How Social Movements Interact with Organizations and Fields: Protest, Institutions and Beyond

The literature addressing the interaction of social movements, organizations, and institutional change has flourished in the last twenty years. This chapter provides an overview of this literature and suggests areas for future development. We review the precursors of this scholarly area, how conflict within organizations can be viewed as a movement, and how movements affect individual organizations, fields of organizations, and institutions. Then, we discuss ways that movements influence organizations in ways not currently appreciated in the literature, such as how some movements by-pass conflict by recruiting elites. We suggest that scholars in this area expand their attention to include forms of political mobilization aside from the classical dynamic of challenger-incumbent confrontations.