Now We Are Almost Fifty! Reflections on a Theory of the Transformation of Social Movement Organizations

In 1963, Roberta Ash (now Garner) was a young graduate student taking a seminar on social movements led by Mayer Zald and the late David Street. There were five students in the class. Several times during the quarter Zald led discussions of the many directions that the transformation of a social movement organization (SMO) could take. Much of the discussion focused upon the limits of the Weber-Michels model, which posited the bureaucratizing and oligarchic tendencies of SMOs, summarized as “the iron law of oligarchy.” The basic framework for discussion was provided by Selznick’s open system approach to organizations. Both internal and external sources of pressures to change were examined. Under specific conditions SMOs could vanish, decline, grow, split or merge with other SMOs, and become more radical and/or develop internal democracy. The students were given a choice of writing a paper or taking a final examination. Considering herself lazy, Garner chose to take a final exam. She was asked to state three or four propositions that were suggested by the class discussions and justify them. When Zald read her answer he immediately thought they could write a paper on the topic.

Since then we have collaborated on one other paper, “The Political Economy of the Social Movement Sector” (Garner and Zald, 1985). Although we both have continued to write about topics related to collective action and social movements, our interests and emphases have diverged. Thus, rather than developing a single response to Arne Kalleberg’s invitation we have decided to provide a conversation between ourselves that responds to the questions he raised in his letter of invitation. Garner begins the conversation.

What I Wish I Had Known

Garner: I wish I had known about all the contentious episodes and social movements that happened in the 49 years after the final exam in Mayer and David’s class! To select a few: the success of the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of Dr. King; riots in American cities; the end of SDS and the Weathermen; the death of Che Guevara (who shared our disbelief in the Iron Law of Oligarchy); Italy’s hot autumn; spring in Prague and Paris; Stonewall, the new social movements and the women’s movement; the Iranian revolution; the Reagan revolution; the emergence of Al-Qaeda; Christian fundamentalism as a political force; the collapse of the Soviet Union; the military coups and “return to democracy” in Latin America; the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa; the Arab Spring; Occupy Wall Street; and the Tea Party.

To what extent would that knowledge change what we wrote? This huge stockpile of contentious episodes would have given us many new tests of our propositions, and as Mayer says, would have enabled us to test them in polities that were or are very different from the United States. Knowing about these episodes would perhaps have forced us to devote attention not only to the trajectories of movements as organizations (which we did), but also to the dynamics of contention and conflict, of which movement organizations are an important element but not the only one.

Zald: The examples of various kinds of collective actions around the globe mentioned by Roberta suggest to me that we didn’t think enough about the scope conditions of our analysis. Most of our analysis in the paper assumes a pluralistic society that permits and/or encourages free association. Some democracies, such as France, have had laws that hindered the development of all voluntary associations, including SMOs, while others, such as Germany, prohibit radical organizations devoted to the overthrow of the regime. Although some of our hypotheses might be seen as applying in totalitarian or authoritarian regimes that stifle or strongly regulate the forms of association, the bulk of the analysis ignores these societal differences. For example, hardly anyone predicted the Arab Spring, because the populations had seemed quiescent even though occasionally “the street” spoke. To understand the Arab Spring we would have had to have a much more subtle understanding of passive resistance and...