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Transformations within religious institutions and traditions often occur via conflict and internal social movements. Yet previous research on such phenomena has missed some important sociological insights because it has not incorporated methodological and theoretical resources from other sociological literatures dealing with social movements and organizational change and conflict. This paper presents a comprehensive critical review of extant research on intradenominational conflict and identifies and describes five shortcomings in this literature. As a corrective, we suggest that analysts focus on organizations and conflict events as units of analysis, pay more attention to ideal factors in conflict, examine relationships between internal and external variables, and compare conflicts across organizations and across time. These alternative methodological recommendations are related to three new theoretical directions in other sociological subfields: resource mobilization theory's focus on intermediate levels of social life, the "new institutionalist" emphasis on how organizational actors respond to their environments, and the recent work on the interplay of "schema? and "resources" in social structure. Such new directions address questions that were not accessible via earlier approaches. They also begin to build important bridges between the sociology of religion and other sociological subfields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper compares political activists from four community protest organizations, formed in response to the March 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Using survey data, newsletters, and fieldwork, we document the existence of two separate paths to protest involvement. In two communities, recruitment was less likely to occur along the lines of established social networks. Instead, utilitarian alliances grounded on shared grievances were constructed. A second distinct path accounted for activism in two larger communities where many of the activists reported previous protest experience. In these communities, existing friendship networks were utilized. Two years after the accident, significant network and ideological differences between the groups persisted. We suggest that analysts work to specify the conditions for different paths to activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]