Competition and resource partitioning in three social movement industries

Citation: Sarah A. Soule, Brayden G. King (2008) Competition and resource partitioning in three social movement industries. The American Journal of Sociology (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1086/587152
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1086/587152
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1086/587152
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Competition and resource partitioning in three social movement industries
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Summary

Sarah Soule and Brayden King's AJS article looks at the idea of resource partitioning in the area of social movements and, in a sense, provides a bridge between social movements research on resource mobilization theory (RMT) stemming from McCarthy and Zald's (1977) Resource mobilization and social movements: A partial theory with work from population ecology on resource partition theory (RPT) like Carroll and Swaminathan's (2000) Why the microbrewery movement? Organizational dynamics of resource partitioning in the U.S. brewing industry.

In resource mobilization literature, there are concepts both of social movement organizations (SMI) and a higher level social movement industry (SMI) which contain multiple SMOs. In the RMT framework, SMOs compete for resources (usually participants or supports) with other SMOs. The RPT approach was largely based on the example of firms competing for customers. It argues that if the presence of several large generalists, there will be unserved areas on the "fringes" of the market that will create opportunities for a number of small specialists. Carroll and Swaminathan use the example of how high concentration into a small number of generalize beer manufacturers created fertile ground for the microbrewery movement.

Although there has been a large amount of social movements research using RMT, very little this work has focused on the SMI level. Indeed, Soule and King attempt to provide an entirely comprehensive literature of treatments at the SMI level and point to large missing issues. They conclude that very little work in RMT has attempting to bridge these two treatments and set out with the goal of "measuring competition with SMOs in SMIs."

Soule and King's treatment is largely an empirical attempt to test the two theories together. They use a dataset from a series of newspapers used in a series of other analyses by McAdam et al. They have coded version of every protest reported by the New York Times during a period from 1960 and 1986. As a result, they define SMOs based on their participation in public protest events which diverges from previous work by Minkoff and others which used listing in organizational registries instead. They limit their sample to groups which are active in New York State and look at three industries: the peace, women's and environment movements.

They also code groups based on organization's tactical and goal specialization. As a result, they have measure both of relative activity within a period of time and tactical and goal specialization.

The authors dependent variables are both tactical and goal specialization and survival. Indeed, they find that (consistent with McCarthy and Zald), industry-level competition reduces the narrowness of tactics and goals that SMOS adopt they find a negative quadratic effect. More established organizations are less likely to specialize.

They find that more specialized organizations (using either measure) are more likely to cease operation. However, when they include an interaction with SMI concentration (measured by a Herfindahl index) they find that specialists are more likely to persist in highly concentrated industries.