Crossing Categorical Boundaries: A Study of Diversification by Social Movement Organizations

Abstract

When do protest organizations borrow issues or claims that are outside their traditional domains? Sociologists have examined the consequences of borrowing claims across movement boundaries, but not the antecedents of doing so. We argue that movement boundaries are strong when there is consensus about the core claims of a social movement, which we measure by cohesion and focus. Cohesion and focus enhance the legitimacy of a movement and impede member organizations from adopting claims associated with other movements. Analyzing movement organizational activity at U.S.-based protest events from 1960 to 1995, we find that a social movement organization is less likely to adopt claims from other movements when the social movement in which it is embedded exhibits high cohesion and focus. However, when movement organizations do borrow claims, they are more likely to do so by borrowing from movements that themselves exhibit high cohesion and focus. We describe the application of our findings to organization theory, social movements, and field theoretic approaches to understanding social action.

Firm Behavior and the Evolution of Activism: Strategic Decisions and the Emergence of Protest in U.S. Communities

“…In this regard, our results show that firms decisions can be considered "critical events" in a conflict (Staggenborg, 1993) that not only determine local mobilization outcomes, but can also have boundaryspanning effects (Wang, Piazza, and Soule, 2018), which can potentially affect other related or unrelated episodes of contention in different geographical communities. Seemingly unrelated instances of mobilization within the same community are thus not necessarily independent; rather, can trigger movement spillovers (Meyer and Whittier, 1994) as well as the erosion of boundaries between movements (Wang, Rao, and Soule, 2019). At the same time, our findings show that traditional explanations concerning the lifecycle of social movements-which would hold that mobilization would be most effective at its very onset, and its efficacy would tend to wane over time (Blumer, 1969;Mauss, 1975;Tilly, 1978)-likely do not hold.…”

Firm behavior and the evolution of activism: Strategic decisions and the emergence of protest in US communities

“…In this regard, our results show that firms decisions can be considered “critical events” in a conflict (Staggenborg, ) that not only determine local mobilization outcomes, but can also have boundary‐spanning effects (Wang, Piazza, & Soule, ), which can potentially affect other related or unrelated episodes of contention in different geographical communities. Seemingly unrelated instances of mobilization within the same community are thus not necessarily independent; rather, can trigger movement spillovers (Meyer & Whittier, ) as well as the erosion of boundaries between movements (Wang, Rao, & Soule, ). At the same time, our findings show that traditional explanations concerning the lifecycle of social movements—which would hold that mobilization would be most effective at its very onset, and its efficacy would tend to wane over time (Blumer, ; Mauss, ; Tilly, )—likely do not hold.…”

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

“…Bennett et al (2004) and Hall et al (2020) argued that the Internet contributed to the emergence of supersized transnational movement communities: each loosely associated with hundreds or even thousands of SMOs from countless SMIs. A phenomenon that Wang et al (2018Wang et al ( , 2019 referred to as boundary spanning. In other words, social media has arguably reduced collaboration costs, thus allowing a greater number of SMOs to participate in movements outside of their primary objective.…”