggles (Touraine). As such, the alteration of meaning, the struggle to define the situation, and the discursive practices carried out within a social movement are all major aspects of social movements and change (Melucci).Indeed, SMOs and marginalised communities worldwide have increasingly learnt the ability to become narrators of their activist and community lives, and to express solidarity and recognition afforded through technology adoption. The recent proliferation of social media applications and mobile digital technologies has allowed activist groups to create and distribute their own stories regarding concrete actions, ongoing campaigns, and thematic issues of protest movements on more multimedia platforms. In order to advance political ideas and collective action frames, they may bring together a variety of online content in such a way that the collated materials offer a commentary on a subject area by articulating and negotiating new media artefacts, while also inviting responses. Therefore, not only are the new media channels for activist communication comparatively inexpensive, but they also provide for a richer array of content and the possibility of greater control by SMOs over its (re-)creation, maintenance, and distribution for potential digital narrating. To understand how digital narrating takes place in contemporary protest movements with SNSs, we now turn to two analytic concepts—curation and choreography.Social Media Content Curation and Choreography Curation, as a new media practice, involves finding, categorising, and organising relevant online content on specific issues. For instance, museums and libraries may have curators to select and feature digital items for collection and display, improving the types of information accessible to a public audience. In protest movements, SMOs and political actors may also curate peer-produced content on SNS platforms so as to filter and amplify useful information for mobilising collective action. In fact, this process by SMOs and political actors is particularly important, as it helps sort and draw timely attention to these information sources, especially at times when users are faced with a large amount of noise created by millions of producers (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker). More importantly, not only does content curating entail the selection and preservation of online materials that may facilitate collective action, but it may also involve the (re-)presentation of selected content by telling stories not being told or by telling existing stories in a different way (Fotopoulou and Couldry). In contrast to professional collecting, it is a much more deliberate process, one which clearly articulates and puts forwards (opportunities for) new meanings or new understanding of a subject (Franks). For example, when new media content is re-posted or shared in its original form but in a new context, digital narrating occurs as it may result in a new or additional layer of meaning (Baym and Shah). Therefore, more than merely expending information resources available to activists, the power of curation can be understood primarily as discursive, as users may pick up particular versions of reality in interpreting social issues and protest movements (Bekkers, Moody, and Edwards).Moreover, nowadays, social media curating is not restricted to text but also includes image and video streaming, as the development of mobile devices and digital cameras has facilitated and enhanced instant communication and information retrieval almost regardless of location. The practice of content curating with SNSs may also involve the process of choreographing with various social media modules, such as posting a series of edited pictures under an overarching schema and organising user-generated photos into an album that suggests a particular theme. Rather than simply using a single visual item designed to tell a story, the idea of choreographing is thus concerned with how curated items are seen and experienced from the users’ perspectives as it “allows curators not just to expose elements of a story but to tell a structured tale with the traditional elements of beginning, middle and end” (Franks 288).In practice, the implementation of choreography can be envisioned to bring together the practice of content curating and that of enhancing and connecting contentious engagement at protest movements. For example, when SMOs make use of images and video to help frame an issue in a more advanced way by sharing a picture with a comment added on Facebook, they may at once, whether consciously or unconsciously, suggest possible endorsement to the selected content and/or the source—may it be that of an individual user or a formal organisation—while drawing attention to the image and circulating it beyond the original network for which it was posted (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker). As such, by posting pictures with captions and sharing user-generated photos that do not belong to the SMO but are produced by other users, curating and choreographing with social media content can create a temporary space for practicing mutual recognition and extending the relationship between the SMO and the larger public. Combined, they may therefore “entail the creation of norms and boundaries in particular user communities and their platforms” (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker 239).This article examines the ways in which a new media-savvy SMO employed SNS platforms to (co-)create digital narratives, with the case of the 2012 Anti-National Education Movement in Hong Kong. By highlighting how social media content curating and choreogr

Through the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, the idea of horizontal, leaderless organization has come to the attention of the mass media. In this article we explore radical, participative-democratic alternatives to leadership through an empirical study of four Social Movement Organizations (SMOs). Whilst there has been some writing on leadership within SMOs, it has mirrored the ‘mainstream’ assumption that leadership is the product of individual leaders possessing certain traits, styles and/or behaviours. In contrast, critical leadership studies (CLS) recognize that leadership is a relational, socially constructed phenomenon rather than the result of a stable set of leadership attributes that inhere in ‘the leaders’. We utilize this framing to analyse how leadership is understood and performed in anarchist SMOs by examining how actors manage meaning and define reality without compromising the ideological commitments of their organizations. Furthermore, we also pay attention to the organizational practices and processes developed to: (a) prohibit individuals from permanently assuming a leadership role; (b) distribute leadership skills and roles; and (c) encourage other actors to participate and take-up these roles in the future. We conclude by suggesting that just because an organization is leaderless, it does not necessarily mean that it is also leadershipless.

Critical management studies (CMS) and critical management education (CME) have been used as ways of analysing organisation and management for almost a quarter of a century. Research and education from this perspective shine Marxian, post-structural, and postmodern lights on strategy, marketing, accounting, human resource management, and other managerial activities. Yet leadership as an activity and a eld of study has mostly escaped attention from this form of critique. This is an odd neglect, given how central the key critical concept of power has been to both critical analysis and to understanding leadership (Collinson, 2014). The oversight is addressed by recent scholarship which sets out two approaches to critical leadership studies (CLS). One approach suggests a dialectical location of the practice of leadership within organisations, to emphasise the inevitable dilemmas and contradictions produced through the exercise of power (Collinson, 2014). A second approach is more focused on ‘deliberated leadership’, a form of practice characterised by openness to academic intervention that provokes collective deliberation on the nature of leading (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012). The dialectical is designed to surface tensions and dilemmas in the practice of leadership; the deliberated relies on reectionin-action during and after the practice of leadership. Both approaches enable better understanding of leading, in that they bring key conceptual issues in CMS and CME to the centre of our understandings of leading and leadership. However, we see more potential and value in the dialectical approach, as it focuses on what leaders do in an everyday sense, and the organisational conditions that all leaders work within. Here, we also suggest that, if closer attention were paid to identity and subjectivity within critical perspectives, this would enable more purposeful research and more meaningful education in this area. This would help respond to a key tenet of ‘being critical’ in seeking progressive change in leadership practice.

Traditional approaches to understanding the emergence and mobilization of social movements focused primarily upon fluctuations in the hearts and minds of aggrieved individuals. Analysts of social movements inspired by the accelerated founding rates of more or less bureaucratically organized groups of citizens in the 1960s – joining early risers in the organizational field, some of which, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had emerged in the nineteenth century – began to focus more directly upon the central mediating role that social movement organizations (SMOs) play in mobilizing social movement activity. Zald and Ash first systematically deployed the concept in their classic paper published in 1966 that effectively challenged the universality of Roberto Michels's “iron law of oligarchy” (1949). Denotatively bounding the SMO, their analyses referenced civil rights movement organizations of the 1960s, including the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the NAACP, as well as the American Communist Party and the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The concept was later more clearly specified by McCarthy and Zald in 1973: A social movement organization (SMO) is one which identifies its preferences with a social movement or a counter‐movement and makes efforts to implement those goals. In subsequent years, the term and its acronym, SMO, have come into widespread use as scholars have sought to understand patterns of SMO emergence, variations in SMO structure, and functioning.

Traditional approaches to understanding the emergence and mobilization of social movements focused primarily upon fluctuations in the hearts and minds of aggrieved individuals. Analysts of social movements inspired by the accelerated founding rates of more or less bureaucratically organized groups of citizens in the 1960s—joining early risers in the organizational field some of which, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had emerged in the nineteenth century—began to focus more directly upon the central mediating role that social movement organizations (SMOs) play in mobilizing social movement activity. Zald and Ash (1966) first systematically deployed the concept in their classic paper that effectively challenged the universality of Roberto Michels' (1949) “iron law of oligarchy.” Denotatively bounding the SMO, their analyses referenced civil rights movement organizations of the 1960s, including the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the NAACP, as well as the American Communist Party and the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The concept was later more clearly specified by McCarthy and Zald (1973: 1218): “A social movement organization (SMO) is a complex, or formal organization which identifies its preferences with a social movement or a counter‐movement and attempts to implement those goals.” In subsequent years, the term and its acronym, SMO, have come into widespread use as scholars have sought to understand patterns of SMO emergence, variations in SMO structure, and functioning.

This article examines the role of leadership in mobilizing collective resistance in the workplace. Given the scarcity of dialogue between critical scholars and leadership studies, relatively little consideration is given to the role of leadership in resisting and potentially transforming structures of domination. The article describes some of the reasons why these areas of research have produced so little mutual work. We then make the argument that theories of leadership can be useful to the study of resistance by providing a grounded approach to theorizing agency, highlighting the role of mobilization and influence in change, and emphasizing participant attributions. In doing so, leadership studies gain important insights about the influence of deep structure power issues on perceptions of leaders, as well as material and symbolic limits on mobilization. The article adopts a dialectical perspective as a way of understanding issues of resistance leadership, and then discusses how existing literatures, read with this dialectical approach, can be brought to bear on significant questions concerning the practices of resistance leadership.

Call to Improve LTC Leadership Development

In the second chapter of this book the differences between social movements and social movement organizations have been highlighted, as well as the analytical distinction between civil society as associational life, civil society as ‘the good society’ and civil society as the public sphere. Seen from these theoretical points of view, this chapter assesses social (environmental) movement organizations at the EU level, and (the green, European) civil society as associational life.KeywordsCivil SocietySocial MovementPublic SphereEnvironmental GroupSocial Movement OrganizationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This article reports an investigation into societal and organizational cultural influences on academic leadership in Saudi Arabian higher education, a previously underexplored area. In Saudi Arabia, it is currently unclear how university deans are negotiating the balance between organizational cultural values and contemporary influences, and how the values they embrace may influence their leadership practices and effectiveness. The study has been conducted in eight main governmental universities under the Ministry of Education. Qualitative data has been collected, involving interviews with fifteen university deans, with data scrutinized by an interpretive thematic analysis. The deans’ responses indicated dissatisfaction with the broad societal culture around them and the negative influence this had on leadership practices. Tensions were apparent between traditional values and change, and the influence of family and tribal backgrounds. Five organizational cultural themes were identified as influences on deans’ leadership—a centralized environment, strict regulations, the authority of top management, selection and promotion issues, and reputational factors. The study’s outcomes contribute to the understanding of leadership perceptions and practices within a particular cultural context.

Learning from Lincoln: Leadership Practices for School Success

Social movement actors seeking alternatives to the highly industrialized, global food system have been advocating for more sustainable, local food systems. Many of the local food movement strategies and initiatives to counter the conventional practices of the industrial food system have proven successful. Social movement researchers have documented the importance of the roles and services social movement organizations provide for movement constituents to realize their success, emphasizing human and financial capital as key components for mobilizing collective action. Researchers have also documented the value of interorganizational networks, and the benefits of collaboration to expand the share of resources, and perhaps more importantly design social movement frames to direct collective action for social change. However, what local food movement research has yet to address are some of the potential barriers that minimize collaboration among organizational leaders as it relates to social capital and collective identity. This dissertation takes a cross-sectional, network analysis of social movement organizations working to increase the sustainability of the local food system in Marin County, California, a historically agricultural region serving a number of urban communities. Findings from the mixed-methods research reveal evidence of collective identity and social capital as enhancing collaboration among particular types of organizations while reducing potential collaboration among and between other social movement organizations. By analyzing the collective identity and dichotomous nature of social capital among social movement organizations, this research contributes a clearer understanding of the existing gaps for realizing a more sustainable local food system.

Based on the theoretical framework of organizational ecology, it is suggested that social movement organizations are inert structures that rarely exceed their initial size. The ecological concept of organizational growth is tested using membership data for Sweden from 1881 to 1940 for virtually all local social movement organizations (29,193 organizations) in three major social movements: the temperance, free church, and trade union movements. Findings show that the organizations in two of the movements have average growth trajectories approximating zero. The ecological argument is then expanded to include information on the movements' organizational niches and intra- and intermovement density development. After controlling for the local organization's initial size, findings reveal that the remaining variation in aggregate membership is more likely to depend on population and niche dynamics (which organizational ecologists focus on) than on the capacity of the movement's local organizations to expand. These findings are consistent for all three Swedish movements. The ecological argument and the findings presented here are contrary to almost all research on social movements, which takes for granted that social movement organizations are necessarily capable of individual growth

Based on the theoretical framework of organizational ecology, it is suggested that social movement organizations are inert structures that rarely exceed their initial size. The ecological concept of organizational growth is tested using membership data for Sweden from 1881 to 1940 for virtually all local social movement organizations (29,193 organizations) in three major social movements: the temperance, free church, and trade union movements. Findings show that the organizations in two of the movements have average growth trajectories approximating zero. The ecological argument is then expanded to include information on the movements’ organizational niches and intra- and intermovement density development. After controlling for the local organization's initial size, findings reveal that the remaining variation in aggregate membership is more likely to depend on population and niche dynamics (which organizational ecologists focus on) than on the capacity of the movement's local organizations to expand. These findings are consistent for all three Swedish movements. The ecological argument and the findings presented here are contrary to almost all research on social movements, which takes for granted that social movement organizations are necessarily capable of individual growth.