As I argue in The U.S. Women’s Jury Movements and Strategic Adaptation, social movement actors who engage in strategic adaptation tend to be more successful and can even speed up the pace of achieving the political reforms they seek. My empirical investigation, however, was based on an early twentieth-century mobilization by women to gain the legal right to sit on juries. Kristen Goss, in her careful and insightful review of the work, raises a critically important question: can we generalize to other citizen-activist groups, especially today’s mobilizations operating in world different from that of early twentieth-century activists?

I would argue that there are many contemporary examples of citizen groups engaging in strategic adaptation, across a range of mobilizations. While the evidence I present here is anecdotal and drawn from a variety of sources, advice by contemporary activist Randy Shaw (The Activist’s Handbook, 2013)—who says “don’t respond, strategize”—suggests that strategically adapting and responding to enhance the chances of success is very much on the minds of contemporary activists.

Examples of strategic adaptation in movements in a variety of contemporary cultural settings appear in Strategies for Social Change (2009). Gregory Maney writes about strategic activism in Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement, Kurt Schock on strategic adaptation in efforts for land rights by rural workers in Brazil and India, and Sharon Nepstad and Stellan Vinthagen on strategy in the British and Swedish Plowshares movements. Deana Rohlinger (Sociological Quarterly, 2006) writes of strategic adaptation as groups on both sides of the contemporary abortion debate respond to their opponents. DREAM activists in their pursuit of citizenship for undocumented young people adapted strategically to a significant legislative defeat in early 2010 by revising their tactics and targeting instead a Democratic president up for reelection in 2012, a president who needed Latino support to win (Shaw 2013). Mary Katzenstein (Faithful and Fearless, 1998) describes the adaptive strategies of feminist nuns in the Catholic Church and soldiers in the U.S. military as they fit their insider activism to their institutional environments. While these authors don’t refer to the tactical process as strategic adaptation, there is clear evidence of such tactical reformulation in response to a contentious field.

A fruitful venue in which to examine strategic adaptation among movement activists in the recent past and today is in struggles taking place in courtrooms. As a variety of scholars’ research makes evident, activists’ litigation tactics have had to respond and adapt to frame compelling legal arguments to counter legal opponents and judicial resistance. Ellen Andersen (Out of the Closets and into the Courts, 2005) tells us how same-sex marriage litigation activists developed their tactics over time to take advantage of doctrinal legal opportunities. Stephen Wasby’s (Race Relations Litigation, 1995) account of civil rights movement legal proponents traces the intensely strategic “planned litigation” of cause lawyers in the movement. My own current research explores strategic adaptation in litigation by feminist lawyers over the past few decades.

In the end, there are ready examples of strategic adaptation among contemporary activists. At a time when contemporary social movement actors can be bombarded with an abundance of information—including from social media—and when some advocacy groups are hierarchical with limited grassroots membership, Goss’s invitation to explore activist adaptation more thoroughly is welcome.