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We use collective learning theory to explain social movement strategic outcomes. Three movement strategies are conceptualized: insider, outsider, and generalist strategies. Generalist strategies are a combination of insider and outsider tactics. Movements learn in three main ways: retention of existing knowledge, adaptation based on past experiences, and via diffusion processes. Utilizing available data about the use of insider and outsider tactics in the state-level fight for woman suffrage, we find that state suffrage movements learned through retention of previously used strategies, adaptation in the face of major defeat, and through the diffusion of outsider tactics. Social movements exhibit structural inertia. Movement activists stick to what they know, unless they face a major defeat. Movement strategies are more complex and more flexible than suggested by the current focus in the social movement literature, suggesting the need to rethink the insider–outsider dichotomy.

We analyze how Brazilian Black Movement organizations and banks deployed different mechanisms like cooperation, cooptation, and confrontation that generated affirmative action initiatives in the banking sector at the beginning of this century. Black movement organizations triggered an institutional change by connecting fields and exploring a constellation of strategies. However, Brazilian banks adopted defensive strategies aiming to accommodate their interests. We find that only piecemeal change occurred, as the field’s structures – resource distribution and power – remained unscratched. We conclude by noting how the success of social movement strategies can depend upon the framing and sense-giving work that social movements conduct in their continuous jockeying activity toward incumbents.

While there are a number of theoretical traditions that study the interactions of business and society, research in these spaces has failed to sufficiently engage across these traditions. This volume aims to bridge these domains, creating a conversation among scholars working at the nexus of stakeholder theory, non-market strategy, and social movement theory. In this introductory chapter to the volume, we review the historical context of these three theoretical areas and explore how they connect in current research. We follow this discussion with our recommendations for common themes that might further integrate these subfields. Finally, we conclude the chapter with a description of each paper in the volume, highlighting how each contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of business and society, as well as the integration of our three focal subfields.

Social movement organizations increasingly engage directly with companies, rather than using the political process to regulate them. This development has spawned lively new literatures on non-market strategy and on social movements, but the two would benefit from engaging each other more effectively. A common framework and set of shared constructs would allow for collaborative theorizing on how new issues emerge into the public sphere, how interest groups mobilize, and how public opinion is formed; transaction cost analysis, with its primarily verbal theorizing, may prove a helpful starting point. Empirical knowledge is growing rapidly, yet many exciting questions remain open.

The renascent focus on strategy in social movement research has made important contributions to our understanding of organizational dynamics, but has not been systematically applied to relational dynamics within movements as a whole. We begin to bridge that gap by presenting a framework for mapping the relative strategic positions of multiple collective actors along two dimensions of strategic orientation: the depth of challenge promoted and the breadth of appeal cultivated. This framework integrates a wider range of collective actors into analyses, and identifies distinct movement roles and contributions associated with different strategic positions. More importantly, the framework facilitates analysis of the overall distribution of actors across a movement and the nature and extent of linkages among them – what we refer to as strategic articulation. Drawing on a breadth of secondary research, we identify characteristics of movement distributions that facilitate stronger articulation and draw out their implications for intramovement relational dynamics – such as the balance between cooperation and competition, and the extent to which flanks are integrated or isolated.

The sociological and socio-legal literatures on social movements have identified three main types of “legal framing” in contemporary social movement discourse: collective rights framing, individual rights framing, and nationalistic legal framing. However, it is unclear from the current research how movement actors decide which of these framing strategies to use, under what circumstances, and to what effect. In this article, I offer a model for future empirical research on legal framing, which (1) distinguishes legal framing by its argumentative structure, ideological content, and remedy; and (2) analyzes how a social movement’s internal culture and institutional environment constrain the symbolic utility of particular legal frames and shape the movement’s legal framing strategy. I argue that the alternative approach offered here will help theorize how social movements strike a balance between the institutional pressure to reproduce dominant ideologies and the internal pressure to reform those ideologies. This perspective thus helps build socio-legal theory on the relationship between legal framing and social subordination, and on the conditions under which movements will be able to inflect legal language with insurgent social movement values.

Activists make strategic decisions about how to pursue their claims, but strategy is hard to study and the topic is underdeveloped theoretically. Here, we contribute to the developing academic literature on social movement strategy by offering a theoretical framework that emphasizes three distinct, albeit interrelated, movement choices: arenas of action, advocacy tactics, and demands. This framework allows us to infer strategy at the movement level through the analysis of events data. Using events data from the New York Times from 1959 to 1996, in conjunction with historical accounts of abortion politics in the United States, we analyze the development of the strategies of the anti-abortion and abortion rights movements. We demonstrate the utility of this framework, and show how movement strategies are affected by both political opportunities and the actions of countermovements, whose activists respond to the same political opportunities. We conclude with a discussion of the complications of assessing movement strategy and call for more research on the topic.

Within the legal mobilization framework, sociolegal scholars identify elite support as a key indirect benefit of litigation. Court-centered strategies generate support from influential state and private actors, and this support helps a movement to achieve its goals. Instead of assuming elite support to be a decidedly positive step in a movement’s trajectory, a more contextual analysis situates elite support as a complex, dynamic factor that movement advocates attempt to manage. Such support may at times create political and legal risks that jeopardize a movement's progress. My analysis of the marriage equality movement suggests a tentative typology with which to approach elite support: Elite support appears generally productive for a movement when it leads to action consistent with the movement's strategy. On the other hand, elite support may pose significant risk when it prompts action inconsistent with the movement's strategic plan, even if it is consistent with the movement's substantive positions.

Those interested in studying the relationship between law and social movements have a wide variety of theoretical and empirical research to draw on, from both social movement theory and legal studies. Yet these disparate studies of law and social movements rarely engage with each other. In this chapter, we review current developments in research on law and social movements and summarize the chapters in this special issue. These chapters offer insight into the multivalent nature of law for social movements, the factors shaping movements’ strategic engagements with the legal system, the relationship between law and identity for social movement activists, and the complex role that cause lawyers play in social movement processes and dynamics.

This paper examines the divergent reactions of the two most prominent Turkish-Islamic movements to a crisis in the Parliament that centered on an elected Deputy's right to wear the headscarf. After the crisis, the National Outlook movement protested, while the Gülen movement became more conciliatory. Drawing on the Multi-Institutional Politics model, we argue that conflicting views on the nature of domination explain the disparate forms of collective action taken by the two movements. We introduce the concept “strategic nonconfrontation” as a type of nonviolent strategy to help understand the Gülen's movement's actions. We expand the nonviolent civil resistance literature by arguing that strategic nonconfrontation as a form of nonviolent resistance only becomes visible when we move beyond an exclusive focus on state power to understand the ways in which multiple systems of authority and power are constituted in society and perceived by activists. We analyze the discourse in newspapers produced by the movements in order to examine how each movement understood and defined the target of action and how that influenced their subsequent strategies.