Model for Analyzing the Strategic Options
published as "Resource Mobilization and Strategy: A Model for Analyzing
Social Movement Organization Actions" in The Dynamics of Social
Movements ed. by Mayer N. Zald and John D. McCarthy, Cambridge, Mass.:
Winthrop Publishers, 1979, pp. 167-189. Revised version published in Social
Movements of the Sixties and Seventies ed. by Jo Freeman, New York:
Longman, 1983, pp. 193-210; Waves of Protest: Social Movements Since
the Sixties, ed. by Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson, Lanham, Md.:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1999, pp. 241-265.
decisions about how a movement will act are not always made by a leader,
or even by a small committee of experts, because most movements are not
subject to hierarchical control. Often, major strategic decisions flow
from circumstances or are made and executed by an otherwise insignificant
group of protestors whose success is then emulated by others. For example,
the 1960 sit-in at a North Carolina lunch counter was planned by a few
college students, not the leaders of the major civil rights organizations.
While these leaders were quick to see its uses, the idea of sitting-in
spread largely through the media and informal communications networks
of students. On the other hand, the decision in 1955 to boycott public
buses in Montgomery, Alabama was made by the black community leaders of
that city and organized through the churches. This article presents a
model within which strategic considerations, both planned and spontaneous,
leader-directed and grass-roots, can be analyzed. It highlights the resources
available to a social movement organization at a given time, the limitations
on the use of these resources, and how the resources can potentially be
Since a movement relies so heavily on people resources, most activities
involve their deployment. If a lot of time is demanded to attend meetings,
there may be a lot less time available to do work. If the standard of
commitment leads to acts which result in arrests, movement resources may
be quickly diverted to fighting legal battles. Groups that have little
access to specialized resources through their own constituencies must
frequently spend other resources developing conscience constituencies
to supply their specialized needs. Even this can backfire. The Southern
Civil Rights Movement effectively mobilized young white students to supply
specialized resources, especially northern public attention. But within
two years the movement decided that their value was had been expended
and that their presence interfered with local people developing organizing
12.1/Resources Mobilized by the Early Feminist Movement
12.1 compares the resources available to the younger and older branches
of the women's movement in the early 1970s. We next have to ask where
they come from, and what are the costs of mobilizing them.
The reason many different movements tend to appear during the same historical
period is not because different groups just happen to discover their grievances
at the same time, or even because the example of one group alerts others
to opportunities to alleviate their own grievances. Rather, it happens because
the resources one movement generates can be used for cognate movements.
Skills gained in one movement are readily transferable to another. One movement's
conscience constituency can become the next movement's beneficiary constituency.
The civil rights movement contributed significantly to the emergence of
many other movements for just this reason.
It is easy to think of resources as abstract entities that, like money, can be used for almost anything if enough are available. Unfortunately, movement resources are not liquid. Instead, all resources - even money - have constraints on their uses. These constraints differ, depending on the source, but their existence acts as a kind of filer between resources and SMOs. These filters are so important that they can totally redirect the resources of a movement, much as a prism does a beam of light. And it is these filtered resources that an SMO has to work with, not the raw product.
The two branches of the women's movement drew upon similar if not identical resources, in comparable if not identical amounts, from people with closely matched class and educational backgrounds. Yet one branch formed numerous national associations, many of which opened Washington offices to lobby the government. The other branch organized numerous small groups whose primary tasks were education, personal conversion, and service projects. The younger branch of the movement could have formed a national organization at its 1968 conference, yet it didn't even make plans for an annual conference. It could have used the IPS office in Washington as a base from which to put pressure on the government, but it never even discussed such a possibility. It could have organized mass demonstrations, like NOW did in 1970, but took to WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) hexes instead. Such divergence of energies cannot be explained unless one looks at the constraints, conscious and unconscious, on the resources available for action.
I have identified five different categories of constraints, and more could be found. Among these are: values, past experiences, a constituency's reference group, expectations, and relations with target groups. The first and the last in the list have been identified by others,2 while the middle three have either been overlooked or referred to only vaguely.
Since these terms don't really require definitions. their filtering function can best be explored by applying them to the two branches of the women's liberation movement. Both the age difference and the political networks from which the two branches emerged provided their members with different values, experiences, reference groups, expectations, and relations with target groups. These differences strongly influenced the kind of SMOs created, and the SMO structure in turn joined with these filters in a synergistic effect that molded the strategic possibilities.
Early participants in the younger branch came largely from the radical community, and their values reflected that community's interpretation of basic American concerns.3 The radical movement's concepts of participatory democracy, equality, liberty, and community emphasized that everyone should participate in the decisions that affected her life, and that everyone's contribution was equally valid.4 These values led easily to the idea that hierarchy was bad because it gives some people power over others and does not allow everyone's talents to develop. The belief was that all people should be able to share, criticize, and learn from one another's ideas - equally. Any structure, or any leader who might influence this equal sharing, was automatically bad.5 The logical conclusion to be drawn from this train of thought - that all structure and all leadership are intrinsically wrong - was not initially articulated. But the potential was clearly there, and it did not take long for the idea of leaderless, structureless groups to emerge and eventually dominate this branch of the movement.
The adherence to these values was premised on the assumption that all women were equally capable of making decisions, carrying out actions, performing tasks, and forming policy.6 This assumption could be made because the women involved had little experience in democratic organizations other than those of the New Left where they saw dominance for its own sake, competition for positions in the leadership hierarchy, and "male ego tripping" rule the day.7 They had felt similar domination and control for its own sake in the social structures - primarily school and family - of which they had been part. The idea that there was some relationship between authority and responsibility, between organization and equal participation, and between leadership and self-government was not within their realm of experience.
The founders and early activists of NOW had gained their political experience in party politics, various bureaucracies, and the civil rights and labor movements. They felt structure in organizations was a help, not a hindrance; they were highly task oriented, found parliamentary procedure a convenience, were trained in public relations, and did not feel it necessary to live out egalitarian ideals in their own organization. Getting equality was more important than living it.
NOW's concept of a well-run organization was not one in which everyone participated, but one in which everyone contributed to the tasks of the movement. The concept of democracy was not one in which everyone had a say in all decisions, but one in which any who wanted to could have a say. Equality meant equal respect, not equal influence. Leadership was good, not bad.
The more immediate experiences of the early participants in the two branches also had an effect on their initial choice of tactics. Both had had experience with mass demonstrations, and both had had experience with the press. But radical women shared with radical men a certain jadedness about the value of mass demonstrations. They certainly hadn't ended the war, and they appeared to absorb enormous amounts of time and energy to proclaim messages that fell on deaf ears. Instead, what was needed were actions that would catch people's attention by challenging old ideas and raising new ones. The women in the younger branch did this creatively with WITCH hexes, zap actions, and a "freedom trash can" at the 1968 Miss America contest into which "instruments of female oppression" were tossed. Ironically, while women used these tactics to catch the eye of the public and press, they didn't want to talk to the press. In fact, they were afraid of the press, and since they had access to the underground press, they didn't feel an acute need to appear in the establishment press. They had participated in so many demonstrations that were reported inaccurately that they did not feel their words would be reported the way they wanted them to be.
NOW women would have felt much too inhibited to engage in WITCH hexes (they thought they were silly) but felt no inhibitions about the press. Many were PR professionals and knew how to present their case, as well as not to expect too much. They were also willing to demonstrate, even though many knew the days of mass action were probably over. The first contemporary feminist picket line was organized by NOW in December 1967 to protest the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's (EEOC) inaction on rewriting their want-ad guidelines.8 NOW members had learned the uses of pickets and parades from civil rights and union activities in which most had engaged. They did not give them up even when some of the their "more respectable" members left in disgust to form the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL).
These direct-action tactics, and NOW's other activities, were not just
to catch the public eye but to pressure the government. These tactics
were part of an overall campaign that also used letter writing, court
suits, and meetings with government officials. Many early NOW members
had engaged in lobbying for other groups, and it seemed perfectly logical
to continue the same types of activities for a new movement. Besides,
the initial impetus for NOW's formation had come from the EEOC's reluctance
to enforce the provision in Title VII prohibiting sex discrimination,
so pressuring for equal enforcement had to be a priority.
This kind of thinking meant actions that "blew people's minds"
were OK, but picketing the EEOC to change its guidelines was not.
Gerlach and Hine have emphasized the importance of opposition in maintaining
movement cohesion.15 The opposition
of radical men to C-R not only created a high degree of group solidarity
for the women engaged in it but strongly reinforced their belief that
it was the way to be radical. As a result, C-R practically took over
the younger branch of the movement as its sole raison d'être.
Analyzing the relations of feminists with their target groups is a little
tricky, because first one has to decide what the targets were. For the women
of NOW, WEAL, and similar organizations, the targets were concrete and identifiable.
They were laws, institutions, discriminatory practices, and the people who
could affect these things. In the younger branch, the first major debate
was over just who the target was. Was it men or male-dominated institutions?
Was it capitalism or patriarchy? Even when the women of a particular group
knew which of these targets they wanted to attack, they were usually distant
enough to raise some difficult strategic questions. For this reason, the
usual targets became those much closer to home, the men in one's life and
the women in one's group. And, contrary to what other sociologists have
said,16 the fact that feminists had
generally close and intimate relations to both these targets did not keep
them from using some very coercive tactics.
There are two heuristic models of SMO structure in the literature. One is the centralized, hierarchical organization with a well-developed division of labor.17 The other model is the decentralized, segmented, reticulate movement with no real center and at best a simple division of labor.18 Strategically, the former seems to be better for attaining short-range goals involving institutional change in which organizational survival is not the dominant concern. The latter appears better for attaining personal changes in orientation and attitude through recruitment and conversion in which organizational survival is a dominant concern.
The centralized movement devotes minimal resources to group maintenance needs in order to focus them on goal attainment. However, this is somewhat reinforcing; short-range goal attainment in turn becomes a means of maintaining group cohesion. The decentralized movement, on the other hand, is compelled to devote major resources to group maintenance. As long as it defines its major task as "people changing," this too is reinforcing because maintaining a strong sense of group solidarity is the means through which personal changes are accomplished. These simple, heuristic relationships work out fine as long as a movement group is conscious of the way in which its structure limits its strategic possibilities. A source of problems for many movements is the frequent attempt to pursue strategies for which their structures are inappropriate.
As Zald and Ash19 among others, have pointed out, the most viable movement is one that has several organizations that can play different roles and pursue different strategic possibilities. Thus the growth, development, and demise of a movement are not the same as the growth, development, and demise of the individual organizations within it. Most contemporary movements in this country have had complex structures and consequently fit both heuristic models. For example, the younger branch of the women's liberation movement was almost a paradigmatic example of the decentralized model, as it had no national organizations and consciously rejected hierarchy and a division of labor. The older branch had several national organizations that reticulated only slightly with one another. None fits the classic hierarchical model perfectly, but they are close enough for analytic purposes.
Neither branch of the movement deliberately created a structure specifically geared to accomplish its desired goals. Instead, the founders of both branches drew upon their previous political experience. Women of the older branch had been trained in and used the traditional forms of political action. They were familiar with national associations, and that is what they created. Women of the younger branch inherited the loose, flexible, person-oriented attitude of the youth and student movements, as well as these movements' disillusionment with traditional politics and traditional forms of political action. They strove for something new - and radical.
Once these different structures were created, they in turn molded the strategic possibilities - occasionally contrary to the professed desires of at least some of their members. Both branches made some efforts to change their structures, yet both remained essentially the same as they began. Organizational structure cannot be changed at will. What arises in response to one set of concerns in effect sets the agenda for what the movement can do next.
The younger branch was an excellent example of this molding effect because the original intention of its founders was not consciousness raising but radical action. C-R was supposed to be a means to an end, not the major task of the movement. Nonetheless, the loose, fluid, supportive C-R group was so successful that it became the model for all other groups. People resisted the idea that different movement tasks required different structures, or for that matter any structure. Instead, they elevated the operating principles of the small group to the status of feminist ideology, making it virtually impossible to adopt any other structure.
I have discussed the problems derived from "the tyranny of structurelessness" elsewhere20 and will not go into them here. Suffice it to say that the activities that could be developed by this branch of the movement were limited to those that could be performed by small homogeneous groups without major divisions of labor. These activities were primarily educational and/or service projects that could be set up on a local level. Consequently, the younger branch of the movement formed numerous women's centers, abortion counseling services, bookstores, liberation schools, day care centers, film and tape production units, research projects, and rock-and-roll bands. The production of a feminist publication was one of the most feasible projects for a small group to handle, and hundreds were developed. But there was never any national coordination of these projects; many were repetitive or competitive; and they frequently became closed, encapsulated units whose primary purpose was to provide a raison d'être for their members to stay together.
The molding effect is less obvious with older branch organizations because
there was a greater congruence between strategic intentions and organizational
structure, but it is there nonetheless. NOW and the National Women's Political
Caucus (NWPC) provide an interesting study in contrasting problems. NOW
was created to be a national lobbying organization, and initially that is
what it was. From the beginning it required national dues to be paid by
all members, whether they were members of chapters or not. Chapters in turn,
apart from paying dues, were largely autonomous units. After Congressional
passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, it gradually became apparent
that a mid-level structure of state organizations was necessary to press
for ratification in the states. Neither individual chapters nor the national
organization was capable of being effective on the state level. The creation
of state organizations proved to be a difficult, time-consuming task. In
unratified states they facilitated lobbying efforts. But in ratified states
they generally undermined the autonomy of the local chapters by creating
a new level of bureaucracy that made it difficult for chapters to act.
The NWPC was created in 1972 in order to try to elect more women to office. Modeled on the American political party, it created state organizations from the beginning but did not require national dues. This hampered its effectiveness on the national level, and it too went through a difficult period of trying to establish, and collect, national dues from recalcitrant chapters that preferred to concentrate their resources on state legislatures and local elections.
Another organization, WEAL, changed its strategy to fit its organization. Founded in 1968 in Ohio as a split-off from NOW, WEAL was intended to be a small, powerful organization for professional, executive, and influential women around the country. Over time, it discovered that a significant percentage of its membership was in Washington, D.C., and that its members there had some influence on Washington politicians. Therefore, it redefined its primary purpose to become a national lobbying organization whose primary resource was not numbers but expertise.
EXPECTATIONS ABOUT POTENTIAL TARGETS
As an SMO searches for effective actions there are three factors it must consider about potential targets and the external environment. They are (1) the structure of available opportunities for action, (2) social-control measures that might be taken and (3) the effect on bystander publics.
As Schattschneider has pointed out, "The function of institutions is to channel conflict; institutions do not treat all forms of conflict impartially, just as football rules do not treat all forms of violence with indiscriminate equality.21 Nor do political institutions treat all demands from all groups impartially. Instead, institutions and the "rules of the game" operate as a filter to eliminate some and redirect others. Because SMOs are generally dissident groups, they frequently lack the resources to exploit the "usual" opportunities for action. Thus the success of such a movement is often determined by its ingenuity at finding less obvious leverage points from which to pressure its targets, creating new avenues for action, and/or effectively substituting resources it has in abundance for those it does not have.
Finding leverage points within the political system generally requires some intimate knowledge of its workings and thus is an alternative available only to those not totally alienated from the system. Ralph Nader's "Raiders" have been very effective at finding leverage points. Affirmative action in higher education became a public issue when a faculty woman sought a remedy for her failure to get a particular job for which she was qualified and found that none of the antidiscrimination laws covered her situation. Her discovery of Executive Order 11375, which required affirmative action for sex as well as race, reflected the fact that such leverage points can be found as much through luck as through knowledge.22
Creating new avenues is a far more common form of action for dissident movements, especially when they have minimal knowledge of or access to the political system. The civil rights and student movements very effectively attracted public attention to their causes through nonviolent demonstrations that prevented people from engaging in "business as usual" without so flagrantly violating norms of behavior that the demonstrators could be dismissed as pathological deviants. Unfortunately, such tactics are usually "creative" only when they are new; their effect wears off over time. Sometimes such tactics do become institutionalized, as did the strike and boycott, which were originally developed by the labor movement. But at other times they simply lose their impact. The arrest in 1977 of over a thousand people protesting at a nuclear plant at Seabrook, New Hampshire, made less of a public impression than the "freedom ride" buses of the fifties or the campus arrests of the sixties.
Resource substitution is a particularly common strategy for social movements that want to utilize institutional channels but do not possess the usual resources for their utilization. Groups that cannot command large voting blocks to elect favorable candidates can achieve equivalent access by supplying the time and commitment of their members as campaign workers. This has been successfully done by the gay rights movement to gain support from local politicians and other groups.
Not infrequently, the structure of available opportunities for action presents no feasible alternatives to some SMOs. This may be because a particular SMO constituency is too alienated or too ignorant to take advantage of what is available, as is the case with movements of the seriously deprived. It may also be because the particular resources of a movement do not fit the channels available for action, that the SMO's structure or values do not allow it to participate in those channels, or that the available channels are not capable of dealing with a movement's demands. In theory the younger branch of the women's liberation movement was just as capable as the older branch of mobilizing its supporters for lobbying activities, but the constraints on the uses of its people resources, as well as its small-group structure, made this opportunity for action unfeasible.
When there are no feasible opportunities, movements do not simply go away; instead, discontent takes forms other than political action. Many riots are now seen as a form of political activity. Withdrawal movements of varying kinds are common when dissident groups feel highly alienated. These withdrawal movements may be "apolitical" in the sense that their members identify their activities as spiritual or cultural. Yet many redefine their politics in "alternative" forms. When the New Left turned to "alternative institutions," it saw these as a new means of pursuing its politics, not a rejection of politics. As has happened with communes and some other leftist activities, however, it is not uncommon for what began as an alternative political institution to become an apolitical one. In this way some movements can be "cooled out" so that what began as a means of making public demands becomes a refuge for seeking personal solutions.
When a movement does appear to find successful avenues for action, it generally
encounters social control measures of one sort or other. These may suppress
a movement, but not always -- direct opposition is a two-edged sword. As
Gurr and Gerlach and Hine23 have illustrated,
some opposition is necessary to maintain movement viability. A solid opponent
can do more to unify a group and heal its splits than any other factor.
Many of the student sit-ins of the sixties would have never got off the
ground if the university authorities hadn't brought in the police. But even
if the enemy is not so blatant, it is the perceived and not the real opposition
that is important. Movements that neither perceive nor experience opposition
find it difficult to maintain the degree of commitment necessary for a viable,
active organization. Often opposition will be blown up larger than life
because to do so serves the needs of group cohesion.
Nevertheless, the relationship between opposition (real or perceived) and movement strength is not linear. Effective application of social control measures can kill a movement; so can completely ignoring it. Similarly, a perceived opposition of great strength can effectively destroy a movement by convincing people that their actions are futile. In the 1970s, leftist and feminist groups developed many infiltration and conspiracy theories to explain their internal problems. Their initial effect was to heighten commitment against a pernicious enemy. But these theories also created suspicion and undermined the mutual trust necessary for movement survival. An opposition that contributes to commitment in the short range can kill it in the long run.
The degree and success of opposition affects not only the movement but the relevant bystander publics. Bystander publics are not direct targets of a movement's actions, but they can affect the outcome of these actions. As a general rule, movements try to turn bystander publics into conscience constituencies that will supply the movement with additional resources and prevent them from becoming antagonists who will discourage targets from responding to movement demands.24 Movements that cannot find leverage points are very dependent on the reactions of bystander publics, and it is not uncommon for demonstrations to be used, not to directly affect a particular target, but to gain sympathy and support from other parties. The southern civil rights movement's used nonviolent demonstrations in expectation that an overtly violent social control response would attract third-party support. When it brought these same tactics to the North where the bystander publics were the targets, it largely failed.
The civil rights movement's failure to appreciate that tactics viable in one area wouldn't work in another is a common one. SMO's plan their actions on the basis of expectations about potential target and bystander public response. These expectations are initially derived from prior experiences, or those of cognate groups. Once actions are initiated, direct feedback becomes relevant. When an activity proves successful, it is generally repeated without analyzing the context that permitted that success.
For reasons already discussed, the younger branch of the women's liberation movement was not interested in ordinary pressure tactics aimed at political institutions. Even if it had been, none of its participants had the experience in this kind of action necessary to know how to do it. They did have experience with zap actions, and did several of these during the first years of the movement's existence. While the actions were approved by other movement participants, they did not receive favorable feedback from the public at which they were aimed. Usually they were ignored; and when not ignored, they were ridiculed. Had this been the only available outlet for their energies, zap actions might have continued.
In the meantime, consciousness raising was systemized and spread widely. Feedback from this process was immediate and favorable. Women recruited into C-R groups spoke frequently of the emotional release they got from the groups, and kept coming back. C-R was sufficiently popular to become the prevalent activity. Its success altered the movement's immediate targets from the general public to that of the women in the C-R groups. Other younger branch activities became the magnet by which to attract new recruits into C-R groups.
In the meantime, the older branch maintained its basic, successful strategy of institutional pressure, though it expanded its repertoire beyond the initial one of lobbying. While some organizations within the older branch, such as NOW, added C-R activities, they did so as a membership service and not as a strategic device. This branch of the movement has been very attuned to the structure of available opportunities for action. It has paid much less attention to actual and potential social control measures and bystander publics. Nonetheless, it is still effected by both these factors; its leaders are merely unaware of how.
In conclusion, some flaws in the model presented should be pointed out. The most glaring one is that it is not a dynamic model. It does not explain changes over time in any of its components or in strategic outcomes. Rather, it enables one to look at an SMO at one point in time to determine the resources available for mobilization and the potential ways in which these resources can be deployed. In addition, the model ignores fortuitous circumstances that might benefit a particular movement's goals and the accidents of history that are often so crucial in a movement's success or failure. Fortuitous resources, as well as accidents, certainly have an effect on final outcome, but unless their availability can be reasonably predicted or controlled by an SMO, they play little part in strategic decision making.