Social Movements, Organizations, and Fields: a Decade of Theoretical Integration

As Andrew Abbott (1992: 754) once argued in these pages, “organization theory always seems like a picturesque Kuhnian subfield. Paradigms come and go. Controversy abounds. People argue about ‘garbage cans’ and ‘populations of generalists’”. This interdisciplinary yet highly paradigm-driven body of scholarship was once dominated by attention to (boundedly rational) decision-making, efficiency, and tight coupling between organizational goals and procedures. It witnessed an almost revolutionary transformation during the Carter and Reagan administrations into a set of sometimes-competing, sometimes-orthogonal theoretical approaches, all of which emphasized environmental influences on the organization as a relatively open system. Loose coupling of elements came to be assumed, instrumental rationality was either pushed aside by analysts’ scope conditions or framed as highly contingent upon context, and inter-organizational relationships became a central empirical focus.