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Movement as Occupation: Space, Decentralization, and Organization in the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Sun, August 17, 12:30 to 1:30pm, TBA

Abstract

Various social movement scholars have identified the importance of organization in allowing movement actors to engage in sustained contention over time (McAdam 1982; McCarthy and Zald 1977; Schwartz 1976; Zald and Ash 1966). At the same time, others have suggested the need to develop a broader understanding of organization beyond its formal hierarchical form (Caniglia and Carmin 2005; Tarrow 1998). Evidence derived from in-depth fieldwork carried out during the first year of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City confirms the need for a broader understanding of organization and, in particular, indicates that the occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan served as a crucial component of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s organizational structure. The occupation was especially critical due to the way the movement was organized, as it provided a set of spatially-centralized resources and helped sustain a high density of ties between participants in what was otherwise a largely decentralized movement. In this way, the mid-November 2011 police eviction of the occupation did much more than simply repress the movement; it served as a blow to the movement’s very organizational structure and, insofar as it united people together under a common umbrella and shared purpose, the very basis for its existence. The findings presented here therefore confirm the importance of organization in allowing movement actors to engage in sustained contention over time, but moreover suggest the need for a broader understanding of what is normally thought of as organization--to include, in this case, the occupation itself.

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