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Social Movements

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DOI: 10.1002/9781119010722.iesc0163

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Social Movements
MANUEL HENSMANS
Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Belgium

KOEN VAN BOMMEL

VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Social movements, defined as “collective challenges by people with common purposes

and solidarity in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities” (Tar-
row, 1994, pp. 3–4), aim to achieve change by engaging in contestation. Social move-
ments typically try to reach their goals through emergent forms of bottom-up collective
action while struggling over resources, meaning, and practices. The very nature of a
social movement makes it an interesting organizational phenomenon to examine from
a strategic communication perspective.
After all, following strategic communication’s foundational assumptions (see Frand-
sen & Johansen, 2017), a social movement purposefully makes use of a range of forms
of communication to gain influence and fulfill its mission. Similarly, as movements are
typically outsiders and at first relatively small players challenging incumbents, they need
to attract attention, create a favorable reputation, and gain legitimacy among their key
stakeholders within the public sphere in order to survive. Finally, social movements
typically personify a more collective, participative, and emergent form of organization,
which coincides with the alternative notion of strategy propagated by strategic commu-
nication scholars.

Social movements

Research into social movements dates back to at least the 1950s, when researchers
started to look at how individual behavior could transform into collective action
toward social change. However, movements were not seen as strategic, organized, and
rational efforts on behalf of a cause. Instead, they were treated as a negative, irrational,
and disruptive form of crowd behavior and social unrest that posed a threat to the
norms and values of the existing social order. Scholars aimed to better understand
this chaotic social upheaval through collective behavior and the group processes
underpinning it. However, they largely neglected both social movements’ positive
influence on social change and the more strategic and organized elements that started
to materialize in the wake of the rise of influential social groupings such as the peace,
civil rights, and environmental movements.

The International Encyclopedia of Strategic Communication. Robert L. Heath and Winni Johansen (Editors-in-Chief),
Jesper Falkheimer, Kirk Hallahan, Juliana J. C. Raupp, and Benita Steyn (Associate Editors).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781119010722.iesc0163
2 S O CI A L M O V E M E N T S

Borrowing insights from the organization studies literature, the dominant paradigm
guiding social movements research started to change around the 1970s. Since then,
social movements scholars have emphasized how movements aim to achieve their
mission by mobilizing resources (McCarthy & Zald, 1977), taking advantage of political
opportunities (Tilly, 1978), and framing issues in advantageous ways (Benford & Snow,
2000). More recent work has also started to examine how social movements pursue
their agendas by engaging in hegemonic struggle (Hensmans, 2003; Van Bommel &
Spicer, 2011).
These four strands in social movement research bring different perspectives to the
question of how collective action succeeds or fails to change social realities. Each per-
spective has important bearings on our understanding of the effectiveness of strategic
communication, particularly in contexts and times of collective upheaval in which the
private and public spheres intermesh substantially. In such contexts and times, corpo-
rations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), nonprofits, and other organizations
willing to advance a mission of change have the opportunity to interact with social
movements and advance their interests and values within a broadened public–private
sphere. Following Hensmans (2003), within this perspective all organizations listed
above as aiming to advance a mission of change have the opportunity to become social
movement organizations: ideological actors that enlist in movements or countermove-
ments to maintain (incumbent organizations) or gain (challenger organizations) the
ability to articulate salient issues, grievances, and purposes in institutional fields, that
is, to define the legitimate boundaries and objectives of strategic communication. We
examine various traditions of social movement research and how they aim to reach their
objectives. We also propose a number of future avenues of research to provide insights
into how organizations can go beyond narrow issues of self-interest and communicate
purposively to advance their missions and change social reality.

Resource mobilization
Up to the early 1970s, scholars conceptualized social movements as relatively rare,
transitory phenomena of a strictly noninstitutionalized and almost irrational kind.
Resource mobilization theorists drew on the dynamics of the civil rights movements
of the 1960s to challenge these assumptions (e.g., Jenkins, 1983; McCarthy & Zald,
1977). Resource mobilization theory argues that social movements are formed for
the rational and strategic resolution of social group grievances. Social movement
leaders are entrepreneurs who effectively mobilize scarce resources such as expertise,
funding, organizing facilities, communications media, and technologies (McCarthy
& Zald, 1977). These resources often come not from the direct beneficiaries of the
social changes pursued but from a “conscience constituency” of the wealthy and
the affluent middle class (including college students). They are also the result of
institutional cooptation of private foundations, social welfare institutions, mass media,
universities, governmental agencies, and even business corporations. By capturing
the shift from noninstitutionalized movement resources to institutionalized sources,
resource mobilization theory, in effect, theorized the emergence of professional social
movement organizations led by professional, full-time paid staff, drawing on resources
 S O CI A L M O V E M E N T S 3

from conscience constituencies rather than a large direct membership, and engaging in
actions that “speak for” rather than involve an aggrieved group (Jenkins, 1983, p. 533).

Political opportunity structures

The resource mobilization approach was criticized for being too agentic—as if
outcomes depended only on the movement. A new generation of social movement
theorists demonstrated that collective action by individuals and organizations is not a
simple function of incentives and overcoming free-rider problems. It first and foremost
depends on mutually acquainted actors sharing interpretations of events and seizing
political opportunities (Tilly, 1978). Consequently, resource mobilization theory
was complemented by a more structural approach that called for more attention to
contextual factors, most notably the availability of political opportunities and public
opinion in the social and political environment. Building on these insights, a number
of organizational scholars conceptualized the relation between economic and political
social movement actors through various nested opportunities at the industry, country,
and transnational levels, and scholars started combining resource mobilization and
political opportunity structure factors to explain why social movements succeed or fail
when they try to effect meaningful institutional and social change (e.g., King, 2008).
Studies combining these two first schools of thought compounded a common flaw
in both approaches, however: cultural dynamics remained underdeveloped. Both
resources and political opportunities are socially and culturally constructed through
the strategic interaction of, and struggle between, various involved actors (Jasper &
Goodwin, 2011). This opened the door to further research on how different theories
may be more salient in different temporal stages of social movement activism. Fur-
thermore, the lack of attention to culture and the emergence of new social movements
based on identity politics led to a shift from political opportunities vested in class
conflicts toward emerging collective struggles steeped in identity politics (Larana,
Johnston, & Gusfield, 2009). Yet again, social movement theory followed the sign of
the times. As traditional cleavages based on class, religion, or even family became less
important and middle-class people became increasingly individualized, new social
movements emerged. These movements, typically classified as left-libertarian, sought
to challenge assumptions about work and the ethics of capitalism. They also theorized
the identity politics at work in women’s movements, ecology movements, gay rights
movements, and peace movements.

Framing
During the late 1990s, framing came to be regarded, alongside the processes of resource
mobilization and political opportunity, as a central dynamic in understanding the char-
acter and course of social movements (Benford & Snow, 2000). Framing entails mobi-
lizing “action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate activities
and campaigns” (p. 614). The framing school articulated what had remained latent in
both the resource mobilization and political opportunity structure theories; namely that
4 S O CI A L M O V E M E N T S

strategic communication is of the greatest importance in mobilizing critical resources

and leveraging political opportunity structures.
Social movements’ framing efforts attach ideological beliefs to firms and mar-
kets (see Hensmans, 2003) and change the norms of acceptable behavior and
the taken-for-granted assumptions about what is legitimate behavior within an
organizational field. As social movement activists mobilize by engaging in collective
action, using the media to attract attention, or through public educational initiatives,
they theorize corporate social initiatives as part of normal business operations. This
theorization helps to justify solutions and specifies “what effects [a] practice will
have, and why the practice is particularly applicable or needed” (Strang & Meyer,
1993, p. 500). Obviously, the framing perspective on social movements stipulates the
strategic nature of social movement communication. As effective social movement
communication requires considerable social skill, social movement activists may
be motivated by different ideologies, leading them to choose different strategies to
spread their influence (Den Hond & De Bakker, 2007). Of critical importance is
the credibility of the actor engaging in frame articulation. Communicators who are
perceived as more credible are generally more persuasive (Benford & Snow, 2000).
That is particularly so when they articulate a collective action frame that is very salient
to targets of mobilization. Communication studies have long established that the
form and content of the message (or collective action frame) should be adapted to the
target audience. This is particularly important given that social movements can only
make a considerable impact and induce institutional change if they appeal to multiple
audiences who may very well differ in terms of their beliefs, knowledge, and interests.
Prominent social movement scholars perpetuated a perspective on strategic com-
munication as a facilitator of the diffusion of logics and their political mobilization
rather than an underlying process directly generating or changing logics (King &
Pearce, 2010). A number of framing scholars therefore called attention to discursive
processes in social movements; and the way discursive choices or ambiguities enable a
positive interaction with multiple targeted audiences. Most notably, Walsh, Warland,
and Smith (1993) concluded that “early framing of protest ideology to appeal to wider
publics . . . . may be [a] more important factor … in determining the outcome of
grass-root protests” than various “static variables” (e.g., socioeconomic status, degree
of organization, or level of discontent; pp. 36–37). It was largely up to the next school
of thought—the discursive hegemony strand of social movement theory—to flesh out
discursive process intricacies.

Discursive hegemony
More recently, scholars have begun to seek to understand social movements as engaged
in hegemonic struggles. This last school of thought on social movements sheds light
on how discursive possibilities to challenge and reframe incumbent issues and solu-
tions are grounded in power constellations and discursive mobilization tactics. A main
assumption of the “discursive hegemony” school is that all institutional fields structure
themselves around the power asymmetries that are discursively established between
their members (Crozier & Friedberg, 1995). In other words, the dynamic underlying
 S O CI A L M O V E M E N T S 5

collective action processes is provided by constantly questioned power relationships.

Power comes from discursively legitimating the basic rationalities about how to orga-
nize collective action (Crozier & Friedberg, 1995); it lies “in the unconscious acceptance
of the values, traditions, cultures and structures” (Hardy & Phillips, 1999, p. 5) of a field
and can thus best be understood as systemic. Counterbalancing systemic power, there
is an entrepreneurship-enabling form of power: performative power (Lyotard, 1984).
Performative power is the capacity to engage in strategic agency and renew communi-
cation possibilities and objectives in a field; it is the ability to gain access to assumptions
and decision making about strategic communication ends.
The discursive hegemony school sees social movements (and their respective chal-
lenger and incumbent organizational activists) as powerful forces working through the
boundaries of economy and state, thereby articulating demands and mobilizing people
in their quest to alter patterns of meaning and dominating discourses. Understand-
ing this struggle for hegemony is particularly important for strategic communicating
scholars. Ernesto Laclau’s social theory of hegemony and its insights into the inter-
play between social movements and stakeholders as they find strategies to forge chains
of equivalence around floating signifiers and nodal points offers useful guidance here
(Laclau, 2005; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001).
Laclau draws on de Saussure’s work on the signifier (sound image) and signified
(concept it refers to), which together form a sign. Unlike de Saussure, however, Laclau
does not see the relation between the signifier and signified as predetermined, but
argues that discourse plays a pivotal role in constituting reality by giving meaning
to particular relations between signifier and signified. Discourse can be seen as the
underlying rules, logic, or form defining the relationships among a series of discursive
“elements.” Still, a discourse is always temporary and partial as Laclau maintains that
there is no structure that is marked by a center with a fixed and closed meaning.
Reality’s richness always provides something more beyond the fixation, something
that escapes the structure’s center, or what Laclau refers to as the “impossibility of the
social.” This incompleteness or fragility of any discourse opens the door for social
movement contestation, critique, and struggle.
Social movements contesting a hegemonic discourse rely mostly on the formation
of chains of equivalence that can help to establish a sense of identity between separate
elements (Hensmans, 2003). This means they utilize antagonisms in the creation of
an “us” versus “them.” In short, despite differences between elements a, b, and c,
they unify and identify with a particular demand because of the considered threat
of characteristic d. This chain of equivalence defies this enemy d, while at the same
time needs it in order to constitute itself, though always temporarily, before further
antagonisms arise. Reversely, a logic of difference, typically preferred by incumbent
actors, does not aim to deliberately create an us and them, but instead seeks to open up
equivalential chains and incorporate them into its own discourse. Rather than creating
simplicity and a narrower political field, its intention is to increase complexity and
widen social space (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001).
To challenge dominant discourses and shape alternative ones, social movements rely
heavily for their actions and communication on floating signifiers and nodal points.
A floating signifier is a term or word that has a certain meaning for actors, although
6 S O CI A L M O V E M E N T S

this meaning remains “floating,” as it is interpreted and used differently in different

discourses. A particular word, that is to say, means something, but, as it has no one
single pre-existing meaning, it does not mean the same to everybody. The struggle to
cement its meaning therefore remains undecided. Social movements draw on these
floating signifiers to broaden their discourse and appeal. They typically attach them
to a central nodal point. A nodal point constitutes the, ultimately temporary, center
of a discourse, which should be sufficiently open to interpretation that it is possible to
articulate a chain of equivalence out of difference. In other words, to create chains of
equivalence, a nodal point should be able to unite various floating signifiers around it so
that it can be interpreted in so many different ways that it appeals to, and unifies, many
of the stakeholders involved. Nodal points are grand terms that, by bringing together a
series of more minor terms, provide some degree of temporary stability. For example,
the nodal point of sustainability is able to bring actors together and create a relatively
coherent discourse by assembling floating signifiers such as social justice, greenness,
and corporate responsibility. Floating signifiers and nodal points are hegemonized as a
discourse through the building of equivalential chains.
To further illustrate the value of examining the hegemonic struggle that social move-
ments engage in, we draw on the example of the Slow Food movement, showing how its
hegemonic struggle and search for a settlement connect with matters pivotal to strategic
communication (Van Bommel & Spicer, 2011).
Slow Food is a social movement that was founded in Italy in 1989 as a nonprofit,
member-supported association. Legend has it that the movement was created when
Slow Food’s founder, Italian journalist Carlo Petrini, embarked on a direct protest
against the opening of a McDonalds store near the Spanish Steps in Rome by sitting
nearby and eating a bowl of traditional pasta.
Slow Food was originally positioned as a defender of traditional and varied local
cuisine with a focus on presenting gastronomy as an alternative to the fast food sector. Its
discourse was shaped around the nodal point of gastronomy and, with floating signifiers
such as taste, locality, slowness, and artisanal production, a chain of equivalence against
fast food was formed. By the turn of the century, Slow Food had gathered quite a lot
of traction among foodies and artisan food producers, but it did not manage to reach
a broader audience for its cause. Slow Food was often seen as a snobbish, middle-class
dining club. It thus needed to broaden and transform, yet without losing its authenticity
and grassroots feel.
Slow Food started to emphasize the labels “good, clean, and fair” as the core of
its message and repositioned itself as championing “eco-gastronomy” rather than
simply “gastronomy.” The nodal point was both clear enough to provide meaning
and ambiguous enough to appease constituents with different interests, backgrounds,
and identities. The movement sought to create links between its existing appeal to
gastronomists and the concerns of other stakeholders. It was thus able to bring together
a range of actors who were often committed to quite different causes. For instance, it
was able to forge a chain of equivalence that linked environmentalists, small farmers,
social justice campaigners, and chefs. By focusing on a commonly reviled enemy in
the shape of fast food, it was able to sidestep many potential conflicts and forge a sense
of commonality. Overall, Slow Food mobilized apparently unrelated constituents by
 S O CI A L M O V E M E N T S 7

increasing the stock of floating signifiers it used to describe its activities and drawing
on increasingly abstract nodal points that gave some coherence to its diverse activities.
Still, by presenting and communicating the movement in such a way that it came to
appeal to a wide range of stakeholders, Slow Food faced a dilemma. It had to balance
presenting itself as a more mainstream social movement organization with maintaining
its grassroots authenticity. A failure to do so would have resulted in its either remaining a
niche movement of gourmets with limited appeal or being accused of selling out its val-
ues. Successfully managing this balancing act required considerable strategic action and
savvy communication. For this purpose, Slow Food employed a broad range of protest
strategies that combined autonomy and engagement when challenging fast food. For
instance, the movement developed a more centralized and formal political agenda with
national and international (political) elite actors, while on the other hand continuing
with a local and grassroots agenda of involvement in farmers’ markets, tastings, com-
munity gardens, and school education. With this combination, the movement managed
to broaden its appeal to a wide range of stakeholders who could all identify sufficiently
with the movement’s message and actions.
From a strategic communication perspective, the extended example above shows
Slow Food’s extensive, purposeful, and varied use of communication to fulfill its mis-
sion. At the same time, it highlights the inclusive multistakeholder perspective that is
pivotal for a movement to gain legitimacy and succeed. Finally, the Slow Food case
brought to the fore the more collective, participative, and emergent nature of an orga-
nization, as its strategic choices about how it should be positioned within a broader
field, whom it wanted to engage with, and how it was organized emerged.

Strategic communication and social movement leadership

Taken together, the four perspectives discussed above offer a better understanding
of how social movements, and their leaders, can utilize strategic communication in
their aim to achieve critical mass. As shown, for instance, by the Slow Food example,
creating a strong collective around a social movement requires a variety of strategic
choices and actions in which strategic communication plays an important role. So, how
do social movement leaders make use of forms of strategic communication as they aim
strategically to seek members, build alliances, and expand the movement’s base?
More than resource mobilization and political opportunity structures, the framing
and discursive perspectives highlight the importance of how successful social move-
ments manage to establish a large group of supporters by providing broad meaning to
the movement’s cause. What sets social movements apart from more institutionalized
advocacy organizations like NGOs is that they require much more active and direct
engagement from grassroots participants—consumers, supporters, and also social
network activists. As the final direction of an emerging social movement is very much
open to contention, grassroots participants have considerable communicative leeway
to set the movement’s strategic direction. Hence, where the leaders of institutionalized
advocacy organizations would tend to direct and rein in grassroots activism and
direction-setting through tightly controlled forms of strategic communication, the
8 S O CI A L M O V E M E N T S

viability of a social movement requires an opposite type of leadership—one that seeks

to build critical mass by relying on more diffuse channels of communication and
emerging forms of activism.
What type of strategic communication allows for the rapid building of a critical
mass of grassroots participants? Social movement leaders can try to gain popularity
by opposing certain organizational practices. Research has found evidence of the
effectiveness of various types of protest and communication strategies as far as
movements and their target organizations are concerned. For instance, Rojas (2006)
found that more disruptive forms of protest and communication (e.g., through sit-ins
and vandalism) did not lead to a propensity among powerful incumbents to succumb
to pressure from the movement and instigate change, whereas challengers using
nondisruptive forms of protest and less confrontational forms of communication
(e.g., rallies and demonstrations) were more likely to find a cooperative incumbent
and subsequently achieve change. Recent research has also highlighted how social
movements, instead of turning to protest strategies, can play an important constructive
role in the creation of new categories, technologies, and markets. After all, as Weber
and King (2014) noted, the work of a social movement can lead to “more diffuse
cultural change in public understandings and sentiments, which may translate into
consumer preferences, employee identities, and more diffuse identity threats” (p. 499).
The case of Slow Food is a case in point here, but movements have also played an
important role in the emergence of organics, renewable forms of energy, and fair trade.
Overall though, movements at some point need to change gear if they want to con-
tinue growing. Professionalization of the leadership and the participation not only of
activists but also of more institutionalized organizations helps movements use their crit-
ical mass for greater impact. A hybrid strategy that combines more centralized and over-
arching forms of communication with the simultaneous involvement of the movement’s
base in grassroots activities caters to the need for both a broad appeal and sufficient
movement authenticity.

Future directions

Taking into account the strengths and flaws of the four schools of thought discussed
above, we suggest several future directions for research at the intersection of social
movement theory and strategic communication. Understanding of the effectiveness of
strategic communication is still flawed, particularly in contexts and times of collective
upheaval in which the private and public spheres intermesh substantially. In partic-
ular, we still know very little about how organizations aiming to promote a mission of
change interact with social movements to best communicate and advance their interests
and values. Under what conditions do organizations choose (i) to become fully enlisted
participants in a social movement and provide direction to an emerging or counter-
movement, or (ii) to keep their distance so as not to become embroiled in unpredictable
turns of events?
Social movements have always been concerned with democracy—keeping power-
holders accountable, but also often advocating alternative conceptions of that form of
 S O CI A L M O V E M E N T S 9

government (Della Porta, 2009). This opens up an interesting avenue of research from a
strategic communication or rhetorical perspective. Following Laclau (2014), rhetorical
entry into the public space of democracy is not an entirely rational choice. Rhetorical
resonance and consequent engagement with hegemonic nodal points and chains of
equivalence can make entry inevitable and even desirable. Meaning travels by contiguity
from one moment to another in chains of equivalence; the meaning of one moment can
contaminate the others beyond initial rational choices of (non)engagement.
In this regard, it would be interesting to contrast Laclau and Mouffe’s perspective on
agonistic democracy with the deliberative democracy school on corporate involvement
in democracy, which has also caught the attention of the strategic communication com-
munity. The deliberative democracy school of thought explicitly conceptualizes firms as
“political actors” (Scherer & Palazzo, 2007). Identifying civil society as the main locus
of political action by firms, these scholars advocate an active prosocial role for firms
at the international level—the most important locus of society and community values
in the twenty-first century. By contrast, agonistic democracy motivates all meaning-
ful democratic participation in terms of engagement with a less rationalizable factor:
antagonistic frontiers that delineate the boundaries of collective identities. Drawing on
the example of the populist movement Podemos in Spain, Mouffe (2013) concluded
that there cannot be a collective identity without antagonism and, since collective iden-
tities are an integral part of politics, there is no politics without antagonism. In the
same vein, Hensmans (2010) has explored how Dutch cooperative banks and English
building societies rose to prominence by being drawn to specific societal antagonisms
that commercial banks could not or would not engage with. By signaling that passions
cannot be eradicated from democratic politics, these scholars have opened a promising
avenue of research into the workings of antagonism and passion in corporate strategic
communication in the public sphere.
Another important area for further research concerns the question of how social
movement activism that is considered successful actually succeeds in effecting sub-
stantial changes in behavior. None of the four schools of thought previously discussed
elaborates on this issue. For instance, Sakuma-Keck and Hensmans (2013) studied
the extent to which the sustainable investment movement managed to change asset
managers’ fundamental behaviors and beliefs in the wake of their adoption of the
environmental, social, and governance (ESG) procedures advocated by the sustainable
investment movement. Remarkably, the authors found an inverse relation between asset
managers’ actual behavior and their strategic communication about the importance of
ESG criteria. In other words, the more asset managers communicated about their adop-
tion of ESG procedures, the more this adoption was ceremonial rather than substantial.
The strategic communication literature can offer further useful insights here.
Recent research has started exploring the link between social movements and cor-
porate social initiatives. For instance, building on the premise that social movements
reflect ideologies that direct behavior inside and outside organizations, Georgallis
(2016) identified mechanisms by which social movements induce firms to engage with
social issues. This calls for more attention to be paid to the intra-firm effectiveness of
strategic communication. For instance, Hensmans (2015) found that change champi-
ons in a large chemical firm used a “Trojan horse” communication strategy to translate
10 S O CI A L M O V E M E N T S

the movement for greater financial and environmental transparency into substantial
organizational change. Clearly, there is a lot of scope for further research on the relation
between social movement activism, target audiences’ strategic communication about
change, and actual changes in their behavior.
Finally, social movement scholars often emphasize cases of successful change.
Following the above arguments, we call for greater attention to the analysis of cases of
failure. For instance, what can firms, NGOs, and other social movement actors learn
from failure and how does this relate to strategic communication? Considering new
media and communication technologies, which means of communication used by
social movements are more or less effective? How does (a lack of) engagement with
the state impact on success or failure over time? The role of the state differs across
developed and emerging economies. We therefore call for comparative studies of
African, Asian, South American, and Western contexts as they affect social movements
and their strategic communication. A comparison of Chinese and Western contexts
seems particularly appropriate.
In sum, the research traditions of social movement theory and strategic commu-
nication have to date developed largely in isolation from one another. However, with
the increasing attention paid by social movements scholars to processes of framing,
discourse, and communication and the simultaneous move on the part of strategic
communication scholars to apply a broader and more integrative approach to their dis-
cipline, many opportunities for cross-fertilization remain to be explored.

SEE ALSO: Activism; Advocacy, Internal and External; Civil Society; Framing; Resis-
tance

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Further reading

Davis, G. F., McAdam, D., Scott, W. R., & Zald, M. N. (Eds.). (2005). Social movements and orga-
nization theory. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Della Porta, D. (2011). Communication in movement: Social movements as agents of participa-
tory democracy. Information, Communication & Society, 14(6), 800–819.
 12 S O CI A L M O V E M E N T S

Kriesi, H., Della Porta, D., & Rucht, D. (Eds.). (1999). Social movements in a globalising world.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tilly, C., & Wood, L. J. (2016). Social Movements 1768-2012 (3rd ed.). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Manuel Hensmans is Associate Professor of Strategic Management at Solvay Brussels

School of Economics and Management, Université Libre de Bruxelles. His research
spans topics of strategic change ranging from social movements and institution-
building through strategic practice and capability renewal, and has been accepted
in journals such as Organization Studies, Organization, MIT Sloan Management
Review, Management International Review, Long Range Planning, and the Journal of
Organizational Change Management, as well as several books. The Financial Times
described his book Strategic Transformation in 2013 as “the Chief Executive’s guide to
sustaining strategy over time.”

Koen van Bommel is Assistant Professor of Organization Theory at VU University,

Amsterdam. His research focuses on corporate sustainability and social movements.
He is particularly interested in the increasing rationalization and standardization of
sustainability practices. He has also studied how social movements emerge and trans-
form in response to their institutional environments and how they can subsequently
change this environment. His work has appeared in journals such as Organization
Studies, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and the Accounting, Auditing &
Accountability Journal as well as in several books and the Financial Times.

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