RAND on the Movement

from Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (published November 2001 by RAND, National Security Research Division)

Chapter 9: The Structure of Social Movements: Environmental Activism and Its Opponents

by Luther P. Gerlach

In the late 1960s Virginia H. Hine and I examined the structure of several social movements. We found that the most common type of organization was neither centralized and bureaucratic nor amorphous, but one that was a segmentary, polycentric, and integrated network (acronym SPIN) (Gerlach and Hine, 1970, 1973; Gerlach, 1971/1983).

• Segmentary: Composed of many diverse groups, which grow and die, divide and fuse, proliferate and contract.
• Polycentric: Having multiple, often temporary, and sometimes competing leaders or centers of influence.
• Networked: Forming a loose, reticulate, integrated network with multiple linkages through travelers, overlapping membership, joint activities, common reading matter, and shared ideals and opponents.

We proposed that this segmentary, polycentric, and networked organization was more adapted to the task of challenging and changing society and culture than was centralized organization.

At the time, even social movement participants did not fully appreciate the strengths of SPIN organization, believing that anything other than a centralized bureaucracy was either disorganized or an embryonic organization. Since then a consensus has emerged that SPINs have many benefits, and not just for social movements. This chapter revisits and supplements our analysis. Although examples abound from many movements since the 1960s, I will feature examples from the environmental movement (once called the ecology movement), and the Wise Use (property rights) movement, which opposes environmental activism. First we will examine each characteristic of a SPIN.

Segmentary

Social movements have many organizationally distinct components that change through fission, fusion, and new creation. A typical SPIN is composed of semiautonomous segments. New segments are created by splitting old ones, by appending new segments, or by splitting and adding new functions. Segments overlap and intertwine complexly, so that many people are members of several segments at the same time. A person may be a leader in one segment and a follower in another.In being so differentiated in structure and role, these movement segments are unlike the segments of classical segmentary lineage systems in "tribal" Africa, which are like each other and unspecialized. When we examined what we then called the "participatory ecology" movement in 1969