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Given the growing interest in social movements as policy agenda setters, this paper investigates the contexts within which movement groups and actors work with political elites to promote their common goals for policy change. In asking how and why so-called outsiders gain access to elites and to the policymaking process, I address several contemporary theoretical and empirical concerns associated with policy change as a social movement goal. I examine the claim that movements use a multipronged, long-term strategy by working with and targeting policymakers and political institutions on the one hand, while shaping public preferences – hearts and minds – on the other; that these efforts are not mutually exclusive. In addition, I look at how social movement organizations and actors are critical in expanding issue conflict outside narrow policy networks, often encouraged to do so by political elites with similar policy objectives. And, I discuss actors’ mobility in transitioning from institutional activists to movement and organizational leaders, and even to protesters, and vice versa. The interchangeability of roles among actors promoting social change in strategic action fields points to the porous and fluid boundaries between state and nonstate actors and organizations.

How do you get people – particularly young people – to engage with social and political issues? Activists and academics alike have been plagued by this question for some time, and answers to it have ranged from greater organizational involvement to framing. Another possibility is meeting youth where they are at; that is, connecting youth’s existing interests in popular culture with broader social problems and issues. A group that is doing just that is the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), a story-fueled nonprofit organization that turns fans into heroes. In this chapter, we trace the development of the Harry Potter fan community, the stories’ resonance with fans, and how the HPA has drawn on the community and the story for mobilization. We argue that the HPA leverages culture in two ways that are relevant for social movements and political communication scholars. The HPA is able to tap into the fan community for bloc recruitment using its ties and connections to media – in this case, the fictional story – as a point of mobilization. Additionally, the HPA is able to bloc recruit from mass society – a process they refer to as “cultural acupuncture” – by strategically connecting the story with social justice issues when cultural attention is at its peak. We conclude with a discussion of the HPA’s impact on its members and how bloc recruitment and cultural acupuncture may be relevant for other fan communities.

How do transnational social movements organize? Specifically, this paper asks how an organized community can lead a nationalist movement from outside the nation. Applying the analytic perspective of Strategic Action Fields, this study identifies multiple attributes of transnational organizing through which expatriate communities may go beyond extra-national supporting roles to actually create and direct a national campaign. Reexamining the rise and fall of the Fenian Brotherhood in the mid-nineteenth century, which attempted to organize a transnational revolutionary movement for Ireland’s independence from Great Britain, reveals the strengths and limitations of nationalist organizing through the construction of a Transnational Strategic Action Field (TSAF). Deterritorialized organizing allows challenger organizations to propagate an activist agenda and to dominate the nationalist discourse among co-nationals while raising new challenges concerning coordination, control, and relative position among multiple centers of action across national borders. Within the challenger field, “incumbent challengers” vie for dominance in agenda setting with other “challenger” challengers.

2011 marked an extraordinary year in which in cities all over the world, political protest and crowds in the street took over public space, in broad opposition to repressive state associated with neoliberalism. Since 2011, a “new global cycle of protests” has developed, characterized by public expressions of outrage, fury, and resentment. In Sofia, in early 2013, Bulgarians gathered on the streets, for the first time since 1996–1997. After the first protests in early 2013 diminished, a new and even stronger protest movement developed during the summer of 2013. The aim of this paper is to detect the peculiarities and distinctive traits that are unique to the Bulgarian Summer 2013 protests. It is argued that, although the Bulgarian Summer 2013 movement is part of the “new global cycle of protests,” the Bulgarian protests are characterized by a distinctive struggle for cultural recognition that is partly inspired by Bulgaria’s National Awakening movement that had struggled against the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.

Feminist legal activists in law schools developed what we call critical community tactics beginning in the late 1960s to bring about important cultural change in the legal educational arena. These feminist activists challenged the male-dominant culture and succeeded in making law schools and legal scholarship more gender inclusive. Here, we develop the critical community tactics concept and show how these tactics produce cultural products which ultimately, as they are integrated into the broader culture, change the cultural landscape. Our work then is a study of how social movement activists can bring about cultural change. The feminist legal activists’ cultural products and the integration of them into the legal academy provide evidence of feminist legal activist success in shifting the legal institutional culture. We conclude that critical community tactics provide an important means for social movement activists to bring about cultural change, and scholars examining social movement efforts in other institutional settings may benefit from considering the role of critical community tactics.

Public administration has struggled to develop effective practices for fostering just and sustainable responses to social, economic, and environmental crises. In this chapter, we argue that radically democratic social movements demonstrate the potential the ideal-type of Integrative Governance holds for achieving the collaborative advantage that has remained elusive to those who study and utilize traditional governance networks. Drawing from myriad studies of social movements, we demonstrate how particular social movements prefigure the philosophy and practices of this approach. Herein we focus on movements’ ethical stance of Stewardship, politics of Radical Democracy, epistemological use of Integral Knowing, and administrative practice of Facilitative Coordination, emphasizing how they use information communication technology and one-to-one organizing tactics. These practices enable social movements to integrate across the domains of sustainability and translate radically democratic modes of association from micro- to macro-scale. Thus, they shift attention from network structures, the main focus of the governance literature, to power dynamics. These movements constitute an interconnected global phenomenon, fostering solidarity across difference and prefiguring a transformation of the global political economy. Therefore, they are nascent exemplars of Integrative Governance, a more just and effective approach to global governance.