Power Plays: How Social Movements and Collective Action Create New Organizational Forms

Abstract

Organizational theory emphasizes how new organizational forms are produced by technological innovation but has glossed over the role of cultural innovation. This chapter suggests that social movements are important sources of cultural innovation and identifies the scope conditions under which social movements create new organizational forms. By doing so, it lends substance to the notion of institutional entrepreneurship and enlarges the theoretical reach of neo-institutionalism.

Operating Room: Relational Spaces and Microinstitutional Change in Surgery

“…Theorists have used social movement concepts to describe how mobilization occurs in organizational fields and inside organizations (e.g., Rao, Morrill, and Zald 2000;Lounsbury, Ventresca, and Hirsch 2003;Davis et al 2005;McAdam and Scott 2005;Briscoe and Safford 2008;Davis et al 2008) and inside organizations (e.g., Zald and Berger 1978;Lounsbury 2001;Scully and Creed 2005;Kaplan 2008;O'Mahony and Bechky 2008). These scholars have argued that mobilization may look different inside organizations because of the important role played by top managers (Scully and Segal 2002;Raeburn 2004;Clemens 2005;Zald, Morrill, and Rao 2005;Weber, Thomas, and Rao 2009).…”

Theorizing command-and-commodify regulation: the case of species conservation banking in the United States

“…"Property," as Roy (1997: 16) summarizes, "institutionalizes power," and of course a central insight of the sociology of markets is that these institutions are anything but autonomous or "free" of political and state intervention (Campbell and Lindberg 1990;Fligstein 2001;Polanyi 2001;Carruthers and Ariovich 2004;Vogel 2016). Indeed, contemporary sociologists have in many ways gone well beyond the legal realist critique, highlighting the ways that markets and exchange are not only social and political creations of the law and thus of states, but are culturally contingent (Fourcade and Healy 2007;Quinn 2008;Zelizer 2011) and continuously shaped by contention, mobilization, and 'power plays' within them (Rao et al 2000;King and Pearce 2010;Rao et al 2011).…”

“…Social movement activism may also push actors and organizations towards adopting new or alternative forms of economic action (Rao et al 2000;Bartley 2007;King and Pearce 2010). What is more, specific laws and policies, like the Endangered Species Act, are likely to act as targets for mobilization that activists can use to challenge status quo administrative and regulatory practices (Campbell 2003;Walker et al 2008).…”

“…Thus, for example, by making the logging of old growth timber both physically challenging and morally questionable, forest activists are not just delegitimizing a product or addressing a market failure (cf. Rao et al 2000). More basically, they are using exchange deterrents to restructure economic power such that, even absent authoritative state commands, it may begin to 'make more sense' for a timber company to harvest regrowth, and perhaps even participate in a sustainable forestry certification scheme (Bartley 2007;Widick 2009).…”

From data extraction to data leaking. Data-activism in Italian and Spanish anti-corruption campaigns

“…The use of data in social movements is not a novelty, and there is a long history of how data on specific, contentious issues can be used to foster mobilization, from ac--tivists employing statistical data to support their struggles in the framework of statac--tivism (Bruno et al 2014) to the production of qualitative data in the context of the workerist co--research tradition (Roggero 2011) to the use of data to face specific, con--tentious issues, like the vigilante anti--speed associations that used stopwatches to pro--duce and gather data in the framework of collective actions against the use of automo--biles at the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States (Rao et al 2000).…”