the future of membership-based organizations
Many of the new generation of activists would tell you that membership-based social movement organizations – i.e., traditional voluntary associations that depend on member contributions to survive – are dead. Those old stodgy structures are being replaced, they claim, by activist networks that rely on social media and other connective technologies to coordinate collective action. I attended a conference recently at USC where many of the presenters bought into this idea.
I’m skeptical. First, we don’t have a lot of empirical data to support the notion that membership-based organizations are dying off or that they are losing their functionality. Most of the studies I see that examine recent protests find that SMOs are still alive and quite active. They often form coalitions with other SMOs, using new technologies to coordinate themselves, but they haven’t disappeared from what I can tell. Second, I think they are likely to change and alter in form significantly over the coming years. We are likely to see more online activity replace traditional meetings, for example. I expect that they will transform structurally, learning how to position themselves as key nodes in activist networks, before they die.
Here is an interesting conversation about this topic with Craig Calhoun and Jeremy Heimans. Jeremy touts the new activist trope that membership organizations are becoming extinct, while Craig has a more nuanced, historically embedded take. I agree with Craig.
Written by brayden king
June 5, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Posted in brayden, social movements
2 Responses
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I think the bigger argument about membership-based organizations is rooted in Skocpol’s work, but her argument is not “that voluntary associations that depend on membership contributions to survive–are dead,” but rather that the nature of membership has changed radically over the last few decades. She is particularly concerned with the disappearance of federated membership organizations, which relied on active participation from ordinary members, and their replacement with large professionally-led (bureaucratized) advocacy groups, which work mostly in a top down fashion and rely heavily on big money donations. For these new organizations, membership is mostly about check writing or as Calhoun says being “consistently on the mailing list.”
For Skocpol, old style (post World War II) membership organizations gave ordinary citizens a chance to be active members in the political process at the national, state, and local levels by virtue of their participation in the various chapters of large national membership organizations (trade unions, fraternal organizations, women’s organizations, etc). The success of these organizations was contingent upon having representation and influence throughout the political process (I am still a bit wary of the evidence compiled in support of this argument).
I think Skocpol’s argument is at the heart of the debate between Calhoun and Heimans in the video. Heimans, Calhoun, and Skocpol seem to agree that there might be a shift away from top-down, centralized advocacy organizations, where local activity is dictated by some “old encrusted” organization. As Calhoun says (and I agree with), fields of activism consist of organizations working at varying levels, some oriented locally, others like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club more in line with Skocpol’s large professionally-led advocacy groups. The difficulty is and will continue to be, how connections are made between what is happening at a local level with what needs to happen at the state, national, and international level. Skocpol would say that old-line membership organizations had a structure which allowed for this to occur a bit more easily, as it was occurring under one organizational umbrella. If activity and membership is becoming more fluid as Heimans says, then it seems like it will be more difficult to coordinate activity across the different organizations. Some might argue, though, that new technologies like social media might alleviate the coordination problem.
My two cents (which given the length of this comment is now more like six cents), I think we still need to focus a bit more on the larger political context. If we are really going to determine how “local activity is related to something national and international,” as Calhoun says, then I think we need to pay more attention to the interests that are pushing back on any movement at the national and international level, or to examine what political opportunities exist at the national and international level. I think large, professionally-led advocacy organizations had to emerge (and might have to develop on an even larger scale) in order to influence and compete with the size and power of organizations that developed in government and business with the advent of global corporate capitalism. While new technologies (i.e. social media) might allow for different types of coordination among activist networks, I remain skeptical about the extent to which such pockets of activity and coordination can change the structure of power at higher levels.
**Note this comment is focused entirely on issues as they operate in the U.S.
Scott Dolan
June 5, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Scott – thanks for the insightful and much needed comment. You put this into context beautifully.
I also appreciate what you said about examining the “interests that are pushing back on any movement at the national and international level.” I’d also add that since many movements are not state-centered, but rather take on corporate targets or are transnational in their focus, activists will likely respond to the pressures they face from these entities as well (or at least they should).
brayden king
June 5, 2012 at 9:12 pm