Social Movement Organization (SMO)

Abstract

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.