Occupying Organization: Space as Organizational Resource in Occupy Wall Street

Abstract

Scholars have shown that organizations active in social movements are important because they carry out a number of critical tasks such as recruitment, coordination, and sustained contention. However, these accounts do not explain how a number of recent movements using the tactic of occupation and featuring a seemingly minimal formal organizational structure nevertheless engaged in a number of critical organizational tasks. This paper draws from in-depth ethnographic research on the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City and finds that the movement’s sustained occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan carried out four critical functions: messaging, recruitment, building commitment, and connecting participants to each other. These findings move past a general overemphasis in the literature on social movements on organizational structure, and instead point toward the utility of a perspective that accounts for the role of nonorganizational factors in the accomplishment of fundamental movement tasks.

Citation

Savio, G. (2016), "Occupying Organization: Space as Organizational Resource in Occupy Wall Street", Protest, Social Movements and Global Democracy Since 2011: New Perspectives (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Vol. 39), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 59-83. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-786X20160000039003