Research That Matters (January 17 - 20, 2008)

Purpose: How people work together across differences within social movements is a question of enduring interest to practitioners and academics alike. While the body of literature on organizing and social movements has produced many insights, it has largely ignored a simple but profound truth about social movements: that the individuals who comprise them are in most cases already members of existing organizations. Building a social movement is thus largely a process of coalescing sympathetic groups into a wider and more powerful coalition, yet we know surprisingly little about the underlying dynamics of coalition-building across differences (of race, gender, ideology, etc.) upon which any successful movement rests. In particular, there is a lack of empirical research on the factors that affect the sustainability of diverse coalitions over time.

Methods: This project begins to fill this gap through a comparative-historical case study of labor-community coalition-building in three Rust Belt cities: Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Chicago. These cases were chosen for comparison because multiracial coalitions of unions, churches, and neighborhood organizations successfully passed living wage ordinances in each city during the late 1990s, at which point their trajectories diverged. Pittsburgh's coalition dissolved in 2001; Milwaukee's coalition imploded in 2000, but a similar body emerged in 2003 and continues today; and while Chicago's coalition emerged later, it continues to grow through the present. This paper is based on more than 60 in-depth semi-structured interviews with activists, participant observation within active coalitions, and content analysis of campaign materials, focusing on factors affecting coalition sustainability. Data from interviews and participant observation were inductively coded and grouped into themes using QSR N'Vivo software.

Results: These cases suggest that enduring coalitions must both aggregate the resources of members to achieve common interests and also transform those interests through the development of collective identity, making the coalition “more than the sum of its parts.” Such a transformation requires overcoming inherent centripetal forces toward disunity by paying attention to differences while setting up organizational structure and managing relationships. Counter-intuitively, the best way to build broad and lasting movements may not be to bring all potential partners together. Each attempt to build “big tent” coalitions in these three cities has foundered, while the successes have been more narrowly defined (while still reaching beyond a single campaign). For example, a similar-organization/multiple-issue coalition might bring together a network of churches to work on a wide range of issues, while multiple-type/single-issue coalitions reduce complexity by bringing together organizations from different sectors around a common long-term goal. Second, those coalitions that directly address power differentials between partners are actually more effective in maintaining unity.

Implications: This paper presents a nuanced categorization of coalitions and explicates the practices that make them more sustainable by comparing experiences across three cities, which will help practitioners work more effectively within this increasingly common organizational form.