Paul-Brian Mcinerney

From Social Movement to Moral Market (eBook, ePUB)

How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In From Social Movement to Moral Market, Paul-Brian McInerney explores what happens when a movement of activists gives way to a market for entrepreneurs. This book explains the transition by tracing the brief and colorful history of the Circuit Riders, a group of activists who sought to lead nonprofits across the digital divide. In a single decade, this movement spawned a market for technology assistance providers, dedicated to serving nonprofit organizations. In contrast to the Circuit Riders' grassroots approach, which was rooted in their commitment to a cause, these consultancies sprung up as social enterprises, blending the values of the nonprofit sector with the economic principles of for-profit businesses. Through a historical-institutional analysis, this narrative shows how the values of a movement remain intact even as entrepreneurs displace activists. While the Circuit Riders serve as a rich core example in the book, McInerney's findings speak to similar processes in other "moral markets," such as organic food, exploring how the evolution from movement to market impacts activists and enterprises alike.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Januar 2014
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780804789066
• Artikelnr.: 48416393

Autorenporträt

Paul-Brian McInerney is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on economic and organizational sociology, social studies of technology, social movements and collective behavior, and qualitative methods.

Inhaltsangabe

From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT
Revolution and Created a Technology Market
Author(s): Paul-Brian McInerney
What happens when social movement ideals meet market principles? Based on a
three-year ethnography of a technology movement, this book shows how social
movements make and shape markets. To illustrate how movements shape markets
this book tells the story of the "Circuit Riders," a group of social
justice activists dedicated to sparking a technology revolution among
grassroots and nonprofit organizations. The movement enrolled and mobilized
many activists, growing 10,000 strong in just a few years. But market
forces soon derailed the revolution. With the support of multinational
corporations, a new organization recognized a nascent market in the wake of
the Circuit Rider movement. Called NPower, this social enterprise combined
social values, like helping nonprofit organizations and market practices,
like charging fees for service and developing complex performance metrics.
NPower experienced nearly instant success tapping foundation funding and
corporate support to forge a market for technology services in the
nonprofit sector. Even in decline, the Circuit Riders continued to shape
the market they inadvertently created. By mobilizing open source
technologies and offering low-cost technology to those in need, the Circuit
Riders became a necessary check on otherwise unfettered market forces.
1
The Circuit Rider Mounts: Establishing Worth and the Birth of a Social
Movement
Chapter abstract:
This chapter discusses the inauspicious roots of the Circuit Rider
movement, explaining how early adherents mobilized others by convincing
them of the worth of information technology in the nonprofit sector.
Mobilization was accomplished through the development and articulation of
accounts, i.e., stories about the role of information technology for social
change and how to deliver it to nonprofit and grassroots organizations. The
movement grew as the Circuit Rider model became established as the movement
began to develop a collective identity to mobilize new adherents. As the
movement grew, the collective identity expanded to include new actors, who
did not meet the original criteria for Circuit Riders. This created a
collective identity problem for them as they attempted to balance the need
to grow with the need to maintain an authentic definition of their
movement. This chapter shows how social movements' appeals to idealism
enable mobilization while constraining future movement activities.
2
Organizing for Change: Conferences, Meetings, and the Configuration of
Fields
Chapter abstract:
This chapter discusses the growth of the movement and how decisions about
how to organize and construct a collective identity produced unintended
consequences that would change the movement's direction dramatically. To
spread their accounts of Circuit Riding, leaders put together two sets of
meetings: the Riders Roundups, which were designed to articulate a
collective identity for the movement in order to enroll new members, and
the National Strategy for Nonprofit Technology, which targeted foundations
and was intended to secure resources for the movement's growth as well as
to institutionalize Circuit Riding. The two sets of meetings highlight a
tension in the development of organizational fields between forces of
stabilization and those of change. However, their organizing strategy
created opportunities for a challenger to gain foothold in the field and
led to the conventionalization of a set of practices different from those
espoused by the Circuit Riders.
3
Institutional Entrepreneurs Build a Bridge: Connecting Movements and
Markets through Social Enterprise
Chapter abstract:
This chapter describes the rise of a challenger organization, called
NPower, that took advantage of transformations in the Circuit Rider social
movement to rise in prominence. NPower combined some of the Circuit Riders'
social values with market values of technology entrepreneurs into a hybrid
organizational form: the social enterprise. The result attracted funding
from for-profit companies such as Microsoft as well as other large
for-profit technology firms. Materially, these resources allowed NPower to
grow rapidly and eventually gain national prominence. Symbolically, the
support of for-profit firms provided a different basis for moral legitimacy
in the nonprofit technology assistance field, moving the account of worth
away from the larger social good and into more narrowly defined economic
goods, such as efficiency gains.
4
Walking the Values Tightrope: The Moral Ambivalence of Social Enterprise
Chapter abstract:
This chapter explains how NPower worked to institutionalize their
entrepreneurial approach to nonprofit technology by expanding and
replicating their model nationally. This chapter illustrates how
organizations translate existing models to local environments while
maintaining enough similarity to the original as to be recognizable as
such. Here, I present data from a longitudinal organizational ethnography
at the NPower office in New York, the first and arguably most successful
affiliate of the NPower national expansion. This chapter explains moral
ambivalence, the tension created by the entrepreneurial strategy of
combining social and economic values. Moral ambivalence forces hybrid
organizations, like social enterprises, to appeal to multiple stakeholders
simultaneously expanding moral legitimacy. However, such a strategy also
makes the organization vulnerable to moral legitimacy challenges from other
actors, in this case members of the Circuit Rider movement.
5
The Circuit Riders Respond: Conventions of Coordination as Movements React
to Markets
Chapter abstract:
This chapter shows how competition among groups shapes moral markets. It
explains how the Circuit Riders engaged with the new dominant actor in
nonprofit technology assistance, NPower. Through successive interactions,
new conventions of coordination reduced the uncertainty of interacting in
the nonprofit technology assistance market. In response to NPower's growing
dominance, some in the Circuit Rider movement mobilized around an
alternative platform, free/open source software. The strategy was an
attempt to reassert the founding values of the Circuit Rider movement as
articulated in technology. Ultimately, the Circuit Riders had limited
success in splitting the technology services market. This chapter
illustrates how, once institutionalized, organizational forms and practices
like social enterprise are difficult to challenge, but also how social
movements can create alternative niches for consumers who share their
social values.
6
Patterns Worth Noting: Markets Out of Movements
Chapter abstract:
This chapter draws conclusions about the relationship between social
movements and markets, while exploring the practical consequences of the
Circuit Riders and nonprofit technology assistance organizations.
Theoretically, this chapter explains the process by which accounts become
conventions, or soft institutions. In the soft institutions stage,
conventions are more easily challenged by alternative accounts. The result
is contention in organizational fields over the "rules of the game." Such
contention is resolved when actors in the field accept a set of "rules" as
appropriate. For moral markets, the "rules of the game" or institutions,
are developed through these processes of contention. This chapter outlines
how contention over institutions, especially battles over moral legitimacy,
imbues markets with moral codes as well as rules of social action.
Practically, this chapter demonstrates the positive and negative outcomes
of the transformation of the Circuit Riders into a market for technology
assistance in the nonprofit sector.
Introduction
Chapter abstract:
This chapter explains how social movements can create moral markets out of
their activities and the ambivalence that arises out of such outcomes. When
social movements create and shape markets, they attempt to imbue such
markets with social values they consider important, such as
environmentalism or social justice. But which values eventually take hold?
And how? This chapter addresses these questions by explaining three
important actions in the creation of markets and movements alike.
Establishing worth entails getting actors to recognize the value of one's
endeavors. Organizing creates stable relationships and meanings and
channels the efforts of others toward achieving collective goals.
Coordination is about figuring out appropriate modes of orientation toward
other actors.