Calvin Morrill

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.

Stages of Change for Increasing Fruit and Vegetable Consumption among Adults and Young Adults Participating in the National 5-a-Day for Better Health Community Studies:

Higher fruit and vegetable consumption is associated with a reduced risk of certain cancers and chronic diseases. The 5-a-Day for Better Health community studies are evaluating population-based strategies to achieving dietary behavior change using the stages-of-change model and associated theories. The authors present baseline comparisons of stages of change for fruit and vegetable consumption among adults and young adults in eight study sites representing diverse regions of the United States and diverse populations and settings. Three dominant stages, precontemplation, preparation, and maintenance, were found across sites. Women and those with college degrees were more likely to be in action/maintenance. Fruit and vegetable consumption, self-efficacy, and knowledge of the 5-a-Day recommendation were positively associated with more advanced stages of change in all study sites. The authors discuss the findings in relation to possible limitations of this and other dietary stages-of-change measures and suggest directions for future research.

Introduction: Social Movements in Organizations and Markets

ments have increasingly recognized that these two areas of research would both benefit from greater crossover. Organizations are the targets of, actors in, and sites for social movement activities. Social movements are often represented by formal organizations, while organizations resemble episodic “movements” rather than bounded actors. In an increasingly global economy and polity, organizations and movements are growing more transnational. And both movements and organizations are changing their strategies and routines in response to similar social and technological shifts. The same information and communication technologies that enable the management of global supply chains also allow global movement activities: on February 15, 2003, millions of participants marched in over 350 cities on six continents to protest the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq, marching under the common slogan “The World Says No to War.” As forms of coordinated social action, movements and organizations are ships riding the same waves.

Social Movements and Organization Theory: THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ON ORGANIZATIONS: ENVIRONMENT AND RESPONSES

In some measure, much of the social change we have witnessed in America and elsewhere during the last several decades can be attributed to social movements, large and small. The civil rights movement (CRM), the environmental movement, the womens movement, and the gay rights movement are among the larger and more visible motors of social change. Other, less visible, movements also have promoted significant changes in social policy, raised our consciousness about issues and problems, and even altered our behavior in everyday life, at home, with friends, and at work. The anti–drunk driving movement, the coalition of groups opposed to smoking, the movement for pay equity reform, and the animal rights movement may not have loomed as large on the political landscape as other movements, but they have significantly contributed to changes in the way we live. Movements that developed as spin-offs or amalgams of larger movements also have led to social change. Consider, as examples, the environmental justice movement, which emerged as an outgrowth of the environmental and civil rights movements, or the movement for pay equity reform, which grew out of the interplay among the CRM, the womens movement, and the more progressive streams of the labor movement. Of course, social movements are themselves created out of broad social processes and social forces, and are accompanied by diffuse political and social processes that contribute to social change. Nevertheless, it is useful to ask how and where social movements contribute to social change.

Culture and Organization Theory

Culture has become a legitimate concern and part of the basic conceptual toolkit in much of contemporary organization theory. This article historically traces the contested place of culture in organization theory—from acultural rationalist theorizing at the turn of the twentieth century; to the accidental “discovery” of shop floor culture by human relations scholars in the 1920s; to mid-twentieth-century explorations of informal and institutionalized relations in organizations; to present-day approaches that blend concepts from organizational culture frameworks, neoinstitutional analysis, sociology of culture, and social movement theory. This historical backdrop provides a context for raising several research questions relevant to organizational change, boundaries, and deviance. In closing, the author suggests that an analytic nexus between culture, power, and agency is emerging in contemporary organization theory that ultimately may yield a theory of society.

Ethnographic Contributions to Organizational Sociology

The authors examine the contributions of ethnography to organizational sociology in five substantive areas: (1) the elaboration of informal relations, (2) organizations as systems of meaning, (3) organizations and their environments, (4) organizational change, and (5) ethics and normative behavior. They then discuss three claims that ethnographers typically make: that ethnography provides for depth, multiple perspectives, and process. These claims permit its unique contributions but also create trade-offs in terms of control, bias, and generalizability. The authors conclude by considering the implications that the resurgent interest in organizational ethnography holds for its systematic practice and the development of standards to evaluate its cross-disciplinary usage.

Telling Tales in School: Youth Culture and Conflict Narratives

This study departs from mainstream criminology to approach youth conflict and violence from a youth-centered perspective drawn from cultural studies of young people and sociolegal research. To access youth orientations, we analyze experiential stories of peer conflict written by students at a multiethnic, low-income high school situated in an urban core of the western United States. We argue that youth narratives of conflict offer glimpses into how young people make sense of conflict in their everyday lives, as well as insights as to how the images and decisional bases embedded in their storytelling connect to adult-centered discourses found in popular media and formal education. Our analyses identify a range of story types (tales), each marked by a different narrative style, that students fashion as they write about peer conflict: action tales, moral tales, expressive tales, and rational tales. In our study, students wrote a majority of stories in the action-tale narrative style. We propose three alternative explanations for this pattern using class code, moral development, and institutional resistance perspectives. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and policy implications of our work and raise questions for future research

Organizational Commitment as Symbolic Process.

The concept of organizational commitment has been viewed traditionally as a single variable with manageable antecedents and predictable outcomes. In this paper, we review some of the core theoretical approaches and empirical work on organizational commitment, point out the strengths and weaknesses of traditional approaches, and suggest a processual approach better suited to the complex nature of commitment during times of radical change such as mergers, acquisitions, downsizing, and reorganizations. Our purpose in this paper is to suggest an alternative approach emphasizing commitment as communication processes which (1) are integrally tied to the creation of organizational cultures, (2) involve, to various degrees, identification via symbolic processes with multiple organizational structures and strategies by individual actors and groups, (3) encompass various degrees of linkages between organizational member roles and organizational goals and (4) can yield unintended consequences for individuals and org...

Implementing a 5-a-Day Peer Health Educator Program for Public Sector Labor and Trades Employees

Peer education in the Arizona 5-a-Day project achieved lasting improvements in fruit and vegetable intake among multicultural employees. Measures monitored implementation of peer education from peer educators’ logs, the program’s reach from employee surveys, and employees’ use in terms of employees’ dietary change. Peer educators logged 9,182 coworker contacts. Contacts averaged 10.9 minutes, according to coworkers. Coworkers read an average of 4.7 booklets and 2.23 newsletters. Many employees talked with peer educators (59%) and read materials (54%) after the program finished. Employee reports of peer educator contact were positively associated with fruit and vegetable intake. Peer education was implemented as intended and reached many coworkers. It continued after program completion, reached into coworkers’ families, and was used by employees to improve intake. This method can be used with employees who rely on informal sources and whose work presents barriers to wellness activities.

The management of managers: Disputing in an executive hierarchy

This paper focuses on the relationship between organizational rank and respectability and the way top managers handle their interpersonal grievances, conflicts, and disputes in an executive hierarchy. Formal grievance procedures are rarely used. Downward grievances (from a superior to a subordinate) are often settled unilaterally by the superior. Upward grievances are typically handled covertly by subordinates. Titular equals opt for a range of covert and confrontational tactics, many of which evolve into disputes and are settled by a common superior. Respectability within the executive ranks appears to enhance the ability of superiors to impose outcomes on grievances, conflicts, and disputes between and within subordinates, to decrease the hostility of upward grievances, and to decrease vulnerability of subordinates to sanctions by their superiors.