State Embeddedness and Field Stability: The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street's Interorganizational Networks

Sociological Inquiry, USA. 2014.

Lind B. E., Cross B. R.

Despite the wealth of social movements scholarship analyzing media coverage, the fullrange of organizations appearing in the media alongside movements remains underexamined. To analyze this organizational complexity, we draw upon field theory and relate it to concepts fromsocial network analysis. In particular, we focus on the relationship between field stability and interactions with state-embedded actors. This study contrasts two US movements, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, according to their interactions with state-embedded actors. Through the New York Times's API, we collect and produce article co-appearance networks that approximate the population of organizations indexed by the Times. Fromthese networks, we detect organizational fields using community detection algorithms and test field stability using triadic closure propensities and average coreness.We find that subgroups affiliated with the Tea Party had greaterstability than those of Occupy Wall Street and this difference diminishes as the boundaries of a field become more abstract.  

Keywords: сетевой анализ, общественные движения, social movements, укорененность, SNA, embeddedness

Publication based on the results of: Прикладные сетевые исследования в образовании, социологии и менеджменте (2014)