Social Movements in Organizations: Coup d’Etat, Bureaucratic Insurgency, and Mass Movement

Abstract

Power structures and political processes of organizations are important components of organizational analysis. The fundamental assumption of this essay is that social movements or phenomena resembling them occur in organizations. The chapter discusses the possible implications of the social movement for the organization, and also evaluate the utility of analogical model. The central argument of this chapter is that much conflict in organizations occurs outside normal channels. It is opposition. Just as in nation-states, when conflict occurs outside institutionalized channels, the tools of social movement analysis are brought into play, so too in organizations: much unconventional opposition and conflict can be subjected to social movement analysis. To support this argument, we consider the three types of social movement phenomena distinguished briefly above: organizational coup, bureaucratic insurgency, and mass movements. The chapter suggests that the similarities of nations to organizations permit us to utilize concepts of social movements drawn from the former to examine similar processes in the latter.