Social Movements and Organizational Form: Cooperative Alternatives to Corporations in the American Insurance, Dairy, and Grain Industries

Abstract

How do social movements promote diversity and alternative organizational forms? We address this question by analyzing how cooperative enterprise was affected by the Grange—a leading anticorporate movement in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State-level analyses across three industries yield three findings. First, the Grange had positive effects on cooperatives and mutuals during the nineteenth-century populist struggles over corporate capitalism. Second, these effects were stronger where corporations counter-mobilized to block challengers' political efforts. Grangers pursued economic organization as an alternative to politics and in response to blocked political access. Third, the Grange continued to foster cooperatives even as populist revolts waned. It did so, however, by buffering cooperatives from problems of group heterogeneity and population change, rendering them less dependent on supportive communities and specific economic conditions. These findings advance research at the movements/organizations interface by documenting movement effects and by isolating different causal pathways through which mobilization, countermobilization, and political opportunity shape economic organization. The results also provide economic sociology with new evidence on how social structure moderates economic forces, and help revise institutional analyses of American capitalism by showing how cooperatives emerged as significant, rather than aberrant, elements of the U.S. economy.