Technology, Structure, and Heterogeneity among American Antiwar Organizations

Social movements are heterogeneous because they attract organizations from other movements and encourage activists to create organizations ‘‘indigenous’’ to the movement. This chapter examines the structural and technical differences between these kinds of organizations. Employing a contingency theory framework, it is shown that older ‘‘spill over’’ groups are much more likely to be multiissue national organizations with particular organizational structures. Then, it is shown that these older groups have correlated environments and internal structures, but not their more contemporary counterparts. Finally, it is shown that the adoption of a new technology, the Facebook group, is mainly a path dependency outcome, and not correlated with contingency factors. 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 Studying Differences between Organizations: Comparative Approaches to Organizational Research Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 26, 221–247 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2009)0000026010 221