Doctoral Dissertation Research: Institutional Environments and Forms of Institutional Challenges

SES-0622866 Sarah SouleJeff Larson亚利桑那大学发起一项制度挑战意味着将主张（问题）、策略（如何影响）和目标（以及对谁采取行动）结合在一起。 有组织的挑战者必须将这三个要素联合收割机并重新组合成他们希望最大限度地提高效率的形式。 然而，这些形式往往持续多年，却几乎没有显示出有效的迹象。 为什么体制挑战者采用他们所采用的形式，以及他们可能在何时以及如何改变？ 通过将组织、文化和社会运动的研究结合起来，本研究对制度挑战的形式进行了社会学解释。 它提出了“社会运动场”的概念，在这个社会领域中，具有挑战性的组织将彼此视为潜在的合作者、竞争者和行动的文化模式。 这项分析利用了1999年至2005年期间在华盛顿西雅图对活跃在社会运动领域的组织进行采访时收集的数据。 多维尺度技术被用来图形化地表示随着时间的推移不断变化的分布的索赔，战术和目标，并允许测试来自新制度，组织生态学，嵌入性和政治机会理论的假设。 这项研究扩大了社会运动研究的重点，包括正式的政治机构以外的更广泛的制度环境。 通过假设社会运动领域的存在，它扩展了组织研究，组织研究已经将运动理解为其他领域边缘的边缘行为者。 更一般地说，这项研究有助于我们理解社会制度的信念和实践的构成和制度变革的基础过程。

SES-0622866Sarah SouleJeff LarsonUniversity of ArizonaWaging an institutional challenge implies bringing together a combination of claims (the issues), tactics (how will influenced be leveraged), and targets (and to whom will action be taken). Organized challengers must combine and recombine these three elements into forms that they hope will maximize effectiveness. Yet forms persist, often for many years, while showing few signs of effectiveness. Why do institutional challengers adopt the forms they do, and when and how are they likely to change? By bringing together research on organizations, culture, and social movements this study develops a sociological explanation of the forms of institutional challenges. It advances the notion of the "social movement field," a social domain within which challenging organizations look to each other as potential collaborators, competitors, and cultural models for action. The analysis draws on data collected in interviews with organizations active in the social movement field in Seattle, Washington between 1999 and 2005. Multi-dimensional scaling techniques are used to graphically represent the changing distribution of the claims, tactics, and targets over time and allow for the testing of hypotheses derived from neoinstitutional, organizational ecology, embeddedness, and political opportunity theories. The study expands the focus of social movement research to include the broader institutional environment beyond formal political institutions. By postulating the existence of a field of social movements it extends organizational research, which has understood movements to be simply marginal actors on the fringes of other fields. More generally, this research contributes to our understanding of social institutions as constitutive of beliefs and practices and the processes that underlie institutional change.