RESOURCE MOBILIZATION AND ORGANIZATIONAL MORTALITY IN THE NORTH CAROLINA ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT, 2003-2009

Abstract

Professionalization is pointed out as one of the most salient trends that contemporary advocacy groups have experienced. The previous literature has focused largely on descriptive characteristics of professionalization of social movement organizations (SMOs) or major impacts of professionalization on movement operations. Little systematic attention has been paid to the implications of contemporary trends of professionalization on organizational mortality. In this research, I take two approaches in order to elaborate the relations of professionalization and mortality. First, my analysis integrates both the selective and adaptive mechanisms from perspectives of organizational ecology and resource mobilization perspectives, and hypothesize that both offer important explanations on organizational mortality. Second, I maintain that diverse types of resources and structural attributes generate asymmetrical effects on the persistence or mortality of SMOs, and these impacts are to be explained differently depending on whether it is grassroots or professionalized SMOs. This research utilizes a unique empirical data set of local environmental advocacy organizations in North Carolina. Original organizational survey conducted in 2003 and follow-up survey confirming the organizational existence in 2010 offer rich and rigorous measurements of population- and organizational-level characteristics of the North Carolina environmental SMOs. I use logistic regression models to analyze statistical predictors in explaining organizational mortality. Based on the split-data approach that reveals the differential impacts of organizational demography, bureaucracy and membership structures, human and material resources, movement tactics on organizational mortality depending on whether the SMO is grassroots or professionalized, I find the mortality predictors are strikingly different depending on it is professionalized or grassroots SMOs, concluding that both organizational ecology and resource mobilization perspectives provide complimentary explanations on nuanced effects of professionalization of environmental SMOs on the local profile of environmental movement organizations.