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Scholars of social movements have long called attention to the differences between those protest events that gain media coverage and those that are not covered. However, although we know much about which protest events are covered in the media, we know considerably less about the differences in prominence among those events that do gain coverage. We extend the literature on mass media coverage of social movements by examining how event characteristics affect page location within a newspaper by examining protest events covered in the New York Times between 1960 and 1990. Using multinomial logistic regression, we develop an account of the editorial decisions regarding the placement of an event within the paper's pages. We find that such decisions are most heavily influenced by the amount of conflict associated with the event (violence, property damage, arrests, and the use of contentious protest tactics). Importantly, we also find that larger events and those located in the nation's capitol are more likely to be placed on the front page, whereas corporate-targeted events are generally kept off of the front page. Overall we find that the Times editors tend to highlight disruptive protest, while downplaying anti-corporate claims-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations active in low- and moderate-income communities face a series of obstacles in their advocacy and service provision efforts: a lack of community financial and political resources, difficulties in training and retaining staff members, and maintaining member interest and commitment. How, then, do such groups continue to exist as viable - even thriving - organizations, despite these challenges? We explore this question by examining the patterns of organizational survival among a sample of poor people's social movement organizations between 1990 and 2004. More specifically, we expand upon earlier research (Walker and McCarthy, 2007) by examining how a wide variety of factors have shaped the survival patterns of such organizations: in particular, their resources and social capital. We find that those community groups that are older, wealthier, or part of an organizing network were among the most likely to survive. Importantly, we found little evidence to suggest that rural and urban community groups have differential rates of survival, although urban groups did fare slightly better. Similarly, interfaith congregation-based groups did not have a significantly higher rate of survival than individual membership organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the structuring of advocacy organizations have had noteworthy consequences for the culture of civic engagement. In recent years, commentators have noted that an increasing proportion of the third sector is composed of professionalized advocacy organizations that lobby in manner similar to institutions rather than voluntary associations. Thus, in a context in which public interest groups increasingly rely on public support from conscience constituents and check-writing patrons, the next logical step would be for such groups to rely on outside organizations such as grassroots lobbying firms to help coordinate their political campaigns. I employ data from the 1995 Encyclopedia of Organizations, and check to see which of these organizations is listed as the client of a grassroots lobbying firm. I find that although memberless groups are, in fact, significantly more likely to rely on support from a grassroots firm, there are also strong effects of membership size, as very large organizations are also likely to rely on a firm to coordinate their efforts. The effect of being a memberless organization, however, disappears when a group's issue focus is controlled. In sum, these analyses suggest that as organizations rely less upon the own internal structures for membership mobilization, these groups run the risk of becoming increasingly disconnected from their members, employing them only as a force for political action and doing less to promote their capacity for developing social capital, learning political skills, and feeling a sense of cultural identification with the organization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within social movement research, there is increased interest in how movements use repertoires of action strategically to achieve stated goals. Much attention has been paid to characteristics of the actors themselves, and there is considerable debate if more formalized actors prefer the use of more conventional protest tactics. Yet the selection of repertoires depends not only upon the type of actor or the claim that actor makes, but the specific target of protest. While the state is generally regarded as the primary granter of new benefits for movements, many movements - from organized labor to the environmental movement - target corporate, educational, and other institutions. Employing a unique dataset of all protests reported in the New York Times between 1960 and 1990, we examine how repertoire choice is, in part, contingent upon the target in question. Although educational institutions and corporations are targeted by a narrower range of social groups who make a more limited variety of protest claims, the repertoires used to pressure these two institutions are much less conventional and more diverse than those used against the state. We offer some possible explanations for this phenomenon, including the role of the state in shaping the institutionalization of insurgent protest forms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with the increasing institutionalization of social movements in the West, agents who typically operate within political and economic institutions have adopted strategies normally associated with insurgent social movements, and are increasingly likely to employ such tactics as protest, petitioning, and community organizing. This analysis builds from the idea that a two-sided diffusion process has taken place that entails both the institutionalization of insurgent activity and the adoption of insurgent tactics by those within dominant institutions. The emphasis of this paper is on the latter side of the process: the widening adoption of insurgent tactics by institutional actors. The proposed research is based on a unique set of listings for "grassroots lobbying" firms provided by the magazine Campaigns & Elections between the years 1990-2004. These sources are supplemented using a triangulated method including a number of print and online directories. Together, these listings will provide a variety of measures, including a listing of each organization's client base, its size and founding date, its fee income, and the full range of tactical methods it offers. Initial conclusions will be drawn with respect to the historical and environmental factors that shaped the development of the organizational field of grassroots lobbying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Membership-based organizations of the poor, to be effective, must survive. Although numerous analyses have considered the organizational factors that shape a social movement group's risk of mortality, no existing analyses have systematically considered this process with respect to poor people's social movement organizations (SMOs). Using a unique data source based on the successful grant application files of such groups to a major United States funding agency, we assess the likelihood of a movement organization's mortality over a period of approximately 12 years. We take into consideration factors such as an organization's membership composition, organizational age and size, diversity of previous funding sources, organizational structure, non-profit incorporation, and position within larger regional and national networks of poor people's SMOs. We find that although membership structure is related to survival, its effects work primarily by way of affiliation with organizing networks and a group's ability to garner substantial and diverse resources. We then discuss how these findings shape our understanding of the factors involved in developing an autonomous voice for the poor in political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the general issue of the relevance of life course perspectives to current theorizing about the impact of religion and religious institutions on individual lives by focusing attention on the linkage between religious mobility and the life-span development of attitudes and beliefs. We argue that theoretically both early religious socialization experiences and contemporary religious attachments should be associated with the nature of individual beliefs and attitudes. Employing data on several measures of attitudes and beliefs from the General Social Survey, we predict variation in individual differences in these measures from information on religious denominational origins and from change in religious affiliations. One of the most important patterns we isolate is one of important differences between "leavers" and "stayers" in salient dimensions of relevant attitudes and beliefs, along with a high degree of coherence between "stayers" and "converts." Persons who switch religious affiliations tend to show accentuated differences between their origins and destinations. Our results provide support for the existence of mechanisms that produce change in attitudes and beliefs via the dynamics of religious resocialization and change. This research points to a need to more thoroughly develop a model that employs both religious origins and religious destinations in the prediction of contemporary differences in attitudes and beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on team dynamics has studied the influences of cultural diversity, communication styles, status and reputation differences, authority, and the division of labor on team effectiveness and innovation. What has been largely overlooked has been a deeper investigation into how teams manage internal diversity alongside environmental complexity and are affected by contextual factors in the communities and regions in which they operate; we also know relatively little about whether similar team dynamics that are common in firms and other conventional organizations apply similarly to organizations advocating change in society (i.e. Social Movement Organizations). To address these questions, we build from a large-scale geographic database of SMO-linked teams that provides evidence of their effectiveness in generating participant fundraising, focusing on how team dynamics are conditioned by contextual factors such as the levels of community civic engagement, the role of large employers, and the socio-demographic characteristics of local residents. Evidence comes from micro-level individual and team participation data from the Movember campaign, a large-scale advocacy effort intended to raise awareness of (and funds for research on) prostate cancer. We find that teams that are homogeneous in their motivations for participation, distributed, and active on social media tend to be more effective in fundraising; zooming out to the community-level, we find that community factors related to resources, political opportunities, and the presence of large employers all increase team fundraising. This research contributes to organizational theory on team dynamics, as well as to theory and research on social movement teams and broader contextual influences on social movement organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business collective action (BCA)--the collaboration of private sector organizations and/or industries to achieve common market or non-market objectives--is a prevalent aspect of business activity (Barley, 2010; Mizruchi 2013; Walker & Rea, 2014). BCA involves a wide range of activities and occurs through a large number of unique organizational forms with trade associations as the most well known form. Yet, BCA has been largely overlooked in management research. The purpose of this symposium is to bring together a panel of distinguished scholars conducting research on business collective action to (1) discuss recent developments in the area; (2) chart out a course for future research, and; (3) engage in an interactive discussion with audience members around the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]