Abstract
Broadly speaking, social movements are forms of collective action whose purpose, over a given (usually long) period, is to bring fundamental changes to the political and social structures of a society. Often they define themselves as opposing existing organizational and institutional structures and forms, sometimes being developed within these existing forms, sometimes developing outside of them. In today's sociological and political theory, as David West explains, social movements are taken seriously as sources of potentially rational collective actions, contrary to a long tradition of denigration, which assimilated them to eccentric and disordered forms of collective behavior. Today, organizational scholars make great use of social movement theory to analyze dynamics of change within and between organizations. For Hayagreeva Rao, Calvin Morrill, and Mayer Zald, social movements are organized collective endeavors aimed at solving social problems. The ability of institutional or social “issue” entrepreneurs/activists to generate fundamental dynamics depends on framing processes ...