Andrew W. Martin

Confronting the State, the Corporation, and the Academy : The Influence of Institutional Targets on Social Movement Repertoires

Analysts have shown increased interest in how social movements use tactical repertoires strategically. While the state is most often the guarantor of new benefits, many movements—from labor to the environmental movement—target corporate, educational, and other institutions. Employing a unique data set of protests reported in the New York Times (1960–90), this research examines how repertoires are, in part, contingent on the institutional target a movement selects. In particular, the authors consider the role of each targets vulnerabilities and its capacities for response—repression, facilitation, and routinization—as explanations for the degree of transgressive protest each target faces. The results provide strong evidence for considering targets as a central factor in shaping forms of social protest.

The Institutional Logic of Union Organizing and the Effectiveness of Social Movement Repertoires1

Despite the growing interest in union organizing, there has been little effort to systematically describe the organizing landscape in America today. Institutionalization, which is an increasingly important concept in social movement theory, provides the framework for differentiating between the two major organizing repertoires presently available to unions: the traditional National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certification election and more recent organizing that avoids the election process. Evidence from a sample of 70 large local unions from 1990 to 2001 reveals that, although the certification election continues to be the preferred method of membership recruitment, non‐NLRB organizing appears to be more effective, in terms of both victory rate and number of workers organized. The findings have implications for future research on labor unions and represent an important step toward an empirical understanding of processes of institutionalization within social movements generally.

Why Targets Matter: Toward a More Inclusive Model of Collective Violence

Efforts to develop a unified model of collective violence have been limited by the diverse array of events analyzed, from terrorist attacks to riots. This article seeks to develop a more inclusive theoretical and analytic framework by exploring the targets of violence, something that has received little disaggregated attention. We argue that consideration of who or what is targeted during the course of an event, together with collectivity size and the conditional role it may play, offers new theoretical insight into collective violence dynamics. Our analysis draws from newspaper records on a diverse range of collectivities, from parties to rallies to riots. We find that in many contexts, collectivity size increases the likelihood of violence against some targets, notably state actors, while reducing attacks on others. These findings provide the basis for a broader discussion of why unpacking targets is so critical to understanding the dynamics of collective violence.

Changing to Win? Threat, Resistance, and the Role of Unions in Strikes, 1984-2002

Much of what we know about strikes is grounded in the context of postwar Fordism, a unique historical moment of relatively institutionalized labor‐management relations. Yet the resurgence of corporate resistance over the past quarter century, coupled with an increasingly hostile political and economic climate, has fundamentally transformed the American industrial landscape. Drawing from this research and insights on social movements and formal organizations, we expect unions will vary considerably in their response to threats. Our analysis, based on a comprehensive data set of U.S. strikes from 1984 to 2002, reveals the importance of such intramovement cleavages for strike activity and for the prospects of organized labor in the contemporary United States. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for scholarship on threat and social movement challenges more generally.

Rules don’t apply: Kafka’s insights on bureaucracy:

Weber’s ideal typical model of bureaucracy constitutes the starting point for most scholarship on organizations. Much organizational behaviour, however occurs outside this formalized model. It is thus somewhat surprising that behaviours outside the formal-rational model are, more often than not, treated as aberrations. In contrast, the emerging critical literature on ‘inhabited institutions’ has identified such gaps in our theoretical understanding as foundational, warranting a more agentic conception of organizational life—a conception more fully acknowledging of and sensitive to the dynamics of power in organizational life. In this regard, we highlight four prevalent (though seldom theoretically incorporated) features of contemporary bureaucracies—divergent goals, patrimonialism, unwritten rules and chaos. These features, which we contend are no less critical to organizational functioning than those identified by Weber, constitute an organizational logic more compatible with a Kafkan vision of bureaucracy than with a Weberian one. Theorizing such attributes allows us to explore elements of bureaucratic life that the formal-rational model of bureaucracy renders largely invisible and is conceptually and empirically ill equipped to incorporate. An illustrative analysis, drawing on narrative data drawn from the population of organizational ethnographies (n = 162) (1) demonstrates the prominence of such dynamics in organizational life; and (2) highlights their implications for rule breaking as a relatively common yet under-theorized occurrence. A core implication of our analysis and critique is that the social sciences need a fundamentally revised theory of bureaucracy capable of understanding bureaucracy’s power laden and often dystrophic features.

We Can’t Win This on Our Own Unions, Firms, and Mobilization of External Allies in Labor Disputes

To cope with steep losses in membership and eroding legal protections, some unions have begun to look outward for help. Scholars likewise point to broad-based coalitions as a potential route to labor’s revitalization. Yet surprisingly little is known about union coalition work, from when and why it occurs to what union allies typically bring to the table. We take up these issues with a unique dataset on strike events from the 1990s and 2000s, contributing to labor and social movement research. First, we show that despite considerable academic interest in union outreach to other social movements, this phenomenon remains fairly rare. Second, our findings demonstrate how the immediate threat to unions posed by employer intransigence matters not just for the mobilization of external allies, as the social movement literature would expect, but also for the assistance brought to bear by those allies, which has received relatively little attention from scholars. Third, although we find important distinctions in unions’ propensity for outreach, results suggest a more nuanced picture of union activity than previously conceived. In various ways during strike events, both social movement unions (typically highlighted in the literature) and declining industrial unions are turning to coalition partners.

The ascension of Kafkaesque bureaucracy in private sector organizations

Although Weber’s ideal typical model of bureaucracy was developed primarily in relation to the state, studies of private sector organizations typically adhere to its formal-rational conceptions with little adjustment. This is unfortunate since bureaucracy in private sector economic organizations has many elements that are poorly captured by and potentially significantly at odds with Weber’s thinking. Most notable in this regard is the pervasiveness of particularistic and often informal, emergent arrangements − arrangements well documented for many decades by workplace ethnographers. This has significant implications for the conception of modern private sector organizations and indeed offers a picture that is more Kafkaesque than Weberian. Significant support for this point is provided by an analysis of content coded organizational ethnographies. Weberian dimensions of bureaucracy − most notably coordinated and specialized organization and training − are predominant in public institutions; private sector establishments, in contrast, witness significantly more particularism as well as uncertainty and fear as core organizing principles. Importantly, and as delineated in our over-time comparisons, such Kafkaesque elements of bureaucracy and organization appear to be increasingly prevalent.

Can the Labor Movement Succeed Without the Strike

Despite growing interest in revitalizing the labor movement, the role of the strike has hardly been discussed. Can unions make gains without it?

Rethinking Organizational Decoupling Fields, Power Struggles, and Work Routines

Neoinstitutionalists have long recognized that organizations must negotiate complex organizational fields to survive. Yet, this ever-sharpening focus on external environments comes at the expense of attending to how micro-level dynamics facilitate or inhibit organizational survival. In this article, and building on insights from research focusing on shop-floor contestation, we reexamine decoupling—that is, possible divergence of formal procedures and everyday practices—and draw on our own case study work on the United Steelworkers. Our analyses show that reforms directed toward restructuring the Steelworker’s organizing program were thwarted by organizational members with a stake in the old order that no longer serves the union’s long-term organizational interest. This offers some needed correctives and insights, namely, that (1) decoupling may be maladaptive and (2) that it should be understood as a contingent outcome of local power struggles over work within organizations as they respond to changing institutional fields. These conclusions have clear implications not only for the study of labor unions but also for a more general understanding of how situated organizational actors respond to structural shifts in historically constituted institutional fields.

How to study political activists: A petition survey approach

A major challenge for social movement and political campaign studies is generating large, representative samples of political activists. This paper outlines a strategy of surveying those who participate in a common, baseline form of political action: signing petitions. Similar to protest surveys, signing a petition constitutes a more baseline low cost/low risk form of political activism. In 26 states in the U.S. petition lists are public record and, with modest effort, can be used to study a wide variety of issues, groups and campaigns. We outline the steps and costs involved in such a petition survey and how to improve response rate. To assess response bias, we compare demographic and political affiliation measures acquired from a marketing analytics company (Experian) for respondents and non-respondents to our survey of petition signers for two state-level initiative elections, finding only modest and interpretable response bias. The methods presented here have broader implications for survey research in general.