An Interorganizational Network Analysis of the Social Movement Sector in New York, 1960-1995

• In Event: 474 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Social Movement Organizations

Abstract

I investigate the interorganizational network of organizations engaged in protest activities over a 35 year period in New York State. This exploratory article represents one section of a larger analysis. Here I use social network analytics to describe, in detail, what the network looks like overall, and to examine how the network changes over time during a critical time in the history of social movement activity in the U.S. I focus on changes in whole-network measures such as density and shifts in clustering. I suggest that macro-structural network processes may impact other aspects of social movement activity. A major contribution of this work is that, while numerous studies have investigated one or several network processes within a relatively small subset of SMOs, the vastness of the dataset I use will allow me to observe multiple network processes across many movement areas, organizational types, and years. Considering the rarity of research on social network effects over time, this focus is a significant contribution of the proposed investigation.

Author

• Misty Dawn Ring-Ramirez, University of Arizona