Until very recently social scientists who studied complex or formal organizations and social scientists who studied collective action and social movements had little to do with each other and seemed to have little in common. Students of complex organizations such as corporations, government agencies, and the larger nonprofit organizations studied organizations that were large and had relatively clear boundaries, bureaucratic and formal procedures, and fairly well defined authority structures. By contrast, social movements and collective action were characterized as more spontaneous, fluid, and unorganized. To the extent that organizations played any role in social movements, they were thought to be small, ephemeral, and resource poor. Moreover, leaders of movements and collective action depended upon charisma and rhetoric, not formal-legal authority, to induce participation in their followers.

On both sides some early theorists and studies suggested that the sharp division of the fields of study overdrew the differences. Robert Michels's study of political parties (1962 [1911]) showed how parties that originated in social movements developed formal organization and authority structures that resembled those found in bureaucracies. Michels's “iron law of oligarchy” may have been overstated, but it nicely captured the transformation of what had been participatory and less bureaucratic organizations into formal organizations with hierarchic and self-reproducing authority structures. Social movements and collective action events that endure for any length of time are likely to develop some formal mechanisms for coordinating action and develop social movement organizations that are amenable to organizational analysis.

Much of the literature on social movements focuses upon the determinants of participation. Why do some people with certain characteristics participate, while others who seem similar do not? How are some successful social movements able to generate involvement from bystanders and transform this potential into activism and, even harder, long time commitment, while other movements burn out? Clearly, social movements that endure for any length of time take on an organizational framework, morphing into social movement organizations (SMOs). SMOs appropriate many of the features and so share many of the advantages of formal organizations, including a known location and group of participants, recognition as a more or less legitimate player, and some continuity of mission and routines. By the same token, SMOs share many of the problems of other formal organizations. How is organizational authority sustained, especially as leaders turn over? What resources – financial, human, technical – are critical, and how are they combined across different SMOs? What is the division of labor between professionals and nonprofessionals, between staff and volunteers? How are SMOs organized across large geographical and geopolitical boundaries? How do they change over time? How do different SMOs sharing related goals that are part of the same movement (e.g., the environmental movement or the women's movement) cooperate, compete, and conflict with each other?

As we noted in the Preface, a concern with the organizational side of social movements goes back at least to the beginning of the last century.

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 women's 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 women's 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.

Assume for the moment that you are convinced that these two fields of scholarship – the study of social movements and organization theory – can be usefully brought to bear on each other; that theories, concepts, and problems raised in one of the areas can be usefully used to focus on issues that are less prominently featured in the other area. How does one do that? Are there intellectual strategies for synthesizing and integrating somewhat disparate fields? One strategy, which no one in this volume attempts, would be to subsume both objects of analysis, organizations and social movements, within a larger or more abstract theory or framework of analysis. For instance, one could show how both social movements and organizations can be analyzed in the language of a general theory of action or of social systems. Another approach, which is in fact adopted by most of the authors of the chapters in Sections II to V, is to begin with a fairly concrete problem or issue in one or the other of the domains, and to seek guidance for understanding in the literature of the other or related domains.

To take one example, in Chapter 10 David Strang and Dong-Il Jung ask the question of how they can account for the adoption of innovations related to the movement for Total Quality Management (TQM) in a large corporation.

Organizational scholars have had to begin to take more account of social movements because, in their myriad forms, they have been an important source for organizational change. Indeed, a case can be made that, along with technological, market, and political policy changes, social movements have been a major engine in the transformation of organizations. Movements have this impact on organizations through several mechanisms and processes. As forces acting in the wider environment, movements contribute to the reconstitution of organizational fields. For instance, the consumer movement of the early twentieth century contributed to the development of norms and standard-setting bodies for industries producing consumer products (Rao 1998). Similarly, among its many manifestations the progressive movement contributed to the enactment of child labor laws, the development of municipal building codes, and the transformation of city and state agencies that regulate industries (Keller 1990; Skowronek 1982). Movement activists or sympathizers external to organizations also attempt to affect organizations directly: they organize boycotts, pursue publicity campaigns, and bring lawsuits to attempt to change policy. Finally, members of organizations who also have professional and personal affinities to movements attempt to work within those organizations to change policies and procedures. In some cases, organizations are obliged not only to listen to and negotiate with movement members, but to hire persons sympathetic to their interests (Hoffman 2001 [1997]).

The chapters in this section employ a variety of different but overlapping lenses to consider the topic of how movements impact organizations.

The essays in this volume have brought together two fields of inquiry, the study of social movements and the study of organizations, that have shown substantial convergence in core concepts and modes of analysis (McAdam and Scott, Chap. 1; Campbell, Chap. 2). Social movements are often represented by formal organizations, and organizations respond to social movements and have movement-like processes within themselves. Thus, scholars from both areas of study are finding it useful to borrow or bridge across the boundaries. This is not an entirely new development; indeed, it has a long, if fitful, history. We will not review that history here, although Elisabeth Clemens, in the next chapter, helps us to understand why that history has been so fitful. Instead, we want to give a partial answer to the question, Why now? Why is this bridging even more relevant today than it has been in the past? What events and processes “out there” almost force us to bridge and blend these two areas?

In this era of rapid social change, organizations increasingly resemble episodic movements rather than ongoing bounded actors, and organizations and movements are changing their strategies and routines in response to similar social and technological changes. Moreover, one of the most visible social movements of our time, aimed at reining in “globalization from above,” is explicitly oriented toward contemporary economic and organizational arrangements.

The essays in this section have a common theme: the developmental dependence of both movements and organizations on the mobilization and political contexts in which they develop. By political context we mean variability in both the formal legal/institutional structuring of politics and the shifting informal elite alignments that define a given historical period. Mobilization context refers more to the social demographic bases of local populations. The chapters in this section exhibit similarities and differences. Three use statistical analyses to show how differences in political and mobilization contexts across all fifty states lead to differences in outcomes. All of the chapters can be seen as doing a kind of political sociology of the phenomena they are studying. But the chapters are also different in the concepts they use, in the extent to which events and processes at the national level are seen as interacting with state-level phenomena, and in the historical depth explored by the analysis.

In Chapter 3, “Institutional Variation in the Evolution of Social Movements: Competing Logics and the Spread of Recycling Advocacy Groups,” Michael Lounsbury studies one aspect of the modern environmental movement as it penetrates organizations and local communities. His chapter draws upon the concept of institutional logics and on concepts related to mobilization context. Specifically, he shows that the formation of early state recycling advocacy groups was enabled by state-level conditions that were favorable to ecological activism.