Edward T. Walker

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.

Privatizing Participation: Civic Change and the Organizational Dynamics of Grassroots Lobbying Firms

This article highlights the shifting boundaries between the public and private spheres in advanced capitalist societies through an examination of grassroots lobbying firms. These organizations, which became a fixture in U.S. politics in the 1970s and have grown in number and prominence since, subsidize public participation on behalf of corporations, industry groups, and associations using direct mail, telephoning, and by mobilizing members and stakeholders. I examine the dynamics of this organizational population—whose existence calls attention to broad transformations in civil society—with reference to dramatic growth in the organizational populations of civic and trade associations. Results, derived from a Generalized Estimating Equation panel regression of firm founding events across U.S. regions from 1972 to 2002, suggest that the increasing formal organization of civil society has supported the development of a field of organizations that subsidize participation. These organizations do so, however, in a manner that restricts the development of social capital and civic skills while augmenting the voice of private interests in public and legislative discourse.

“No Fracking Way!” Documentary Film, Discursive Opportunity, and Local Opposition against Hydraulic Fracturing in the United States, 2010 to 2013

Recent scholarship highlights the importance of public discourse for the mobilization and impact of social movements, but it neglects how cultural products may shift discourse and thereby influence mobilization and political outcomes. This study investigates how activism against hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) utilized cultural artifacts to influence public perceptions and effect change. A systematic analysis of Internet search data, social media postings, and newspaper articles allows us to identify how the documentary Gasland reshaped public discourse. We find that Gasland contributed not only to greater online searching about fracking, but also to increased social media chatter and heightened mass media coverage. Local screenings of Gasland contributed to anti-fracking mobilizations, which, in turn, affected the passage of local fracking moratoria in the Marcellus Shale states. These results have implications not only for understanding movement outcomes, but also for theory and research on media, the environment, and energy.

Replacing Members with Managers? Mutualism among Membership and Nonmembership Advocacy Organizations in the United States1

Associations with a professional staff but no members (nonmembership advocacy organizations, or NMAOs) are the subject of lively debate. Many argue that their proliferation has allowed an expansion of advocacy without an accompanying growth in civic engagement. This article asks if there has been significant recent growth of NMAOs and if those organizations have displaced membership advocacy organizations (MAOs). The authors find no evidence for a proportional increase of NMAOs since the 1960s. Further, among all organizations in three populations—peace, womens issues, and human rights—NMAOs have not displaced MAOs. In particular, the authors find that MAO density shapes NMAO founding, as membership groups provide a base for professional advocacy. These findings challenge the notion that U.S. civic life has undergone a systemic transformation away from organizational forms that promote civic engagement.

Putting a Face on the Issue Corporate Stakeholder Mobilization in Professional Grassroots Lobbying Campaigns

Business scholars pay increasing attention to the expanded influence of stakeholders on firm strategies, legitimacy, and competitiveness. At the same time, analysts have noted that the transformed regulatory and legislative environments of recent decades have encouraged firms to become much more politically active. Surprisingly, relatively little research has tied together these two trends. The present study integrates perspectives on stakeholder management with research on corporate political activity to develop an understanding of the structural sources of stakeholder mobilization in professional grassroots lobbying campaigns. This study employs a unique, original data source to consider how the adoption of grassroots lobbying by a firm relates to its industry, degree of inside lobbying, partisan PAC contributions, and more. This research shows that corporate grassroots lobbying is shaped most significantly by a firm’s degree of inside lobbying, as highly active firms take a diversified strategy for gaining influence. Firms in industries with a heavy public presence as well as those concerned with taxation, government appropriations, and economic development also adopt these strategies readily. PAC contributions to Republican, but not Democratic, candidates also heighten firms’ propensity to lobby the public.

Alternative Organizational Repertoires of Poor People’s Social Movement Organizations:

This article contrasts the organizational structure, goals, and tactics of congregation-based organizations (CBOs) with individual membership organizations (IMOs) that represent alternative organizational repertoires for groups aiming to empower poor communities in the United States. Organizational records of 86 CBOs and 125 IMOs are evaluated. It was found that CBOs mobilize substantially more community members and are more likely to devote their efforts toward leadership development and organization building. On the other hand, IMOs are far more likely to employ aggressive social change tactics, whereas CBOs focus more on consensus issues. Finally, IMOs employ a far more diverse array of grassroots funding strategies. The generalizability of these findings is discussed.

Winning hearts and minds: Field theory and the three dimensions of strategy

Strategy involves more than seeking to accomplish goals, innovate, and improve financial performance. We offer a field-theoretic perspective that distills three key dimensions of strategy: the need to accrue and mobilize resources, maintain an organization’s status, and achieve greater levels of power and influence. Strategy evolves as actors seek cooperative partners or come into conflict with other actors who hold competing worldviews. Attaining strategic advantages depends greatly on actors’ abilities to shape the perceptions of others. Actors must be able to win the public’s hearts and minds if they are to gain positions of prominence and to influence the rules of the game that shape who wins or loses. Much strategic action evolves from these contests over shaping key audiences’ perceptions. Field theory, in our view, provides a more holistic view of strategy.

Trade Associations and the Legitimation of Entrepreneurial Movements: Collective Action in the Emerging Gourmet Food Truck Industry

Trade associations are an important topic of investigation for nonprofit and voluntary sector researchers because they serve civic purposes and help to support innovative areas of entrepreneurship. We examine how local trade associations in the emerging gourmet food truck industry help to reduce uncertainty and augment industry legitimacy by (a) representing collective interests when challenged by regulators and incumbents (e.g., restaurants), (b) generating collective identity and creating cultural capital, and (c) providing a regime to manage “tragedies of the commons,” procure club goods, and promote self-regulation. We draw on social media data and narrative accounts by industry activists to explicate the evolution of the field from 2008 to 2012 in 11 cities. Findings suggest that trade associations, as an often-overlooked type of mutual benefit association, are key players in the legitimation of creative industries.

Social Movements, Organizations, and Fields: a Decade of Theoretical Integration.

As Andrew Abbott (1992: 754) once argued in these pages, “organization theory always seems like a picturesque Kuhnian subfield. Paradigms come and go. Controversy abounds. People argue about ‘garbage cans’ and ‘populations of generalists’”. This interdisciplinary yet highly paradigm-driven body of scholarship was once dominated by attention to (boundedly rational) decision-making, efficiency, and tight coupling between organizational goals and procedures. It witnessed an almost revolutionary transformation during the Carter and Reagan administrations into a set of sometimes-competing, sometimes-orthogonal theoretical approaches, all of which emphasized environmental influences on the organization as a relatively open system. Loose coupling of elements came to be assumed, instrumental rationality was either pushed aside by analysts’ scope conditions or framed as highly contingent upon context, and inter-organizational relationships became a central empirical focus.

Signaling Responsibility, Deflecting Controversy: Strategic and Institutional Influences on the Charitable Giving of Corporate Foundations in the Health Sector

Corporate foundations – entities established to regularize corporate giving at an arm’s length removed from the firm – command substantial resources, root companies in the nonprofit sectors of their host communities, indirectly augment perceptions of corporate responsibility, and help firms to deflect controversies in an attentive global media environment. Despite these important roles, relatively little research has examined the institutional and strategic factors that influence such proximate charitable giving by firms. Using systematic data on foundations linked to S&P 3,000 firms in the health sector – a growing domain in which public trust in high-stakes products and services is critical – fixed-effects models illustrate the primary role of network influences on giving: corporate foundations give substantially more in years following higher contributions by other (non-corporate) foundations in the health sector in a firm’s headquarters locality and also following increased contributions by industry peers through their corporate foundations. Giving also appears to reflect strategic reputational concerns, in that foundation contributions increase significantly following controversies associated with the corporate parent’s products and/or services. By contrast, giving tends to decline as the presence of outside directors on a firm’s board increases, as well as when firms carry heavier debt loads. Combined, these findings suggest that corporate foundations serve as a strategic proxy for the firm, reflecting both the firm’s position in community and inter-firm networks while also mitigating the threat of reputational challenges.