Sarah Soule Jeff Larson University of Arizona
Waging an institutional challenge implies bringing together a combination of claims (the issues), tactics (how will influenced be leveraged), and targets (and to whom will action be taken). Organized challengers must combine and recombine these three elements into forms that they hope will maximize effectiveness. Yet forms persist, often for many years, while showing few signs of effectiveness. Why do institutional challengers adopt the forms they do, and when and how are they likely to change? By bringing together research on organizations, culture, and social movements this study develops a sociological explanation of the forms of institutional challenges. It advances the notion of the "social movement field," a social domain within which challenging organizations look to each other as potential collaborators, competitors, and cultural models for action. The analysis draws on data collected in interviews with organizations active in the social movement field in Seattle, Washington between 1999 and 2005. Multi-dimensional scaling techniques are used to graphically represent the changing distribution of the claims, tactics, and targets over time and allow for the testing of hypotheses derived from neoinstitutional, organizational ecology, embeddedness, and political opportunity theories. The study expands the focus of social movement research to include the broader institutional environment beyond formal political institutions. By postulating the existence of a field of social movements it extends organizational research, which has understood movements to be simply marginal actors on the fringes of other fields. More generally, this research contributes to our understanding of social institutions as constitutive of beliefs and practices and the processes that underlie institutional change.
