Who Partners? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Environmental Movement Organizations in the United States, 1970-2001.

The environmental movement industry has experienced significant structural changes over the past decades in the United States. I investigate the dynamics in the formation of the partnership ties for joint litigation between the environmental movement organizations (EMOs) operating at the national level for the period, 1970-2001. I aim to explicate (a) the structural conditions under which (a) the EMOs have formed partnership ties for environmental litigation and (b) the generative-structural processes and the differentiating processes in the partnership network structure. Analytic foci are based on the investigation of the degree distributions and the statistical network models (conditional logit). The findings suggest that the traditional EMOs have come together for environmental litigation as a contemporary movement strategy and the overall structures have become structurally hierarchical and functionally differentiated for the given period. The findings help further study structural dynamics of inter-organizational relations in both non-profit and for-profit sectors. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]