ISTR Sixth International Conference Toronto, Canada / July 11-14, 2004 Contesting Citizenship and Civil Society in a Divided World

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Direct action society: The institutions of new and innovative Third Sector direct action organisations
by
Malcolm Carroll
Aston Business School, Birmingham, UK

Direct action society: The institutions of new and innovative Third Sector direct action organisations. Abstract offered for consideration for ISTR 2004 Malcolm Carroll, Doctoral student, Public Management and Sociology Group, Aston Business School, SW813, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK carrolls@surfaid.org Direct action advocacy is one of the most visible forms of Third Sector activity. The political science literature has researched methods, tactics and impacts of direct action organisations (see for instance della Porta and Diani 1999) with some scholars arguing that some are new forms of organisation, and that these new groups and their activities are the harbinger of a new civil society (see Jordan and Lent 1999). However, Third Sector scholarship has paid scant regard to these organisations; in particular, there is very little research on the organising of such activity (Carroll and Harris, 1999; Lewis, 2001). There are descriptions of what they do, but little description, let alone analysis, of how they do it. This paper begins to address this gap in knowledge. It is based on research into three peaceful direct action groups - Earth First! (UK), GenetiX Snowball, Trident Ploughshares. What they do ranges from anti-road camps, office occupations, destroying GM crops, peacefully disarming nuclear submarines and disabling or obstructing weapons transporters. In total, many hundreds have been arrested, some imprisoned, and still they are able to mobilise hundreds more. Yet they have little or no organisational structure, no paid staff, no head office, so - how do they do it?

The paper draws on new institutional theory to analyse empirical data gathered from three Third Sector direct action groups over the past two years. New institutionalism explores organisational behaviour arising from regulative, normative, and cognitive structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behaviour (Scott 1995:33). Data were gathered from semi-structured interviews, participant observation, documents, websites, and gathering cultural artefacts of many sorts. Data were aggregated and themed, and then analysed, looking for the consistent and significant similarities, significant dissimilarities, and counter-intuitive themes (Silverman 2000). Analysis was based on the strongest sets of themes and explained in social science terms through new institutionalism.

Compared to the vast majority of NGOs, these groups are structureless, but the argument of this paper is that they are full of “intermediary structures” - patterned behaviour - which enables them to mobilise hundreds of activists and to expect those activists to be “on message” in terms of campaign theme, behaviour on actions, and social sense-making. Although all three organisations are UK-based, they have equivalents in other countries and, more importantly, their ways of doing things are internationalist. The paper firstly describes the patterned behaviour observed in these organisations and argues that what is being described in these new and structureless organisations is in fact old and institutionalised patterned behaviour; secondly, that these institutional practices are powerful, they can be the tail which wags the organisational dog; thirdly, that these patterns, though sub-organisational, are also inter-organisational, and give activists transferable rules of behaviour for different activist groups carrying out different actions in connection with different issues; indeed some of these institutional behaviours are de facto internationalist. Fourthly, it explores how these patterned behaviours are introduced and become institutionalised, and it points to Knowledge-brokers, Training, and Founding myth as powerful mechanisms.

These are “new” organisations which are struggling for recognition and rights and building a new collective identity. But although there is much that appears new about them, the thrust of this paper is that they are drawing on established intermediary structures, a rich mine of transferable organisational know-how, often international, to structure activist behaviour in structureless organisations. As such, it is more about localised and particularised expressions of an alternative global economy, an alternative social capital and a solidarity which can be mobilised against the structural contradictions of the global neoliberal economy. “Social capital”, in the context of this paper, is perhaps best understood in the rather too neat but helpful distinction Kaufman and Tepper (1999) make between organised exchange and informal interaction; in their terms, the social capital represented by these direct action groups belongs to the informal world, which throws into relief all the more the institutions that constitute a direct action society.

Carroll, M. and M. Harris (1999) “Voluntary action in a campaigning context: An exploratory study of Greenpeace”, Voluntary Action 2 (1) 9-18 della Porta, D, and M. Diani (eds) (1999) Social Movements: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwells Jordan, T. and A. Lent, (eds) (1999), Storming the Millennium, London: Lawrence & Wishart Kaufman, J. and S. Tepper (1999) “Groups or Gatherings? Sources of political engagement in 19th Century American Cities”, Voluntas 10 (4) 299-322 Lewis, D. (2001), The Management of Non-Governmental Development Organisations: An Introduction. London: Routledge Scott, W. R. (1995) Institutions and Organisations, Thousand Oaks: Sage Silverman, D. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research: A practical handbook, Thousand Oaks: Sage

Date received: September 29, 2003

Copyright © 2003 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # camk-73.