Recombination and Novelty in Social Protest

Dan J. WangAssistant Professor

Columbia Business School

The Emergence of Organizations and Markets Conference

Radcliffe Institute, Harvard UniversityJune 29-July 1

The Autocatalysis Recipe

• Ingredient List:– Disparate actors/resources/social domains– Relationships between previously separate

social domains• Directions:

– Stir? (and hope that new actors bump into one another?)

Action-oriented autocatalysis

• Not a theory based on Brownian motion• Actors are purposive and reactive

New relationships forged in response to changes to external environment

Open empirical questions

• What is novelty?– How do we measure novelty?

• When does tipping occur?

Tactical innovation in social movements: The coevolution of the tools and content of protest

Tactical innovation• Where do innovations in protest tactics come from?• In what kinds of protest events can we observe

tactical innovation?

Tactical innovation as autocatalytic inputs and outputs

1. Actors cross boundaries to forge new relationships

2. New relationships leads to interactions that transform resources into novel ideas, tools, organizational forms

3. Actors realign themselves based on these new resources

4. External changes prompts actor boundary-crossing again

Past explanations of tactical innovation

• Historical changes in political authority and technology (Tilly 1976, 1986, Tarrow 1995)

– Introduction of new cultural frames (Snow and Benford 1992)

– Necessity due to movement-opponent dynamics (McAdam 1983)

• Professionalization of movements through SMOs and other formal organizations (McCammon 2003, Taylor and Van Dyke 2008)

Our perspective

• Tactical innovation as both premeditated and endogenously emergent

• The protest event as crucible of tactical innovation– New tactics (or the novel repurposing of

tactics) are realized at protest events• In what types of protest events is tactical

innovation more likely to occur?

Tactical innovation as an autocatalytic process

Different movement sectors protest

together

Knowledge sharing at protest staging

and planning

Recombination of tactics fashions new weapons for protest

New movement identities forged around

new tools of protest

Realignment of movement

sectors

External Shock

Tactical innovation as an autocatalytic process

Non-violent Civil Rights movement allies with

peace movement

Labor Movement and Civil Rights Movement

brought together

Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955),

Memphis Sanitation Strike (1968)

Development of “Sit-In” from “Sit-Down

Strike”; used alongside boycotts,

demonstrations

Civil rights movement split between violent and

non-violent factions

Vietnam War

Peace movement and Civil rights movement

brought together

Women’s movement

Peace movement

Environmental movement

Civil Rights movement

1995

1966

Peace movement

Civil Rights movement

1976

Environmental movement

Peace movement

Civil Rights movement

1986Women’s movement

Peace movement

Civil Rights movement

Environmental movement

Novel recombinations as tactical innovation

• “Intermingling” of older tactics with newer tactics (Tarrow 2011: 41)

• “Creatively using familiar” tactics by “combining them in new ways” (Morris 1993: 634)– Boycotts, sit-ins, strikes, marches

contemporaneously deployed in Birmingham 1963

Novel recombination of tacticsThe greater the dissimilarity between the claims of a protest event, the more likely the event will exhibit a novel recombination of tactics.• Dissimilarity in claims = (movement) boundary-spanning

protest event• Creativity and innovation is more likely when diverse

resources are accessible (Ahuja 2000, Powell, et al 1996, Padgett and McLean 2006, Fleming, et al 2007, Benet-Martinez, et al 2008, Burt 2004)

• Certain tactics associated with certain movements (Tilly 1997)

• Overlap in movements creates overlap in tactical repertoires

Protest Event

Women’s Movement

Peace Movement

Labor Movement

Linkages within one set of domains (claims – the content of protest) creates innovation in another (tactics – the tools of

protest)

Dynamics of Collective Action Dataset

• 23,000 protest events gathered from The New York Times between 1960 and 1995

• For each event, coders identified tactics (up to 4) used and claims made (up to 4)

• Size of protest, violence, report-specific features, presence of police, counterdemonstrators, social movement organizations(www.dynamicsofcollectiveaction.com)

Finding 1: New tactics are more likely to appear in the peripheral protest events

Drunk Driving

Anti-Afghanistan War (1979)

Anti-Police Brutality against Native Americans

New tactics appear in protest events with more peripheral claims.

Finding 2: Novel tactical recombination is more likely to occur in protest events that

combine dissimilar claims

Outcome Variable: New Recombinations of Tactics

Measurement: Protest event contained new recombination of tactics not observed previously in data = 1

Independent Variable: Claim Dissimilarity

• Assumption: Claims are more similar to one another if they have been often paired together in past protest events

• Protest events with claims that have never been paired together in the past represent (movement) boundary-spanning, truly multi-issue protests

Independent Variable: Boundary-Spanning Protest Event

Average shortest path length among each pair of claims in a protest event

– For each protest event, collect path lengths between claims in each possible pairing

– Based on claim pairing network up to time of protest event

– Claims in different components coded as length of geodesic + 1 [i.e., longest shortest path length]

1992

2100: Civil Rights for Disabled1344: Prisoner’s Rights1600: Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights1604: Same-Sex Domestic Partnership Legislation

Civil Rights and Peace Movement

collaboration

Peace and Women’s movement

collaboration Emergence of identity

movements

Protest events with higher dissimilarity among their claims (spanning movements) are more likely to have

novel recombinations of tactics.

What do novel recombinations of tactics look like?

Most novel “pairings” of tactics consist of two

unpopular tactics.

Few novel “pairings” contain one popular and one

unpopular tactic.

Avg. popularity of two tactics in novel pairing

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What is the mechanism?

• How do disparate claims bring forth novel recombinations of tactics?– Do multiple groups from different movements

come together at protest events?– Compare single-actor protest events and

multi-actor protest events• Finding: Multi-issue events more likely to

result in novel recombinations of tactics if only one organizational actor is involved

Lessons for Emergence

• Innovation = Novel recombination of tactics (observed)

• Invention = Realignment of movement alliances (implicitly observed)

• Spillovers in one domain leads to innovation in another

• Domains can be conceptually discrete, but in analytically, they do not have to be

• Autocatalysis explains the persistence of tactical innovation