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Article Excerpt
CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION have long been of central concern to social movement scholars. Such processes are commonly examined in light of specific questions about the emergence of social movements (McAdam, 1999; Tarrow, 1998; Morris, 1984) and organizational maintenance (Taylor, 1989; Rupp and Taylor, 1987). For example, what are the changes that need to take place in the political opportunity structure before a movement can get started (McAdam, 1999; Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak and Giugni, 1992; Tilly, 1978)? What kinds of organizational transformations are most salient if a movement is to successfully mobilize a supportive and enduring constituency (McCarthy, 1996)? Other writers have chosen to focus on movement maintenance, addressing the question of how movements and movement organizations transform themselves for long-term survival, especially when the larger political and media context is otherwise unreceptive (Staggenborg, 1996; 1996; Taylor, 1989). Clearly these and related questions of social movement change and transformation have played, and continue to play, a pivotal role in our understanding of social movements.
Yet recently there has been a subtle shift in the direction taken by social movement researchers. Rather than focus exclusively on why movements emerge and how they maintain themselves, researchers are turning their attention to movement outcomes (McAdam and Su, 2002; Giugni, McAdam and Tilly, 1999; Della Porta and Diani, 1999: Chap. 9; Andrews, 1997). Framed as an exploration into "how movements matter," this shift allows a reformulation of some older questions of movement dynamics. Instead of looking at how external and/or internal change facilitates (or inhibits) movement emergence and maintenance, the goal now is to untangle a variety of social movement impacts on a host of individual actors, organizations and institutions. Put differently, the consequences of social movement activity have taken front and centre stage, a shift that provides a much-needed addition to what we already know about social movement causes.
The major aim of this paper is to contribute to this rapidly growing research on movement outcomes. It does so by revisiting an important but often overlooked 1978 article by Mayer Zald and Michael Berger on the impact of social movements on organizational change (for an important exception, see Lyng and Kurtz, 1985). Reviving Zald and Berger's organizational change typology makes sense, particularly in the context of what has been one of the dominant views of organizational change. The Weber-Michels thesis still remains influential in discussions of such change (Voss and Sherman, 2000; Rucht, 1999; Duffhues and Felling, 1989; Brym, 1980). This thesis holds that as change-oriented organizations mature they gradually ossify into conservative, status quo-supporting organisms more concerned with their own survival than with working for change. Zald and Berger challenge this central idea by arguing that as organizations age a myriad of different outcomes are possible.
This paper uses the increased politicization of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (CSAA) during the early 1970s around the issue of Canadianization as a case study in organizational change. As a professional organization serving the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, the CSAA came of age at a time of tremendous political change both on and off university campuses. As the women's movement grew in strength, for instance, it influenced the relationship between the CSAA, its female members and the larger community (cf. Maticka-Tyndale and Drakich, 1992). On campus, one need only point to the CSAA's seventeen-year censure and boycott of the Simon Fraser Department of Politics, Sociology and Anthropology to realize that campus unrest was influencing the way the CSAA interacted with the university community (cf. Rush, 1992; Jones, 1992).
The late 1960s also saw an increase in expressions of Canadian cultural nationalism. More specifically, there was a small but influential movement to "Canadianize" educational and cultural institutions in Canada (Cormier, 2004; Edwardson, 2003; Granatstein, 1996: Chap. 8; Hiller, 1979). The debates that took place around Canadianization have been already well discussed by Brym (1986; 1989), Hiller (1979; 1982) and Hofley (1992). Here I am interested in the impact the movement had on the CSAA. I use Zald and Berger's notion of bureaucratic insurgency to explain how the CSAA was transformed from an association concerned primarily with the professional interests of sociologists and anthropologists into a major campaigner for Canadianization. First, I provide a brief theoretical discussion of Zald and Berger's idea of organizational change, focussing on their notion of bureaucratic insurgency. I then describe the organizational factors that made the CSAA susceptible to a shift in policy. From there I outline the process in which several Canadianization supporters within the CSAA pushed forward a new agenda for the association. The eventual outcome is that by the mid-1970s the CSAA took a more engaged stance on issues relating to Canadianization. I rely on archival (1) and interview (2) material as evidence of these processes.
Bureaucratic Insurgency and Organizational Change
The Weber-Michels thesis of organizational change is by now well understood. Max Weber contributed the notion that with time social change organizations experience a "routinization of charisma." As an organization ages, external and internal pressures act on it, forcing charismatic leaders to conform to cognately emergent bureaucratic structures (Weber, 1978: 235-50, 341-54). Weber pointed to an overall shift towards organizational conservatism in this process, as charismatic hard-liners are forced to accommodate a rapidly developing organizational consensus. Robert Michels identified similar processes, renaming them the "conservative basis of organization" (Michels, 1962: 333). Like Weber, Michels believed that organizations move from pursuing social change agendas to more conservative ones. Increased organizational and ideological ossification is the end result:
[t]he history of the international labor movement furnishes innumerable examples of the manner in which the party becomes increasingly inert as the strength of its organization grows: it loses its revolutionary impetus, becomes sluggish, not in respect to action alone, but also in the sphere of thought.... More and more invincible becomes its aversion to all aggressive action (Michels, 1962: 337).
Both Weber and Michels' views converge on the notion that organizations have an innate tendency to change from loosely organized, dynamic organizations led by a charismatic leader--or leaders--to centralized, bureaucratized and conservative ones (cf. Piven and Cloward, 1979).
As influential as this particular model of organizational transformation has been, it is not without its detractors. Some have argued that the model is over-deterministic. Barnes (1987), for example, maintains that both Weber and Michels were too forceful in stating categorically that all organizations naturally go through the same process of increased conservatism, centralization and bureaucratization. She counters with examples whereby an organization, well on its way to becoming thoroughly controlled by a small group of elites, suddenly shifted direction, and organizational control was regained by the general membership. Others have shown that it is not necessarily the case that social movement organizations change in the strictly linear way suggested by the Weber-Michels thesis (Tarrow, 1998; Brym, 1980). Tarrow (1998) for instance, maintains that an organization's power can continually fluctuate from "control-by-oligarchy" to "control-by-democracy," analogous to the cycles of protest he identified in his work on Italian protest.
Still others believe that while the Weber-Michels thesis is not entirely wrong-headed in its assessment of the transformation of some organizations, as a general theory it is incomplete and therefore in need of revision (cf. Rucht, 1999). As early as the 1960s, Zald and Ash Garner (1994) observed a variety of ways a social movement organization can be transformed: it could foster long-lasting coalitions with other organizations (cf. Staggenborg, 1986; 1991), it could develop fractional splits and divisions (cf. Whittier, 1995), it might increase its radicalism rather than decrease it, or it might disappear altogether (cf. Voss, 1996). It is clear that there exist numerous possibilities for social movement organizations in the process of transformation; the iron grip of bureaucratic and oligarchic control is only one.
In an often overlooked 1978 article entitled "Social movements in organizations: Coup d'etat, bureaucratic insurgency, and mass movement," Mayer Zald and Michael Berger provide yet another option for analysing organizational change. They argue that there are situations where the priorities, goals and actions of an existing organization are radically shifted, pushing the organization as a whole in a new and more radical direction. Clearly, if instances could be found where this process had taken place, we would have reason to challenge Weber-Michels' linear model. For Zald and Berger, it is possible for an otherwise centrally controlled bureaucratic organization, with a more or less conservative social agenda, to be overtaken and radically altered in its daily operations, organizational structure and political goals. The question then shifts from: what is...
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