Strategy and Social Change: Why Reputation Matters to Social Movements

• In Event: 464 - Section on Communication and Information Technologies Paper Session. Open Topic on Communication, Media, and/or Information Technologies

Abstract

This research uses a strategic choice approach to highlight a key mechanism that affects how social movement organizations use mass media to forward their goals: reputation. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I discuss how reputation explains the ways in which activist groups use news, social, and direct media in their organizational strategies. I distinguish groups with relatively strong reputations from those with weak reputations and delineate how each can use different kinds of media outlets to forward their goals. Then, drawing on archival archival data (from the years 1980 to 2000), organizational newsletters (1980 to 2010), and interview data with activists and journalists as well as content analyses of news media coverage and social media, I illustrate the utility of this framework for understanding the ability of groups to use mass media to affect institutional change. I find that reputation explains why some organizations have an easier time using mass media to affect change than others. Groups with relatively strong reputations get more news media coverage and are well positioned to shape media content for their own purposes. Additionally, organizations with a strong reputation in moderated media have more leeway in terms of how they use social and direct media to forward their goals. Organizations with weak reputations, in contrast, have far fewer media opportunities and, consequently, focus most of their moderated, social, and direct media efforts on trying to buttress the legitimacy of their ideas.

Author

• Deana Rohlinger, Florida State University