State Embeddedness and Field Stability: The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street's Interorganizational Networks

• In Event: 277 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. Movement Organizations and Fields

Abstract

Despite the wealth of social movements scholarship analyzing media coverage, the full range of organizations appearing in the media alongside movements remains underexamined. To analyze this organizational complexity, we draw upon field theory and relate it to concepts from social network analysis. We hypothesize that interactions with state-embedded actors increase field stability, yet this effect decreases with the field's level of abstraction. We contrast a pair of US movements, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, according to their interactions with state-embedded actors. Through the New York Times's API, we collect and produce article co-appearance networks that approximate the population of organizations indexed by the Times. We parse fields from these networks using community detection algorithms. Our analyses test stability using triadic closure propensities and average coreness. Our findings show that subgroups affiliated with the Tea Party had greater stability than those of Occupy Wall Street.

Authors

• Benjamin E. Lind, State University-Higher School of Economics

• Remy Cross, Webster University