Power Plays: Social Movements, Collective Action and New Organizational Forms

We study the construction of new organizational forms as a political project involving collective action. We conceptualize the construction of new organizational forms as a political process in which social movements play a double-edged role: They de-institutionalize existing beliefs, norms, and values embodied in extant forms, and establish new forms that instantiate new beliefs, norms and values. We then turn to a theoretical discussion of four types of organizational and market failures from which social movements can arise. The next section of the paper investigates how organizational fields both constrain and enable social movements, as well as the organizational forms they produce, by comparing three cases under different field conditions: the establishment of alternative dispute resolution at the