Contentious Coalitions, Movement Divisions, and Strategic Action Fields. Factors Motivating and Unlikely Alliance of Environmental Organizations and Gas Companies.
My dissertation explores the factors motivating the formation of a contentious alliance of environmental movement organizations and major gas corporations. Utilizing Fligstein and McAdam’s (2012) theoretical framework of strategic action fields, I argue that a field-level analysis helps to contextualize the strategic decision-making environmental organizations engaged in as they surveyed broader societal and political conditions for deciding whether to support or oppose the coalition for advancing their goals. Additionally, I engage aspects of Whittier’s (2018) typology of frenemy relationship structures to link the interaction of environmental actors with the dynamics of contention that occurred within the field as a result of the collaboration.
By situating organizational factors, such as resource mobilization and the framing processes of individual groups, in a wider network of potential alliance and conflict systems (Klandermans 1997) and proximate fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2012), my analysis shows that, as new collective action frames, identities, and practices emerged within the environmental field, uncertainty seeped into the shared understanding of the cultural processes and mission upon which the environmental field had been built. Additionally, my analysis also reveals that participating organizations valued the coalition as an important addition to their tactical repertoire and a necessary strategy to advance the movement’s goals in a politically constrained environment and globalizing world.
Through this project, I seek to contribute to the emerging body of work focused on the intersection of social movement, organizational theory and field level analyses. My research also contributes to the literature on social movement coalitions. Despite the scholarly attention to the formation of coalitions among social movement organizations (Van Dyke and McCammon 2010), little work examines factors that influence organizations to pursue extra-movement, and in some cases, contentious, alliances (Whittier 2018). Finally, my study corroborates key aspects of Whittier’s (2018) frenemy typology. Understanding the coalition as an adversarial collaborative relationship among ideologically opposed actors helps to contextualize the alliance structure as a phenomenon distinct from social movement coalitions
