Interest organizations in social movements: An empirical exploration

Since the 1960s, sociologists and political scientists interested in social movements and protest have recurrently debated the nature of organizations promoting collective action. A substantial consensus has now emerged that social movements may take various organizational forms, ranging from the fairly hierarchical to the highly decentralized. However, it is argued here that social movement politics cannot (without significant analytical losses) be reduced to the performance of specific acts of pressure, conducted by individual organizations as independent actors that in principle might be indifferent to, if not in competition with, other actors focusing on the same issues. It is, in contrast, a form of political action that implies sustained coordination between multiple actors identifying, with variable levels of commitment, with the same broad cause. This article explores the traits of the organizations that get involved in those processes. Do all instances of social movement mobilization display the same heterogeneity of organizations? Or does the profile of social movements change in different settings? In order to address these questions the article draws upon data, collected in two British cities, Glasgow and Bristol, that differ in both their social and political profile. The study focused on participatory organizations promoting advocacy and interest representation on environmental, ethnic and migration, community and social exclusion issues. The analysis looked for distinctive traits in the organizations involved in social movement forms of collective action in the two cities. It compared two definitions of social movements: one, formulated by Charles Tilly, viewing movements as sustained interactions between challengers and powerholders in the context of protest events (the protest model of social movement), the other, proposed by the author, viewing movements as a particular structural position within broader civil society networks (the network model of social movements). Empirical evidence largely supports skeptics claims about the distinctiveness of organizations active in social movements, regardless of how movements are defined. No consistent profile of the organizations involved emerges from the data. However, we should be cautious about drawing inferences on the nature of movements by looking at the distribution of the properties of organizations interested in a certain cause. As the overall profiles of organizational populations in the two cities were very similar, this might have prompted the plausible conclusion that a movement sector existed in both cities, characterized by broadly similar levels of organizational informality, predisposition to protest repertoires, interest in new issues such as globalization and the environment, proximity to dissenting groups. As it happens, this is not the case. The most consistent result by far did not have to do with differences between social movement actors and other organizations, but between cities. For all their social and political distinctiveness, Glasgow and Bristol did not differ because of the properties of their civic organizations, taken as aggregates. The difference between the two cases lay in how the same elements combined to shape network patterns, or to differentiate the set of organizations highly involved in protest events. All the above draws attention to the importance of taking local peculiarities into consideration, not only when analyzing the behavior of individual actors or ecological data on protest diffusion, but also when exploring the structure of collective processes such as those reflected in the protest or the network model.