Resources for Success: Social Movements, Strategic Resource Allocation, and Union Organizing Outcomes

Abstract

Social movements’ capacity to mount effective challenges often hinges on the availability of scare resources. Yet despite considerable scholarly interest in the ways that resources are mobilized, we know surprisingly little about the conclusion of this process, how movement actors strategically disburse resources to achieve specific goals. Recent attempts to revitalize the American labor movement, particularly efforts to reverse fifty years of membership decline, provide a substantive backdrop for examining resources and success. Data from a sample of local unions and their organizing activities from 1990 through 2001 indicate that tactical resource disbursements do increase the union’s ability to recruit new members, but their effect is contingent upon other dimensions of organizing, such as firm and state hostility. The findings extend our understanding of movement agency and offer insight into the growth of social movement unionism today. Keywords: social movements, resource mobilization, labor unions, union organizing, resistance to unions. With the introduction of the resource mobilization perspective in the 1970s (McCarthy and Zald 1977), scholars began to recognize that the strength of social movement actors is closely linked to the availability of external resources. Although initially spurred by the growth of professional social movement organizations (SMOs) in Western democracies (McCarthy and Zald 1973; Walker 1983), the centrality of resources in contentious politics has since been established across diverse movements and social settings (Cress and Snow 1996; Khawaja 1994). While analyses have begun to attend to the mechanisms groups employ to amass scarce resources (McCarthy and Wolfson 1996), this is only the first step in a process that culminates in the dispersal of resources for specific goals. Surprisingly, however, there has been little effort to deconstruct the relationship between purposeful resource allocation and success, a topic that has become particularly salient given the burgeoning interest in movement outcomes (Giugni 1998). Current attempts to revitalize the American labor movement present a unique opportunity to examine how SMOs deploy resources to win new benefits for constituents. In an effort to reverse fifty years of membership decline driven by an increasingly hostile political and economic climate, a number of scholars and activists alike have advocated a return to “social movement unionism” (Clawson 2003; Fantasia and Voss 2004). This has led to the use of contentious tactics like civil disobedience when organizing, the formation of coalitions with community groups to confront corporate power, and, notably, an increase in resources devoted to organizing. As a direct consequence of these changes, there has been substantial growth in the