Focusing the Conversation: Making Sense of Influences on Strategic Choice

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 22. The Mobilization and Strategy of Unions

Abstract

Scholars of social movements have produced a small but diverse body of literature on strategic choice. However, current research offers explanations of many influences on movements’ strategic choice processes, and relatively fewer attempts to explain how these influencing factors work in concert with one another. While scholars generally recognize strategic choice as an ongoing process, and as one that incorporates both structural conditions and activists’ agency, more work must be done to understand the influence of structure on agency in strategic choice processes. In this paper, I identify seven factors that influenced activists’ strategic choices made by teachers’ unions in their fights against legislative threats, discuss how these factors worked together to shape these processes, and call for scholars to focus our conversation toward a more complete model of strategic choice processes.

Author

• Amanda Pullum, Duke University