Social Movement Organizational Collaboration: Networks of Learning and the Diffusion of Protest Tactics, 1960-1995* Dan J. Wang Department of Sociology Stanford University
[email protected] and Sarah A. Soule Graduate School of Business Stanford University
[email protected] December 15, 2011 Word Count: 13,073 * Direct written correspondence to the first author at the Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94304. This research was supported by grants to the second author from the National Science Foundation (SBR # 9709337, SBR # 9874000). We thank Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Susan Olzak for their role in collecting the data used in this paper. We also thank the members of the Organizational Behavior group at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the members of the Organizations and Networks Workshop and Social Movements and Political Sociology Workshop at Stanford University for comments on earlier iterations of this paper. Finally, we thank Steve Barley, Linus Dahlander, Amir Goldberg, Woody Powell, Craig Rawlings, Jesper Sørensen, Kurt Sandholtz, Sidney Tarrow, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript. ABSTRACT This paper examines the diffusion of protest tactics between social movement organizations (SMOs). Drawing on organizational learning theory, we argue that knowledge about specific tactics diffuses between social movement organizations via their co-engagement in protest events. Using a longitudinal network dataset of organizations and their participation in protest events between 1960 and 1995, we adapt novel methodological techniques for dealing with selection and measurement bias in networks analysis, which comes in two forms—1) the mechanism that renders some organizations more likely to select into collaborations than others, and 2) the notion that tactical diffusion is not a result of collaboration, but rather is an artifact of homophily or some form of indirect learning.