These two books, both important additions to the social movement literature, represent two traditions at theoretical odds. Frances Fox Piven's new book is an authoritative, updated restatement of Piven and Richard Cloward's classic thesis that it is not lasting organization but fleeting and overwhelming mass disruption—literally, “the mob” in her new work—that is the only source of progressive reform in American politics. Meanwhile, the focus of Gerald Davis et al.'s new book is squarely in the organization-centered tradition of social movement scholarship. And yet, while the books are quite different, Doug McAdam and Piven (with Cloward) were all pioneer scholars of the role of political opportunity on movement emergence and outcomes. These two books are testimony to how far research on social movements has come in the past 35 years.

Social Movements and Organization Theory is a significant, theoretically edited volume that draws on senior scholars of organization theory (often based in business schools) and social movements organizations. Its purpose is to craft a “stronger foundation” for explaining “organizationally mediated social change processes in modern societies” (p. 14).This is a major agenda-setting volume whose importance is obvious in the theoretical depth of its chapters. Its roots go back 10 years, when McAdam and W. Richard Scott, the prominent organization theorist, began to look for points of contact in their fields, broadening the effort to include Davis and Mayer Zald. (With this collaboration, which includes Zald and John D. McCarthy, they come full circle to the origins of resource mobilization theory, the study of movement organizations as rational resource seekers that form “sectors” and even “industries” within movements.)

This limited space cannot begin to do justice to the rich and varied contributions of this book, but simply sketches its range and some notable arguments and their implications. Those familiar with the evolution of political process theory will not be surprised to see an emphasis on mechanisms and a move away from analyzing movements in isolation (see Dynamics of Contention by Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, 2001). The edited volume, which emerged from two workshops, includes five sections with distinct missions.

In the two introductory chapters of Section I, McAdam and Scott and then John L. Campbell review the points of convergence and complementary strengths and weaknesses of organization theory and social movement theory. McAdam and Scott insightfully apply concepts from one body of research to the other. For example, they emphasize the value of a field-level perspective, often used in organization studies, for the study of social movement organizations (which McCarthy and Zald several decades ago called movement sectors and industries, a line of research that few movement scholars took up). In brief reviews of the American health-care system and the Civil Rights movement, they combine the relatively static, structural concepts from organization studies (organizational fields, actors, dominants, challengers, institutional logic) and more dynamic social movement concepts (destabilizing processes, mobilizing mechanisms, attribution of threat or opportunity). While the study of organizations and social movements includes conceptual overlap, real differences exist, and essays such as this one show the added value of combining and training them on apparently different phenomena. Campbell's introductory chapter focuses fruitfully on social mechanisms in movements and other organizations, another way to bridge the differences among types of organization by shifting focus to smaller-scale components they share. He argues that mechanisms play an indispensable role in causal explanation because, following Jon Elster (The Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, 1989, 3), social mechanisms are the “nuts, bolts, cogs, and wheels that link causes with effects.”

In his introductory chapter, Campbell notes that “both movements and organizations are … forms of organized action and as such are susceptible to similar tools of analysis” (p. 41). This may be true, but later in the volume, Davis and Zald ask, “Why now?” (p. 335) Elisabeth Clemens offers an answer: Business organizations are increasingly removed from the stereotypical hierarchical bureaucratic firm, and scholars seek new models to understand them (p. 352). For example, firms, like activist organizations, often work in temporary networks, with the tools of the communications revolution. Davis and Zald rhapsodize about the wonders of the Internet, cell phones, and instant messaging to assemble six million protestors on one day in February 2003 worldwide against the war in Iraq—an astounding testament to the technologies, though a jaundiced observer might note their ultimate lack of impact—and that the limited impact some national protests had was on that old traditional target, the sovereign state. Nevertheless, Davis and Zald's brief case studies of the protests that brought down Philippine President Joseph Estrada in 2001 and of the April 16, 2000 demonstration against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, DC, add force to their argument.

The preface of Davis et al. notes that Robert Michels's “iron law of oligarchy,” while overstated, captured the “transformation of what had been participatory and less bureaucratic organizations into formal organizations with hierarchic and self-reproducing authority structures” (p. xiii). Piven and Cloward's classic Poor People's Movements (PPM, 1977) began with this premise. Piven's new book, Challenging Authority, is an utterly different book from Social Movements and Organization Theory. Rather than a dense collection of empirical studies that knit together two highly developed literatures, her new book is an economical, uncompromising, and forceful statement from the Left. It restates but revises Piven and Cloward's famous thesis about the power of disruption to bring about progressive reform. Compared to PPM, Challenging Authority, a volume in Rowman & Littlefield's “Polemics” series, is both more concise and accessible. Its focus has changed somewhat from poor people's movements to cross-class progressive reform movements. Piven makes her argument through a selection of cases: the popular power in revolutionary America, the Abolitionist movement, the workers' movement of the 1930s, and the Civil Rights movement, the latter two familiar from PPM.

Influenced by the ferment in social movement research that Piven and Cloward helped inspire, her argument has developed somewhat since 1977. First, disruption has been defined more broadly as ordinary citizens disturbing “the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed” (p. 1). Second, she has tightly linked disruption to its effects on party electoral coalitions—the ability to weaken or break down the broad coalitions that the American two-party system must cobble together. Third, in recent years scholarship that illuminates organizations as incubators of ideas, solidarity, identity, and strategy has mushroomed. As the other volume reviewed here indicates, few scholars today dismiss organizations as Piven and Cloward did in 1977. Accordingly, Piven shifts her focus from an attack on bureaucratic organization building to a renewed focus on the power of disruption. However, she brings to the fore what was somewhat assumed in the earlier book: Shifting electoral coalitions become the key intervening variable between movement disruption and reform. A fourth change in emphasis responds to the cultural turn in movement studies and the social sciences. With the Abolitionist movement, she has taken on a case in which ideology and religious fervor among radical abolitionists simply cannot be ignored, even by structuralists such as herself. However, these ideas and their operation on activists are left to other scholars. While Piven acknowledges their causal role, to her credit, she is primarily interested in showing how the significant disruption they caused—ferment within local churches, mob attacks on abolitionist speakers, North–South schisms within church denominations, inflammatory rhetoric that provoked reactionary southern response, slave revolts, and the underground railroad—ultimately abolished chattel slavery. If these forms of “disruption” look different from the strikes that struck at the heart of capital in the 1930s, that is because they were different. The Abolitionist movement forces Piven to acknowledge religious fervor and its disruption of different institutions. However, she shows that its ultimate disruptive impact was felt through an epochal party realignment and a Republican president who, however grudgingly, freed the slaves.

Piven may be guilty of the charge of tautology, based on her chapter “The In-Between Times”: When movements fail, by definition their opponents had more power, and when movements succeed, they were able to exploit divisions among elites. However, many cases support this claim. But what about cases when movement actors failed to perceive opportunities? That requires opening the black box of organization, with its ideologies, leaders, and strategic decision making. Why do some groups make successful choices and others do not? These questions Piven cannot answer. She does not aim to, but rather to show that “disruptive movements are responsible for the truly brilliant movements of reform in American history,” and that when movements decline there are few new reforms, and those gained “are often rolled back” (p. 111). Hers is a subversive and important vision for political science: Democracy is not realized by voting but by destabilizing electoral arrangements so that movement actors can extract concessions in return for their votes. This view implies that electoral arrangements from the Constitution forward are fundamentally antidemocratic. This is not a new idea, but when taken seriously it is capable of undermining much establishment political science, which ultimately favors stability over democracy (p. 6).

Social Movements and Organization Theory offers many examples of how organization studies and social movement scholarship can be profitably synthesized, offering scholars and graduate students alike innumerable suggestions for further research. Challenging Authority, which could be used for both undergraduate and graduate courses in American politics and movements, offers a revised argument informed by new research, by one of our most influential scholars of social movements.