Social Movements and Neo-Institutionalism: A Fruitful Merger?
Social movement theory assumes that by and large rational movement actors weigh their chances and adjust their strategies to opportunities. This is in sharp contrast to the difficulty of assessing whether social movements make an impact and the self-asses
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For years social movement research has focused on social movement organizations. To a large extent movement research has been research on the size, structure, and activities of movement organizations (McCarthy and Zald 1977; Edwards and McCarthy 2007). Taking this into account, it is surprising that the research has been reluctant to use theoretical approaches and insights from the sociology of organizations, and vice versa. The sociology of organizations has dealt with a wide array of different organizations, but social movement organizations have rarely been regarded as a type of organization worth studying.1 This missing link between the sociology of organizations and social movement research cannot be fully established in this article. Rather, I want to focus on one influential tradition in organization research: neo-institutionalism. Neo-institutionalism has gained considerable prominence beyond the realm of organization theory (Scott 2008b), and is claimed to be “one of the most broad-ranging ‘theoretical research programs’ (…) in contemporary sociology and
This paper has profited much more than usual from a thorough discussion in the research group and from the comments of the two fellow editors. I am very grateful for these improvements. 1
As often, there are exceptions to this general rule. Some ideas of organization research have been integrated into studies of movement organizations (e.g., Roose 2003). A broader review of the opportunities for social movement research and organization research to inform each other was made by Davis et al. (2005).
J. Roose (&) Willy Brandt Center for German and European Studies, University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2016 J. Roose and H. Dietz (eds.), Social Theory and Social Movements, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-13381-8_7
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one of the most empirically developed forms of institutional analysis” (Jepperson 2002, p. 229; with reference to Berger and Zelditch 1998). In the following section, I will first present the basic ideas of neo-institutionalism relevant for the analysis of social movements. In Sect. 2, I will show briefly that the core arguments of the approach are as applicable to social movement organizations as they are to others, and argue that concepts from neo-institutionalism are also helpful to refine the analysis of how social movement actors choose their strategies. In Sect. 3, I show what neo-institutionalism and social movement research can learn from one another.
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Neo-Institutionalism
It is not my intention to present another general introduction to neo-institutionalism (see, for instance, Jepperson 2002; Scott 2008a, b; Scott and Meyer 1994). Rather, I want to point out central arguments of the approach that are particularly applicable to social movements. The starting point for neo-institutionalism is the observation of isomorphism. Organizations of a similar kind or, in the diction of the approach, in a particular organizational field (DiMaggio 1983) tend to have very simil
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