In the autumn of 2011, thousands of protesters in multiple cities across the world – from Australia to Mongolia – put up tents to occupy prominent sites in cities to protest against the international financial system. Under the slogan of ‘We are the 99%’ they were particularly responding to the financial crisis and austerity measures. Our own research on the Occupy movement shows that these protests attracted many people who were new to organising for change. However, the camps also attracted experienced SCMs who had participated in multiple causes. Life history interviews with SCMs like Mike, a man in his forties, who participated in Occupy London, illustrate how the involvement in SCOs is embedded in everyday lives.

We interviewed Mike, who came from a working-class background, in November 2011. He remembered that during his childhood and youth, his mother supported the Labour Party and was involved in the Greenham Common protests of the 1980s against the stationing of cruise missiles during the Cold War. He was socialised into attending marches and direct actions and started to become aware of different movements through going to protests at an early age. He remembers meetings of SCMs while he was growing up and that his mother hosted members of the Polish Solidarność (Solidarity) movement. They were staying with Mike and his mother on an exchange basis at the beginning of the 1980s, when Solidarność was starting to take shape to bring about changes in communist Poland. Mike went to university, and at the time of the interview was self-employed and had several children. He told us that fatherhood was his main motivation for being politically active. He was concerned that his children would not have the same opportunities that he has had and was concerned about their economic situation and the state of the environment. Before getting involved in Occupy, he had participated in various campaigns organised by several environmental SCOs. He had been involved in Camps for Climate Action and had also run a local environmental campaign. When he realised that his local environmental campaign got bigger, he approached larger and more established organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace because he felt that he did not have enough experience to deal with the significant campaign that he envisioned. However, he stressed that he preferred being independent from organisations.

The Coalition of Labour Union Women (CLUW), which was formed in Chicago in 1974, to give voice to women in the male-dominated US labour movement (which we introduced in Chapter 1) is also a good case through which to introduce our chapter on the interaction between different SCOs. As we already noted, the founding members of the organisation came from a variety of backgrounds. Many had been long-standing trade union members, others came from the second-wave women’s movement and wished to improve the working conditions of non-unionised women, some were also involved in the civil rights and student movements and other causes. What united them was the desire to improve women’s working conditions, but founding members disagreed about the best strategy. Given the low unionisation rate of women and female-dominated sectors of the labour market, initially there was some debate whether this would be best achieved within the context of the trade unions or in an autonomous organisation. The view that CLUW would have more impact acting within the framework of the trade union federation AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) prevailed. This decision meant that founding members decided that the best strategy of supporting (non)unionised women was from within the labour movement. In order to do this, they sought to unionise women who had not yet joined trade unions, bringing women into union leadership positions, and by adding women’s issues on the agenda of trade unions. These efforts are characterised by collaboration with other organisations (trade unions, women’s organisations) and conflict within the organisation. Through solving the internal conflicts, CLUW became a bridging organisation between the women’s movement and the labour movement by framing ‘women’s issues’ (day care, pay equity, sexual harassment, reproductive rights) as ‘workers’ issues’ (pay, working conditions) and ‘workers’ issues’ as ‘women’s issues’ (Roth, 2003).

While CLUW represents a successful example of an SCO that was able to bridge women’s and labour issues, this is not always the case.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the global justice movement (GJM) came to prominence around the world. It first grabbed the attention of journalists, academics and the public through large and oftentimes disruptive summit hopping demonstrations that coincided with meetings of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the G20, G8, and G7. But a closer examination of the movement reveals, behind the scenes, multiple repertoires, strategies, and tactics tailored to specific grievances localities and settings. It is for this reason that Tarrow (2005) referred to the participants involved in these apparently global mobilisations as rooted cosmopolitans. While some of the SCMs associated with the GJM came together for big international demonstrations, they and many of their counterpart SCMs were rooted to locally situated concerns and shaped by more localised sets of geographically and historically variable contexts.

Some scholars consider the GJM as a ‘movement of movements’ (della Porta and Mosca, 2005; Cox and Nilsen, 2007) because it brought together a range of causes including environmentalism, humanitarianism, workers’ rights, and other struggles for equality. Together, the SCOs involved in the GJM used a range of strategies to seek justice for people and the environment across the globe. A useful way of thinking about the GJM is as a call for, in Paul Kingsnorth’s words, ‘one no, and many yeses’. This means that while the GJM universally rejects neo-liberal forms of capitalism that generate injustices (the ‘one no’), there were multiple ways to take action to begin to redress these injustices (the ‘many yeses’). These ranged from marches, occupations and riots through to hacking and reconnecting electricity supplies, reclaiming land, guerrilla gardening, and helping others in need.

The GJM provides a useful lens to examine the repertoires, strategies, and tactics of SCOs, and to illustrate how social change efforts are multi-faceted and shaped by geographically and historically variable contexts. It also shows the ways in which SCOs work together strategically (and sometimes less strategically) in chains of interacting strategic repertoires. This does not only apply to the GJM as we will show in this chapter.

The end of the Cold War, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, and the end of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) between 1989 and 1991, had far-reaching consequences for SCOs around the world. In Europe, these developments encompassed the enlargement of the European Union (EU) to include CEE countries such as Poland, Hungary and Slovenia, among others, as new member states. The consequences for SCOs, including those addressing gender equality in CEE countries, were significant.

A historical look at European women’s movements (Roth, 2017) illustrates the ways in which various political and gender regimes enable and constrain the work of SCOs. As we noted in the Introduction to our book, gender equality movements around the world have been able to achieve significant gains with respect to political, economic, and social rights. Nevertheless, gender equality has still not been achieved at the beginning of the 21st century. Neo-liberalism, as well as the end of socialism, changed the context in which SCMs addressing gender equality in the CEE countries could mobilise. Their activism was shaped by several factors. First, the end of state socialism ended repression and surveillance. This enabled groups that previously met in a clandestine manner around kitchen tables, like the participants of the East German women’s peace movement (Miethe, 1999; 2000) to, instead, organise openly. Second, people in the former socialist countries were confronted with high unemployment and a massive dismantling of the socialist welfare state. Third, CEE countries that, during the Cold War, had provided assistance to countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America then became recipients of ‘aid’ focused on strengthening and restoring democracy and civil society. We are putting ‘aid’ in inverted commas to draw attention to the deeply unequal relations between those who deliver and those who receive aid (see Roth et al, 2024). That means that aid is not necessarily oriented at the needs of aid recipients. We discuss humanitarian assistance further later and in the following chapters. Much of this ‘aid’ was delivered by Western SCOs, notably women’s NGOs and political foundations that supported the projects of their CEE partners (Wedel, 2001; Roth, 2007).

Let us start with a couple of examples of SCOs and SCMs. Members of the Coalition of Labour Union Women (CLUW), an organisation that was founded in Chicago 1974 and which bridges the US women’s and labour movements (Roth, 2003), have been involved in a range of social movements simultaneously and successively. Some of the ‘founding mothers’ who were born in the 1920s and 1930s were long-standing trade unionists who were also involved in the civil rights movement marching with Martin Luther King and supporting the women’s movement and the struggle for the Equal Rights amendment. In contrast, some of the ‘rebellious daughters’, who were born in the 1940s and 1950s, had been involved in the farmworkers’ movement, supported the Black Panthers, and were involved in various feminist organisations including a feminist healthcare collective that provided abortions. The ‘political animals’, were involved in community organisations and the Democratic Party, and became union members after starting to work in the public sector. Finally, the ‘fighting victims’ became politicised after they had received support through their union at the workplace. While each of these four types came to CLUW on a different trajectory, what was important to all was to frame ‘women’s issues’ as ‘workers’ issues’ and vice versa while also fighting for racial justice. Many felt that supporting the Democratic Party was an important strategy in addition to participating in strike action and engaging in lobbying at the local, state, and national levels.

Our second example is based on our knowledge of environmentalists, derived from our in-depth interviews with environmental activists and participant observation in environmental organisations. Jo thinks of their self an environmentalist. For the past 15 months they have worked as a conservation volunteer with a county-wide branch of a national conservation organisation in the UK. They spend one weekday every week (outside of the school holidays) working with a small group of other conservation volunteers removing invasive species, planting trees, opening up spaces to allow cattle to graze, and managing ponds. Jo has always been a nature lover, but since volunteering began to appreciate the gravity of the environmental and climate crises through their communications with others. They now attend annual climate change marches, and have, more recently, joined a network that engages in civil disobedience to raise the profile of the climate crisis. At the previous annual climate change march, they encountered a counterdemonstration.

In 2016, the British green transport activist John Stewart won the Sheila McKechnie Foundation Long-Term Achievement Award for excellence in environmental campaigning. Prior to this, in 2011, he came top of the list of the UK’s most effective environmentalists as judged by The Independent newspaper. When we interviewed Stewart in 2001 and again in 2004 he already had an impressive track record of what we might call ‘success’ within a range of environmental SCOs.

Stewart began his environmental SCM career working with a local transport group in Lambeth, London, which sought to make public transport fares fairer. This group became institutionalised and obtained council funding to deliver services to make public transport policy greener. This led to Stewart’s involvement in campaigns against road building in the 1980s. By the late 1980s this work had expanded to coordinating a London-wide network called All London Against the Road Menace (ALARM), which had around 250 local groups. To stop NIMBYism (that is, not-in-my-backyard tendencies), all grassroots groups signing up to this network were asked to pledge to agree to the principle of ‘no more new roads in London’, which prevented groups from pitting themselves against each other, thus preventing conflict and competition among groups pursuing the same goals. In 1990, UK transport minister Cecil Parkinson dropped all of the road schemes planned for London. Stewart told us that – if the anti-roads campaigns of the late 1980s had not been successful – Clapham Common (a significant green space in London) would now be a spaghetti junction of roads full of traffic. After this success, the network turned to help other national anti-road groups struggling to fight what had been dubbed the UK government’s largest road building scheme since the Romans (Saunders, 2013). It morphed into ALARM-UK, with around 300 groups across the country. The network engaged in non-violent direct action and again deemed itself successful. Stewart told us:

1. Volunteering in the male life course (1988–90)

Around 1988, Silke joined a project on ‘Socialisation in Retirement’ as research assistant. The project, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, the German equivalent of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council [ESRC]), was led by Martin Kohli. It aimed to understand how retired men cope with the loss of paid work to structure their everyday lives. Five groups of men aged 60 and older, some of them still pursuing paid work as part-time workers or self-employed men, were contrasted to different groups of volunteers. Silke was responsible for interviewing volunteers in the Rote Kreutz (Red Cross) and the Arbeiter Samariter Bund (Labour Samaritans’ Union, a first aid organisation associated with the labour movement). The ten life history interviews she conducted revealed that the men started to volunteer in their youth or mid-life, not in their retirement. Subsequently, she examined the role of volunteering in the male life course in her masters’ dissertation, carrying out ten additional interviews with young and middle-aged men. She found that volunteering provided stabilisation throughout the life course, especially crises times, such as unemployment or divorce. Silke’s master’s dissertation also examined the significance of voluntary organisations in modernisation processes. Work on the project has informed our thinking about the necessity of understanding paid and unpaid work in a life course perspective and to consider voluntary organisations as shaped by and contributing to social change.

2. The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) in the US (1994–97)

Silke’s next project was her PhD thesis, funded by the Hans Bockler Stiftung (the research foundation of the German Trade Union Federation) and the University of Connecticut. Silke was interested to investigate the challenges of women to get involved and assume leadership positions in bureaucratic organisations. Trade unions had for a long time been male-dominated although this changed due to de-industrialisation and the higher involvement of women in the paid labour force. The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) presented an excellent case study to study efforts of women to change trade unions.

Founded in 1971, Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors without Borders) is one of the largest and most prominent humanitarian organisations. According to its website, in 2021, the organisation received 97.1 per cent of the funds it raised (€1.94 billion) from more than 7 million individual donors and private institutions (private companies and foundations). The organisation explains that relying on ‘individuals donating small amounts … helps to ensure our operational independence and flexibility to respond at a moment’s notice to the most urgent crises, including those that are under-reported or neglected’. MSF furthermore explains that less than 2 per cent of the total funds raised come from government funding and, since 2016, in opposition to the damaging migration deterrence policies, MSF refuses to take funds from the EU, its member states, and Norway. The SCO also eschews the acceptance of funding from companies and industries that are in conflict with the provision of medical humanitarian work, for example pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies; extraction industries (such as oil, natural gas, gold or diamonds); tobacco companies; and arms manufacturers). The organisation thus has strict policies on its funding sources. It is clear in its determination to turn down financial support from sources that contradict the values of MSF. This allows MSF not only to decide where and how to allocate its resources but also to speak out against the policies and actions of governments and companies. In 1999, MSF was awarded the Nobel Prize in recognition of its pioneering humanitarian work around the world.

In this chapter, we discuss the different resources needed to carry out the work of SCOs. These material and non-material resources include people, knowledge (experience and expertise), money to pay salaries, travel costs and accommodation, goods, access to media and meeting space, and much more. We also examine how these resources are mobilised and argue that decision making processes about access to resources are a central part of organising for change. As our introductory vignette discussing MSF’s fundraising strategy demonstrates, some SCOs consciously avoid and refuse support that would constrain their ability to speak out, criticise, or to engage in disruptive action.

Throughout the book we have argued that SCOs are as much shaped by historically variable contexts as they in turn shape this context in interaction with other SCOs. Recognising SCOs as co-creators of social change invites us to consider together temporality, interaction, and the variety of forms of SCOs, and to do so within the broader historically variable context. The factors that allow SCOs and SCMs to secure social change vary across time and place. Thinking in this way alerts us to the magnitude and complexity of disentangling SCO outcomes – on each other, on SCMs, on policy, on legislation, on institutions and on culture as well as in relation to broader social, economic, cultural, and technological contexts at multiple (local, national, and international) levels over time. We therefore stress the value of our holistic approach, which encourages us to think realistically about the very real challenges of accurately tracing the outcomes of SCOs back to the source or sources from which they originated.

It is, nonetheless, important to recognise how an outcome in one sphere (for example, cultural or biographical) might set on course some chain reactions in different spheres (for example, political or material). Indeed, this is probably one reason why existing work on the outcomes of SCOs is currently unclear about the precise mechanisms through which outcomes are secured. This is part of the beauty of our approach: a simple, linear, theory of ‘organising for social change’ would do injustice to the multiple processes at play within and among SCOs and their broader historically variable context. A holistic account of the outcomes of organising for change must recognise how individual, SCO-sector, socio-cultural, and socio-political outcomes come to shape one another in usually unpredictable ways.

Throughout this book we have examined varieties of SCO and a range of intersecting classes of SCMs. What are the lessons learned and what are the implications of our intervention? In this, our concluding, chapter we first highlight the relevance of our work to the circumstances we find ourselves in at the beginning of the 2020s. Then we discuss the three key themes that our book raises about the role of SCOs and SCMs in social change processes.

The first two decades of the 21st century have been shaped by multiple intersecting financial, health, and environmental crises, and rapid social change. The financial crisis of 2008 generated economic and fiscal consequences that resulted in unemployment and austerity measures. The COVID-19 pandemic, which began at the end of 2019, reshaped our societies dramatically and revealed the challenges of dealing with a pandemic within national health systems already under strain. The ongoing environmental and climate crises threaten the homes and livelihoods of many, particularly in the Global South, but also in the Global North, and have huge ramifications on how societies across the world organise their economies and citizens live their lives. These crises have intensified global economic, racial, and gender inequalities and thus must be analysed from an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1991). Together, these intersecting crises have resulted in a wide range of mobilisations, from large-scale protests on the streets to self-help and DIY (do it yourself) mobilisations, which are less visible. This book is about the organisations and people that are responding to crises and seeking to bring about as well as resist social change. We call these organisations social change organisations (SCOs) and the people engaged in them social change makers (SCMs).

We argue that focusing on SCOs and SCMs in a historical perspective contributes to the development of a theory of social change that takes into account structure and agency. SCOs and SCMs are constrained by the contexts in which they are active, but at the same time they are contributing to the transformation of these contexts – more often incrementally than rapidly. Our approach goes beyond models of social change that focus on the dynamics between incumbents and challengers (McAdam et al, 2001; Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). We argue that it is important to broaden the perspective on efforts to bring about change beyond contentious politics (various forms of violent or non-violent protest) by paying more attention to insider activism and prefigurative politics. Insider activism refers to social change making that seeks to pressure institutions to change (or resist change) in more formal contexts than contentious politics (Pettinicchio, 2012).