Social Movement Organizations Research Articles

THE CONSEQUENCES OF SOFT REPRESSION*

This article examines the consequences of soft repression on social movement activists. By drawing on activists’ perceptions, we develop a multilayered analytical framework that captures the experienced effects of soft repression at the individual, organizational, and movement levels. Our results show that soft repression—in particular, labeling, and stigmatization—primarily affect the individual level by triggering self-policing and self-control. By introducing a model that incorporates several radical social movement organizations, we also show how labeling and stigmatization affect different radical groups in different ways. These measures sometimes fail to demobilize the primary targets of the repressive actions, the most militant and clandestine groups. Instead, the demobilizing effects seem most evident in organizations that mobilize openly and inclusively. Our analysis is based on in-depth interviews with activists from the radical left-libertarian movement (RLLM) in Sweden, most of which have been active in organizations labeled as “violence-affirming extremists” by the Swedish government.

The power to convene: making sense of the power of food movement organizations in governance processes in the Global North.

Dominant food systems, based on industrial methods and corporate control, are in a state of flux. To enable the transition towards more sustainable and just food systems, food movements are claiming new roles in governance. These movements, and the initiatives they spearhead, are associated with a range of labels (e.g., food sovereignty, food justice, and community food security) and use a variety of strategies to enact change. In this paper, we use the concept of relational fields to conduct a post-hoc analysis of nine cases, examining how social movement organizations and other actors actively create new deliberative governance spaces. We argue that successes are related to the “power to convene,” a process-oriented approach that increases movements’ capacity to mobilize; leverage different types of power; and integrate, coordinate, and build a systems-oriented vision. The power to convene and create deliberative spaces is demonstrated in a variety of contexts and often results in outcomes that further movement aims, including policy change and repositioning food movement actors vis-à-vis others in the field. Our findings suggest that success is not only measured as policy outcomes, but as an advantageous repositioning of social movement actors that enables them to be part of governance processes beyond simple policy advocacy.

From policy networks to policy preferences: Organizational networks in the opt-out movement

Organizational networks shape education policy by influencing power holders and elites, but do they have similar effects on grassroots activists? We use data from the National Survey on Opting Out (2016 and 2018; n = 2,909) to examine the role of organizational networks in mobilizing activists in the opt-out movement (a movement in which parents and caregivers refuse to have their children sit for standardized tests). Despite characterizations of the opt-out movement as a bunch of “soccer moms” disappointed with their children’s test scores, our findings show that opt-out is in fact a structured movement reliant on social movement organizations (SMOs) with agendas that go beyond standardized tests. Further, we demonstrate a small but significant correlation between contact with SMOs and individual policy preferences. These patterns suggest that organizational networks may inform education policy by creating a social space for activists to learn about different policy ideas in education. We discuss implications for research and practice.

Beyond the eye-catchers: A large-scale study of social movement organizations’ involvement in online protests

Existing studies of social movement organizations (SMOs) commonly focus only on a small number of well-known SMOs or SMOs that belong to a single social movement industry (SMI). This is partially because current methods for identifying SMOs are labor-intensive. In contrast to these manual approaches, in our article, we use Twitter data pertaining to BlackLivesMatter and Women’s movements and employ crowdsourcing and nested supervised learning methods to identify more than 50K SMOs. Our results reveal that the behavior and influence of SMOs vary significantly, with half having little influence and behaving in similar ways to an average individual. Furthermore, we show that collectively, small SMOs contributed to the sharing of more diverse information. However, on average, large SMOs were significantly more committed to movements and decidedly more successful at recruiting. Finally, we also observe that a large number of SMOs from an extensive set of SMIs, including Occupy Wall Street, participated in solidarity or even as leaders in BlackLivesMatter. In comparison, few SMIs participated in Women’s movement.

Contentious Policies and Local Politics: Learning from Coal-Fired Facilities’ SO2 Emissions

Building on the theory of social movements, we theorize that the influence of social movement organizations (SMOs) at the state level on their targets will depend on the broader regulatory context at the federal level. Specifically, we argue that contentious federal policies open up political opportunity structures and provide a favorable sociopolitical environment for SMOs at the state level. We use data on coal-fired facilities’ sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions to address the question of whether the influence of SMOs at the state level on facilities’ environmental performance was influenced by the contentiousness (or lack thereof) of federal-level policy mechanisms. The empirical results show that when the national-level Acid Rain Program (ARP) was regarded by stakeholders as a contentious regulation (2010–2011), the direct impact of SMOs and other related state-level sociopolitical contexts on facilities’ emissions increased. This is because when the federal policy was not contentious (2003–2009), coal-fired facilities, local government officials, key stakeholders, and even SMOs themselves attended to the implementation of the federal law. However, when the key policy mechanism was brought into question, SMOs stepped in to support and supplement the contentious policy at the local (state) level. Moreover, we contend that coal-fired facilities became more responsive to their local sociopolitical environment because the federal policy no longer fully secured their stable operation. From a political mediation perspective, our theory and results suggest that evaluating the direct influence of local social movements on organizations requires a dynamic approach that considers the broader institutional context at different societal levels.

How to Stigmatize: Inside the Fight for the Rhetorical History of the Seal Hunt

Organizational stigma is a collective, negative, moral evaluation of an organization that results in increased threats to its survival. Within the extant literature, stigma is generally conceptualized as an organizational attribute, or something that an organization inherently is. Though researchers have thoroughly interrogated the processes by which organizations manage stigma and minimize stigma transfer to resource-granting stakeholders, we know very little about how an organization actually becomes stigmatized. What turns a negative event into a debilitating organizational label that becomes difficult to shake? Where does stigma come from and how can we distinguish it from related constructs like illegitimacy and poor reputation? By delving beneath the growing typologies of organizational stigma to examine the processes by which stigma emerges, this work demonstrates that organizational stigma is a social process that lends itself to a categorization rather than just a fixed category of organizations. In other words, stigmatized organizations are stigmatized only for as long as their stigmatizers actively stigmatize them. I examine the process of stigma emergence through the case of the stigmatization of seal hunting in Canada by animal rights social movement organizations (SMOs), beginning in the 1960s.

Substainability: Integrated Strategy and the Design of Industry Sustainability Standards

In many markets, social movement organizations design private standards and certification systems as a way to improve an industry’s social or environmental performance. As the market share of these systems grows, incumbents often fight back by creating competing standards, and many markets now face a bewildering proliferation of standards. The literature offers a number of accounts of standards competition, but with outcomes that vary widely and no coherent theoretical account that can explain the wide range of outcomes. In order to gain a deeper understanding of competing standards, we conducted a qualitative study of sustainability standards in the North American wine industry, where proliferation of standards is rampant. Building on our qualitative findings, we develop a theory of how industry standards-setting entities choose the breadth, prescriptiveness, stringency and opacity of their labels. Our theory builds on work in economics and political science and argues that incumbents design industry standards with both market and nonmarket objectives in mind. First, they attempt to undercut consumer demand for movement-driven standards by crafting industry standards that can gain wide adoption. Second, they attempt to forestall external community and regulatory pressure by presenting a broad coalition of self-regulating industry participants. Both motivations drive the industry to attract wide participation through standards that are strategically broad, non-prescriptive, lax, and opaque.

Local Path Dependency and Scale Shift in Social Movements: The Case of the us Immigrant Rights Movement

This paper examines how social movement organizations shift scale through the case of the immigrant rights movement. This was largely a local movement for the first decades of its existence. However, in the late 1990s, repressive federal policies increased the salience of national politics for many organizations. While recognizing the importance of national politics, many organizations remained mostly engaged in local politics for nearly a decade. The aim of this paper is to examine why immigrant rights organizations stayed local for so long after the threat shifted to the federal level and why they actually shifted to the national scale when they did. It does so by focusing on the case of Los Angeles.

The Existence of Social Movement Organization(SMO) &Comparison of Collective and Connective Action in the Digital Era ---- an Analysis of 15-M Movement in Spain

Social movement organizations (SMOs) have been performing a significant role in terms of gathering like-minded civil individuals with common interests during social movements. Stepping into the digital era, the social media becomes prevailing in transforming people’s lifestyles. This essay will discuss the 15-M Movement in Spain to explore the transition of SMO’s position from conventional social movements to those in the digital era in the light of collective action logic and connective action logic. With the phenomenon that SMO itself sometimes is the original source of problems to trigger social movements, it is reasonable to see the decreasingly important SMO with the successful example of the 15-M Movement to engage over 60 cities in Spain and avoid the “free ride” problem via completely excluding brick and mortar organizations.

Pensamiento Latinoamericano Agroecológico: the emergence of a critical Latin American agroecology?

ABSTRACT Latin America is known for social movement organization and innovation, and for dialog among different types of knowledge (‘dialogo de saberes’). This has included dialog between academic knowledges framed by Western science, popular and ancestral ‘peoples’ knowledges and wisdoms,’ and so-called critical thought from global and Latin American revolutionary traditions. We postulate that a specifically Latin American agroecology has emerged from these dynamics. While the global academy recognizes that agroecology is simultaneously a science (in the Western sense), a movement, and a practice, it is the emergent Latin American version that is the most politically charged and popularly organized. This contribution uses a survey of selected Latin American agroecologists to evaluate the extent to which such a critical Latin American agroecology actually exists, and if so, what its characteristics are.

Solidarities in and through Resistance: Rethinking Alliance-Building through Protests in Plantations in India

The tea plantations of Dooars in West Bengal, India are among the primary tea growing belts in the country. The 2000s saw a crisis in the plantation sector with the closing down of some of the plantations and curtailed operation in others coupled with traditionally low wages in the sector. The paper uses this moment of crisis of livelihood to interrogate resistance and solidarity. Focussing on three protests — one organised by trade unions, another by social movement organisation and the third by the women workers of the plantation, the paper looks to understand the divergences and convergences between the three. How are intersectional alliances formed and what part of one’s identity is foregrounded in such alliances? Who owns protest movements? How does language of protests differ across these? How does the neo liberal state interact with such challenges to its authority? Social movement literature tends to focus on how professional activists create coalitions to strengthen movements. Through the ethnography of the three protests, this article suggests ways in which activists are also produced by movements. It asks can collective actions energized through affective bonds achieve ends which institutional social arrangements are constrained from striving for?

Cross-Movement in Latin America: Lessons from the Mercosur Confederation of Family Farming Organisations (Coprofam)

In this article, we analyse the Mercosur Confederation of Family Farming Organisations (Coprofam), a transnational organisation of South American rural social movements and trade unions. Based on the dialogue mirrored in the literature on coalition formation, a contextual-spatial perspective and a pragmatist approach, we aim to understand the process of alliance building that led to the creation of Coprofam, as well as its sustainability and longevity. The paper highlights the importance of political context, previous social ties, political cultures and historical memories, debates about coalitional identity, as well as Coprofam’s actions to expand relations with other movements, organisations and regions, which have influenced Coprofam’s formation and development, through the decades. In terms of data and methods, the research is based on the analysis of documents, participant observation and interviews with Coprofam’s activists.

Leadership in digital activism: an example of techno-enthusiasts in Nigeria

ABSTRACT This paper explores the importance of leadership in the organisation of social movements in Nigeria and examines how the leadership style adopted impacted the organisation of two social movements in Nigeria. Using response from 34 semi-structured interviews from university students in Nigeria that participated in the protests, the paper finds that Leadership remains crucial to the organisation of social movements in Nigeria. Results further indicate that the leadership style adopted impacts the organisation of social movements in Nigeria, more so, than the media platform. Results also show that Techno-Enthusiasts in 2012 unlike the Nigeria Labour Congress in 2016 used their technological skills to rouse a passive generation into action. This paper concludes with a proposed leadership typology for social movement organisation in Nigeria.

Connections result in a general upsurge of protests: egocentric network analysis of social movement organizations after the Fukushima Nuclear Accident

ABSTRACT Since the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 (3/11), Japan has witnessed a nationwide upsurge of antinuclear demonstrations as well as protests against diverse concerns. Why did this upsurge of protests occur beyond the antinuclear concerns? The exact mechanism that caused this general upsurge of protests has not been explored in detail. Given the limited number of first-time participants, this phenomenon can be fully explained only through an analysis of network-building processes among social movement organizations (SMOs). Based on the first nationwide survey of SMOs conducted in Japan by our team in February 2018, covering 308 groups, we analyzed the constellation of the SMOs’ networks after 3/11, their logic of coalition building, and their network effects on mobilization. We observed that the new characteristics of the constellation of the SMOs’ networks are twofold. The first feature is that the networks of various SMOs were bridged by antinuclear groups. Antinuclear organizations served as the hub of SMOs’ networks, enabling the mobilization to cross different concerns. The second feature is the connections between the citizen groups and labor unions. Labor unions increase the participation during events by mobilizing their partner unions. Both new connections contributed to the general upsurge in large-scale demonstrations for various concerns after 3/11. Our paper contributes to the general discussion on the relation between coalition of SMOs and mobilization by focusing on the dyadic level of networks, and analyzing its effect for mobilization through egocentric network analysis.

Consequences of Group Style for Differential Participation

AbstractThis article proposes a theory of how interaction in groups influences differential participation in political activism and interrogates this theory through an empirical analysis of online Facebook group interaction. We study the refugee solidarity movement in a mixed methods design employing online ethnography, survey, and “big” social media data. Instead of conceptualizing the group as a social network or social movement organization (SMO), we argue that the group’s culture emerges as patterns of interaction that have implications for what kind of activities in which group members participate. Based on observations from our online ethnography, we suggest that group interaction influences differential individual participation through processes of (1) encoding different habits and (2) attuning the activist to different aspects of situations. We support our theoretical propositions with six statistical tests of the relationship between the group-level variable of contentious group style and the individual-level variable of participation in political protest. The dependent variable, political protest, and a comprehensive set of controls stem from an original survey of the Danish refugee solidarity movement with 2,283 respondents. We link the survey data with “big” social media data used to estimate the focal explanatory variable, contentious group style, generated from content analysis of online interaction in 119 Facebook groups quantified with supervised machine learning. The results show that group style has a consistently positive relationship with the individual’s degree of participation independent of networks, SMO framing, and individual attributes.

‘Nothing about us without us’: organizing disabled people’s solidarity within and beyond borders in a polarized age

ABSTRACT This article examines collective action and the alliances between social movement organizations engaged in the work of solidarity with disabled people within and across borders during austerity. Building upon social movement theory, specifically political opportunities and resource mobilisation, we focus our analysis on data from in-depth interviews with thirty-five organizations at the UK and European levels, where we examine both how solidarity is operationalized by such organizations and the everyday cooperation and alliances they build with others in a UK policy context that has been hostile to disabled people and a European context which disabled people’s solidarity organizations have sought to seize as political opportunities. Our study therefore adopts a multi-level approach by analysing the building of alliances between organizations at the local, national and transnational levels and it reveals the impact of the political context and organisational pressures which can diminish resources and generate competition, thus placing strains on solidarity between disabled people.

The Missionaries of Francis: The Theology of the People and the Unification of the Argentine Piquetero Movement (2014–2018)

Founded in 2014, the Missionaries of Francis is a small social movement organization made up of activists from several other social movement organizations representing informal workers and the unemployed. Its goal was to promote the message of the newly appointed Pope Francis among the poor and excluded. Drawing inspiration from the theology of the people, the movement is contributing new repertoires of contention based on popular religious images and icons to Argentine social movements. Starting in 2016, it has occupied a key role, bringing together ideologically and politically heterogeneous social movement organizations to resist the neoliberal social policies of President Mauricio Macri. Fundados en 2014, los Misioneros de Francisco son una pequeña organización formada por activistas de varios movimientos sociales que representan a los trabajadores informales y a los desempleados. Su objetivo fue promover el mensaje del recién nombrado Papa Francisco entre los pobres y excluidos. Inspirado en la teología del pueblo, el movimiento está aportando nuevos repertorios de protesta basados en imágenes e íconos de la religiosidad popular a los movimientos sociales argentinos. Ha jugado un papel clave a partir de 2016, reuniendo organizaciones de movimientos sociales ideológica y políticamente heterogéneos para resistir las políticas sociales neoliberales del presidente Mauricio Macri.

Lifelong activism and women’s entrepreneurship: how a social movement organization improves conditions for self-employed women in India

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate how a local trade union improves living conditions for women entrepreneurs in India and how its activities have evolved over time.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a longitudinal case study of the self-employed women’s association (SEWA) in India. Founded in 1972, this organization fosters and supports women’s entrepreneurship. The approach of this study combines qualitative face-to-face interviews and secondary data analysis.FindingsThe findings highlight the fact that SEWA, which combines the features of a trade union and a social movement, improves women’s conditions in several different ways. The study shows that the organization’s main role has evolved from creating a community to expanding it and finally to becoming an agent of societal change.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the literature by analyzing how locally grown organizations fight social exclusion and improve the conditions of deprived groups in emerging economies.

Xenografting in Political Activism: Co-Existing Logics Powered by Resource Injections

The Decoder project launched Amnesty International (Amnesty), a global social movement organization (SMO), into the uncharted territory of crowd work for political activism through a micro-task cro...

Linking consensus to action: does frame alignment amongst sympathizers lead to protest participation?

ABSTRACT Frame alignment theory has become a dominant perspective on how people get mobilized into social movement activities. Most theoretical accounts on micromobilization take individuals’ congruence with social movement organizations’ frames as a starting point. However, the positive effect of frame alignment on protest participation has mostly been approached as an assumption rather than as an empirical question. Additionally, measuring frame alignment and testing its effect on participation is methodologically challenging. As a result, it has remained unclear to what extent an individual’s degree of frame alignment increases the chance that he or she will participate in protest. Using panel survey data on a street demonstration organized in Belgium in 2016 (N = 2,646), we compare the frame components broadcasted by the organizers with the specific diagnostic and prognostic frame components held by both sympathizing participants and sympathizing non-participants. We test the effect of frame alignment on people’s intention to join a protest and on participation as such, while accounting for multiple alternative determinants of protest participation. Our results suggest that frame alignment affects the likelihood that a sympathizer will intend to participate, which in turn affects participation.