Social Movement Organizations: A Metaphor for Strategic Actors in Institutional Fields

Abstract

Faced with increasing real-time dislocation of institutionalized practices in empirical studies, it has become clear that neo-institutional theory is still ill-equipped to elucidate strategies of change in institutional fields. In this article, I endorse the claim that neo-institutional theory can both become more strategic and give a richer meaning to the strategy-formation process by integrating issues of ideology, power and agency in a political-cultural rhetoric of legitimation. Using the social movement metaphor to describe institutional change, I study incumbents and challengers as potentially antagonistic social movement organizations (SMOs) that strive to hegemonize entrepreneurship in fields. After having outlined a model linking institutional change to the strategy-formation process, I identify four archetypes of SMOs and strategic propensities, and illustrate the presented propositions about the incumbent SMO-challenger SMO dynamic using the case of emerging Internet challengers in the music industry.