Movements of the poor win concessions through disruption, and lose their leverage when they turn into formal organisations.
Piven and Cloward argued it in Poor People's Movements (1977) from four cases: the unemployed and industrial workers' movements of the 1930s, the civil rights movement and the welfare rights movement. Gains came at the peaks of disruption, they found, and organisers who built membership bureaucracies traded that leverage for the organisation's survival.
In practice
- A tenants' group wins repairs after a rent strike and loses momentum once it becomes a registered association with a board and dues.
- A workplace walkout achieves in a week what years of formal grievance procedure did not.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is that disruption imposes costs institutions cannot ignore, while formal organisations need the goodwill of the institutions they bargain with. Another is Michels's iron law, in which organisations come to put their own continuity first.
- In its favour
- Supported by the authors' case studies, influential in social movement research, and consistent with the iron law of oligarchy.
- Against it
- Gamson's 1975 study of 53 challenging groups found bureaucratic organisations more likely to succeed, though also more likely to be co-opted, and Gamson and Schmeidler argued against the thesis directly. Critics note that disruption without organisation rarely sustains its gains.
- Standing
- Contested within social movement research. Compare Michels's iron law of oligarchy.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works