These two books represent two very distinct paths in the rapidly growing field of research on transnational advocacy. Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action attempts to argue that advocacy groups operate much like utility-maximizing and competitive firms. In contrast, Building Transnational Networks socializes advocacy groups, illustrating how relationships among organizations and between networks and their political environments shape organizations' practices and decisions about their transnational work. The studies in the edited volume replicate common approaches in the literature of organizational case studies and cross-sectional analyses of organizations at a single time point. Their analyses aim to uncover particular organizational traits. In contrast, Marisa von Bülow's book offers conceptual and methodological leadership that builds upon relevant work in multiple disciplines to uncover complex ideational and organizational “pathways to transnationality” that activist groups have blazed in the course of their work. She explicitly argues for multidisciplinarity and advances the field by demonstrating the importance of embedding our analysis of organizations in their social and political contexts.

Aseem Prakash and Mary Kay Gugerty set out to advance what they claim is a novel approach to the study of advocacy associations that they see as advancing our knowledge of how these groups operate. They offer a “collective action approach” that compares advocacy groups to for-profit firms, considering how they are shaped by competitive pressures and markets for their services. The contributors analyze a variety of issue areas and provide some interesting empirical material on, for instance, human rights and environmental groups, economic justice and faith-based organizations, and service-providing groups. But their key objective is to demonstrate the competitive and instrumental inclinations of these groups, rather than to assess the larger sets of relationships and forces that structure groups' choices about tactics and strategies. The framework imposed on the analyses is thus distracting and often misleading, in my view.

A major complaint of this sociologist is the fact that the analyses in Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action tend to disembed actors from their social and political contexts and treat them as utility-maximizing entities, rather than as complex, interdependent, social actors. Another problem is that there is a bias toward the research in political science and public policy, and a very large and rich body of research on advocacy organizations in sociology, anthropology, and social geography is virtually ignored. The idea that social change groups can be studied as rational political actors with instrumental goals is not new: It was introduced, as the editors acknowledge, by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, whose 1977 “Resource Mobilization in Social Movements: A Partial Theory” set off a lively debate about the application of literature on organizations and firms to the study of social movements (American Journal of Sociology 82: 1212–41). This now-classic debate in sociology should have been engaged, for it provides very relevant insights into the perils and pitfalls of economistic thinking when applied to the study of social change groups. In addition to ignoring this highly relevant literature, the framework offered in this book ignores most of the research on the sociology of organizations, which offers important ideas about how organizational fields, cultural scripts, and logics guide the practices of advocacy organizations. While it may be appealing to compare advocacy groups to firms, this literature offers more appropriate ways of thinking about a multiplicity of organizational motivations and operating dynamics. Whereas the market analogy stresses competition and material incentives, organizational scholars have shown how other sets of values, norms, and practices shape organizational fields.

In my frustration with this book, I struggled to find a way to explain why this effort to make advocacy groups look like firms is seen as so appealing in political science. The chapters stress their findings that advocacy groups pursue instrumental goals, in addition to, and at times in contravention of, their normative goals. There is an implicit assumption that research emphasizing the normative aims of these organizations lacks objectivity, whereas a market approach yields a more rigorous and objective account. I would suggest that this book reflects what Dia Da Costa and Philip McMichael have referred to as the “market epistemology that infects development studies and international relations” (Dia Da Costa and Philip McMichael, “The Poverty of the Global Order,” Globalization 4 [December 2007]: 588–602). In other words, the market logic is accepted uncritically, and it is even applied to an examination of groups that resist the hegemony of markets. The appeal of this framing of reality reveals the hegemony of the dominant political and economic order, and it serves to reinforce that order. While not denying that advocacy groups can be competitive and focused on advancing organizational over broad, normative aims, we need to be mindful about the dominant logics that define the contemporary political economy and affect the discourses, decisions, and even the mind sets of actors—including academic researchers!

Thus, while there is some good empirical investigation in this book, I believe the authors would do well to relate their research to work in sociology and elsewhere that uncovers how larger sets of social and political relationships affect organizational choices, and that offers a critical perspective on the operation of markets and power in the advocacy sector. For instance, Gerald Davis, Doug McAdam, W. Richard Scott, and Mayer Zald's edited collection, Social Movements and Organizational Theory (2005) reviews the organizational literature and considers its relevance for studies of advocacy groups. It also contains examples of some creative applications of the literature on firms to analyses of social change efforts. David Hammack and Steven Heydemann offer a fascinating and critical collection on the ways in which global models are “projected” through various aid and philanthropic schemes. Their Globalization, Philanthropy, and Civil Society (2009) offers highly nuanced analyses of the organizational dynamics involved in advocacy work, and they provide a critical reflection on the operation of power in interorganizational networks. Finally, Rajagopal Balakrishnan's International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements, and Third World Resistance (2003) offers a Gramscian analysis of transnational advocacy organizing that is informed by voices from the global South, which I have found extremely useful in making sense of the patterns of transnational organizing over the past several decades.

Building upon the lessons from these works and from von Bülow's fine book, Dawn Wiest and I have shown how the population of transnational social movement organizations has been transformed over the past several decades, enhancing the importance of movement-centered networks relative to state-centered ones (Social Movements in the World-System: The Politics of Crisis and Transformation 2012).

Building Transnational Networks could not be more different from the edited volume, and the comparison of the two works highlights the importance of viewing advocacy groups as social actors whose choices are defined and constrained by a multiplicity of relationships. I believe that this is one of the most important new books on transnational advocacy, and it demonstrates an important application of network analytic methods to the study of transnational organizing. Von Bülow's innovative study traces the relationships among groups organized around the free trade debates in the Americas over 20 years, illustrating how these networks developed over time. She combines interviews of key network organizers with in-depth case studies of important coalition organizations and a social network survey of more than 120 civil society organizations operating in four countries (Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and the United States). The interview data allow her to identify key brokers or “gateways” that linked activist groups to and from different countries, showing that different brokers facilitated inward and outward ties. Over time, the need for brokerage declined, and more local and national groups were forging direct transnational ties with organizations they encountered in previous mobilizations around regional trade negotiations. In addition, early mobilizations around trade negotiations generated new coalition groups, and von Bülow analyzes two such organizations in depth. She shows how these and other organizations' roles, identities, and framings of the issues were shaped by their experiences in transnational campaigns.

The author's account illustrates the complex and changing nature of interactions among local, national, and transnational scales of action. She shows how transnational campaigns were adapted to local and national politics, as well as how transnational politics affected local and national work. Her long-term perspective provides rich evidence supporting the argument that local and national politics cannot be understood without attention to transnational politics, even as actors may forgo transnational-level action and networks when they become embroiled in local or national initiatives. Also important is her attention to the operation of power in networks, and careful attention to changing North–South dynamics permeates her study. Significantly, she concludes that southern groups enhanced their influence in transnational networks over time.

For von Bülow, civil society organizations experience a “double embeddedness” in social networks and political systems. Social networks are thus both preconditions for, and outcomes of, collective action, and they shape future trajectories of activism (p. 7). Organizational actors' choices are thus shaped by peer groups and network ties with other actors in the polity, as well as by the political and institutional context. Moreover, it is impossible to understand collective action without attention to this context. Over time, civil society networks and political contexts change in important ways, affecting how actors perceive their interests as well as their sense of the value of transnational versus localized organizing.

The contrast of these two books, in sum, highlights the need for scholars to be more interdisciplinary and historical in their research and for an understanding of organizations as social actors that are embedded in complex networks of relationships that help define their identities, as well as their choices of actions.