Legal Classification and Communicative Restraint in Movement Organizations

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Communication

Abstract

Social movements’ public communication strategies are widely studied due to their important influence on constituent mobilization, public opinion formation, and both public and private policymaking processes. The rich literature that has emerged has taken a number of different perspectives on these communication strategies. Some scholars have focused on how organizations navigate the multiorganizational fields in which they operate, developing strategies vis-à-vis the other organizations in their alliance system and those in opposing counter-movements (e.g., Evans 1997). Others have focused on issues of framing, analyzing how organizations construct interpretative frames to communicate their issues in ways that resonate with the public and mobilize individuals sympathetic to the movement into action (e.g., Benford 1993; Benford and Snow 2000; McDonnell et al. 2017; Snow and Benford 1988). Still others have focused on the interactions between movements and media systems/institutions, researching how organizations adjust their communications to suit dominant news values and journalist work routines and/or the communicative norms of different social media platforms (e.g., Chadwick 2017; Gamson and Wolfsfeld 1993; Earl and Kimport 2011). Each of these perspectives has helpful advanced scholarly understandings how and why social movement organizations develop the strategies that they do. However, each of them misses an important structuring fact about social movement organizations: They are, first and foremost, organizations embroiled in bureaucracy. More specifically, they are nonprofit organizations, which governments regulate in significant ways, including regulating what types of communicative activities they may and may not engage in. These regulations structure how social movement organizations communicate, but the extant literature does not consider the structural implications of these organizations’ legal classifications.

This paper addresses this lacuna by investigating how US social movement organizations’ legal classification as either 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations and the associated restrictions on allowable public communications affects how organizations develop communication strategies. To answer this question, I draw on two years of ethnographic observations at the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE)—the leading organization of the US transgender movement—across 2017 and 2018. During this time, the organization—which was a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization—launched the NCTE Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) sister organization comprised of the same staff, but with an administrative firewall between their two domains of work. My observations led me to a novel concept of “communicative restraint” to describe both (1) the direct ways that legal classifications impose restrictions on organizations’ communicative abilities that must be navigated and (2) the indirect, downstream consequences for the development of communication strategy that result from legal classification. Through an analysis of the daily practices that NCTE staff engaged in as they sought to manage this communicative restraint, I show how social movement organizations make strategic decisions vis-à-vis legal restrictions while still prioritizing the more persuasion- and mobilization-oriented demands placed on their communications as identified in the extant literature.

References
Benford, Robert D. 1993. “Frame Disputes within the Nuclear Disarmament Movement.” Social Forces 71 (3): 677–701.
Benford, Robert D., and David A. Snow. 2000. “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611–39.
Chadwick, Andrew. 2017. The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Earl, Jennifer, and Katrina Kimport. 2011. Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Evans, John H. 1997. “Multi-Organizational Fields and Social Movement Organization Frame Content: The Religious Pro-Choice Movement.” Sociological Inquiry 67 (4): 451–69.
Gamson, William A., and Gadi Wolfsfeld. 1993. “Movements and Media as Interacting Systems.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 528: 114–25.
McDonnell, Terence E., Christopher A. Bail, and Iddo Tavory. 2017. “A Theory of Resonance.” Sociological Theory 35 (1): 1–14.
Snow, David A., and Robert D. Benford. 1988. “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization.” International Social Movement Research 1 (1): 197–217.

Author

• Thomas J Billard, Northwestern University