Social Movements

Conceptual Overview

Today, organizational scholars make great use of social movement theory to analyze dynamics of change within and between organizations. For Hayagreeva Rao, Calvin Morrill, and Mayer Zald, social movements are organized collective endeavors aimed at solving social problems. The ability of institutional or social “issue” entrepreneurs/activists to generate fundamental dynamics depends on framing processes (e.g., diagnosing causes of grievances, and providing possible solutions), mobilizing vehicles of collective action, and political opportunities enabling social movement leaders to enhance alliances with the elite groups.

A good example of the relevance of social movement theory to the organizational realm is the generation of defensive antitakeover strategies on the part of business managers. As stated by Rao, Morrill, and Zald, 29% of the Fortune 500 industrial firms were targeted for takeovers in the 1980s. Paul Hirsch suggests that managerial elites used mechanisms, with colloquial names such as “poison pills” or “shark repellents,” to reduce shareholder discretion in the control of the corporation, or, when unsuccessful, had designed “golden parachutes” for those executives fired in takeovers. These actions, in turn, spawned “antimanagement” actions designed to discipline business leaders that led to the establishment of investor-rights “watchdogs” (such as Calpers or the Investor Research and Responsibility Center) to confront errant managers.

On another topic, Gerald Davis and Tracy Thompson highlight how a political approach to corporations requires an explicit framework that helps to understand corporations as places where common interests, coalitions, and competing views of the world are shaped. They suggest a social movement perspective can serve as such a framework. Because recent organization theory recognizes that the production of institutional and organizational forms is a political process, scholars have attempted to delineate some conditions of emergence and sustainability of social movements and to relate them to organizational change. Organizational scholars tend to oscillate between a sociopsychological approach to social movements as collective behaviors and a political [Page 1435]approach seeing social movements as rooted in the enduring cleavages, forms of stratification, and collective definitions of rules and status that shape the whole social system. In the tradition of Alain Touraine, the latter approach examines how the infrastructure of society enhances or thwarts the development of collective action. It includes, following William Gamson, the analysis of the relationships between structure of authorities, social movement leaders, and the responses of incumbent elites to the protest.

In the organizational context, Mayer Zald and Michael Berger delineate three major forms of social movements.

• 1.
  The coup, ranging from cabals at the top aiming to oust the incumbent leader to conspiratorial infiltrations of small groups from within the organization to effect unplanned successions.
• 2.
  The bureaucratic insurgency, whose aim is not to take over and replace the leader but to effect some change in the organizational functioning. This ranges from product or program development to policy choice through whistle blowing.
• 3.
  Mass movements, ranging from protest to rebellion, which are attempts to express grievances and/or to promote or resist change. The latent political purposes of such movements might be to trigger changes in the larger society, even if the initial goals are focused on the structure of organizational authority. In other words, mass movements are more dependent on the larger society for the ideological and ethical legitimacy of their goals (for instance, mass movements linked to rebellion against massive layoffs or closing plants processes depend on the social perception of the legitimacy of these business decisions in the larger society).

The emergence of collective action is analyzed by Jack Goldstone and Charles Tilly as stemming from two general paths: political opportunity and threat. Political opportunities are more driven by positive institutional and political contexts where subgroups are encouraged to act in order to realize their interests. Threat can be partitioned into different dimensions, from erosion of rights to state repression, elements that increase the cost of collective action and deter protest and active resistance.

...