The premise of this volume is that both organizations and social movements are forms of coordinated collective action and, therefore, ought to be conducive to similar forms of analysis (Perrow 2000: 472–4; Zald and Berger 1978). Furthermore, the editors and contributors suspect that if students of organizations and social movements paid closer attention to each other's work, then opportunities for creative conceptual and theoretical cross-fertilization might occur, and our understanding of both organizations and movements might improve. To date, researchers in these fields have made limited progress in this direction.

A few organization theorists have used social movement theory to generate new hypotheses for organizational analysis and provide insights into the development of organizational forms (e.g., Davis and McAdam 2000; Davis and Thompson 1994; Lounsbury 2001; Rao et al. 2000). But they acknowledge that social movement theory still has been employed only intermittently to explain these and other organizational phenomena (Swaminathan and Wade 2001). Social movement theorists have been somewhat more ambitious in capitalizing on organizational analysis to explain how social movements emerge and develop (e.g., Clemens 1993, 1997: chap. 2). In particular, the resource mobilization tradition drew on organizational analysis to argue in part that social movement organizations, like many types of organizations, tend toward bureaucratization, professionalization, and conglomeration, and that these organizations often adjust their goals in order to better fit their resource environments and survive (Kriesi 1996; McCarthy and Zald 1973, 1977; Zald and Ash 1966).