Doctoral Dissertation Research: Institutional Environments and Forms of Institutional Challenges

面对一个制度性的挑战意味着要将诉求（问题）、策略（如何利用影响）和目标（将对谁采取行动）结合起来。有组织的挑战者必须将这三个要素结合并重新组合成他们希望能够最大化效果的形式。然而，形式仍然存在，通常持续多年，而几乎没有显示出有效的迹象。为什么制度挑战者会采用他们所采用的形式，他们何时以及如何可能改变？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“社会运动领域”的概念，这是一个社会领域，在这个领域中，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。该分析利用了1999年至2005年期间在华盛顿州西雅图对活跃于社会运动领域的组织进行采访时收集的数据。多维尺度技术用于图形化地表示诉求、策略和目标随时间的变化分布，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。该研究扩大了社会运动研究的重点，将正式政治机构之外的更广泛的制度环境包括在内。通过假设社会运动领域的存在，它扩展了组织研究，后者将运动理解为其他领域边缘的简单边缘行动者。更广泛地说，这项研究有助于我们理解社会制度是信仰和实践的组成部分，也是制度变革的基础。

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.