Recombination and Novelty in Social Protest

1. Recombination and Novelty in Social Protest Dan J. Wang Assistant Professor Columbia Business School The Emergence of Organizations and Markets Conference Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University June 29-July 1

2. The Autocatalysis Recipe • Ingredient List: • Disparate actors/resources/social domains • Relationships between previously separate social domains • Directions: • Stir? (and hope that new actors bump into one another?)

3. Action-oriented autocatalysis • Not a theory based on Brownian motion • Actors are purposive and reactive New relationships forged in response to changes to external environment

4. Open empirical questions • What is novelty? • How do we measure novelty? • When does tipping occur?

5. Tactical innovation in social movements: The coevolution of the tools and content of protest

6. Tactical innovation • Where do innovations in protest tactics come from? • In what kinds of protest events can we observe tactical innovation?

7. Tactical innovation as autocatalytic inputs and outputs • Actors cross boundaries to forge new relationships • New relationships leads to interactions that transform resources into novel ideas, tools, organizational forms • Actors realign themselves based on these new resources • External changes prompts actor boundary-crossing again

8. Past explanations of tactical innovation • Historical changes in political authority and technology (Tilly 1976, 1986, Tarrow 1995) • Introduction of new cultural frames (Snow and Benford 1992) • Necessity due to movement-opponent dynamics (McAdam 1983) • Professionalization of movements through SMOs and other formal organizations (McCammon 2003, Taylor and Van Dyke 2008)

9. Our perspective • Tactical innovation as both premeditated and endogenously emergent • The protest event as crucible of tactical innovation • New tactics (or the novel repurposing of tactics) are realized at protest events • In what types of protest events is tactical innovation more likely to occur?

10. Tactical innovation as an autocatalytic process External Shock Different movement sectors protest together Knowledge sharing at protest staging and planning Recombination of tactics fashions new weapons for protest Realignment of movement sectors New movement identities forged around new tools of protest

11. Tactical innovation as an autocatalytic process Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955), Memphis Sanitation Strike (1968) Vietnam War Labor Movement and Civil Rights Movement brought together Peace movement and Civil rights movement brought together Development of “Sit-In” from “Sit-Down Strike”; used alongside boycotts, demonstrations Non-violent Civil Rights movement allies with peace movement Civil rights movement split between violent and non-violent factions

12. Civil Rights movement Women’s movement 1995 Peace movement Environmental movement

13. Civil Rights movement 1966 Peace movement

14. Civil Rights movement 1976 Peace movement Environmental movement

15. Civil Rights movement Women’s movement 1986 Peace movement Environmental movement

16. Novel recombinations as tactical innovation • “Intermingling” of older tactics with newer tactics (Tarrow 2011: 41) • “Creatively using familiar” tactics by “combining them in new ways” (Morris 1993: 634) • Boycotts, sit-ins, strikes, marches contemporaneously deployed in Birmingham 1963

17. Novel recombination of tactics The greater the dissimilarity between the claims of a protest event, the more likely the event will exhibit a novel recombination of tactics. • Dissimilarity in claims = (movement) boundary-spanning protest event • Creativity and innovation is more likely when diverse resources are accessible (Ahuja 2000, Powell, et al 1996, Padgett and McLean 2006, Fleming, et al 2007, Benet-Martinez, et al 2008, Burt 2004) • Certain tactics associated with certain movements (Tilly 1997) • Overlap in movements creates overlap in tactical repertoires

18. Peace Movement Women’s Movement Labor Movement Protest Event

19. Linkages within one set of domains (claims – the content of protest) creates innovation in another (tactics – the tools of protest)

20. Dynamics of Collective Action Dataset • 23,000 protest events gathered from The New York Times between 1960 and 1995 • For each event, coders identified tactics (up to 4) usedand claims made (up to 4) • Size of protest, violence, report-specific features, presence of police, counterdemonstrators, social movement organizations (www.dynamicsofcollectiveaction.com)

21. Finding 1: New tactics are more likely to appear in the peripheral protest events

22. Drunk Driving Anti-Afghanistan War (1979) Anti-Police Brutality against Native Americans

23. New tactics appear in protest events with more peripheral claims.

24. Finding 2: Novel tactical recombination is more likely to occur in protest events that combine dissimilar claims

25. Outcome Variable: New Recombinations of Tactics Measurement: Protest event contained new recombination of tactics not observed previously in data = 1

26. Independent Variable: Claim Dissimilarity • Assumption: Claims are more similar to one another if they have been often paired together in past protest events • Protest events with claims that have never been paired together in the past represent (movement) boundary-spanning, truly multi-issue protests

27. Independent Variable: Boundary-Spanning Protest Event Average shortest path length among each pair of claims in a protest event • For each protest event, collect path lengths between claims in each possible pairing • Based on claim pairing network up to time of protest event • Claims in different components coded as length of geodesic + 1 [i.e., longest shortest path length]

28. 1992 2100: Civil Rights for Disabled 1344: Prisoner’s Rights 1600: Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights 1604: Same-Sex Domestic Partnership Legislation

29. Peace and Women’s movement collaboration Civil Rights and Peace Movement collaboration Emergence of identity movements

30. Protest events with higher dissimilarity among their claims (spanning movements) are more likely to have novel recombinations of tactics.

31. What do novel recombinations of tactics look like? Few novel “pairings” contain one popular and one unpopular tactic. Difference in popularity between two tactics in novel pairing (normalized) Most novel “pairings” of tactics consist of two unpopular tactics. Avg. popularity of two tactics in novel pairing

32. What is the mechanism? • How do disparate claims bring forth novel recombinations of tactics? • Do multiple groups from different movements come together at protest events? • Compare single-actor protest events and multi-actor protest events • Finding: Multi-issue events more likely to result in novel recombinations of tactics if only one organizational actor is involved

33. Lessons for Emergence • Innovation = Novel recombination of tactics (observed) • Invention = Realignment of movement alliances (implicitly observed) • Spillovers in one domain leads to innovation in another • Domains can be conceptually discrete, but in analytically, they do not have to be • Autocatalysis explains the persistence of tactical innovation