Mario Diani Building civic networks: Logics of tie formation1 3.1 Why alliances matter

Very few organizations can afford to pursue their goals in total autonomy. Even business organizations,

that are supposed to operate in regimes of fierce competition, are substantially dependent on each other

as well as on other types of actors in order to secure the financial, intellectual and professional

resources which are essential to their survival and development (Fligstein 1996; Gulati and Gargiulo

1999; Powell et al. 2005). In the case of voluntary organizations active in advocacy, the centrality of

alliance building has never been questioned (M. N. Zald and McCarthy 1980; Meyer and Corrigall-

Brown 2005). This is not because voluntary organizations would not be inclined to work in pursuit of

their own distinctive agenda. This applies not only to major organizations richly endowed with

resources,2 but also to much smaller, grassroots organizations: in Bristol and Glasgow alike, the list of

the two most important projects pursued by each of our respondents showed hardly any overlap. At the

same time, however, if we take a slightly broader perspective and look at the overall amount of projects

that civic organizations are actually involved in, alliance building is usually regarded as an essential

requisite of their success; it is also considered an essential component of collective action, for practical

as well as symbolic reasons (Knoke 1990b, xxx). Voluntary organizations collaborate in order to

maximize their limited resources, increase their reach into different social and political milieus, and

their potential threat towards their opponents.

“.... the authorities, the powers that be pay more attention to more than one voice. Because

people feel disempowered by the scale of the issues which they face and feel stronger by

combining with others…” (Representative of black and minority umbrella group, Bristol)

1 Chapter 3 from Mario Diani, The Cement of Civil Society, under review. 2 Greenpeace is probably the most extreme case of highly influential organization focusing almost

entirely on its own campaigns, even though over the years has proved more willing to engage in

collaborative collective action, both within civil society and in broader policy arenas (Eyerman and

Jamison 1989; Stafford, Polonsky, and Hartman 2000).

2

“Nobody can do everything themselves, and if what we want is an environmentally friendly

Scotland involving the people of Scotland, nobody can do that on their own we all have to do

it together.” (Representative of conservation group, Glasgow)

They also work together, however, in response to ethical imperatives and to normative arguments that

emphasize the positive nature of collaboration, its role in building cohesion within civil society, and in

strengthening collective identities associated to alternative perspectives. It is in other words possible to

extend to the organizational level the well-known argument, elaborated in reference to individual

participation, that holding a collective identity both helps citizens to pursue their goals and to

strengthen their identification with larger collectives (Pizzorno 1978):

“[Alliance building] is important because we want to live in a harmonious society and we

want to live as one big multicultural community…..It’s one way of sharing and meeting and

exchanging information on community things…… it’s because we were are not talking

enough to one another that we have these problems [linked to competition for resources].

This is where the barriers are because we are not communicating enough, we are not finding

out what each of us are doing and if we had better collaboration, better networking we would

be able to use our resources in a better way as well as have a better understanding of what

people are doing..” (Representative of capacity building organization in the black and

minority sector, Bristol)

More specifically, alliance building can be seen as a primary component of the relation between

organizations and their environment. Resource dependence theories have stressed how organizations

not only secure resources through alliances, but also operate a reduction of systemic uncertainty (e.g.

Galaskiewicz 1985). In business terms this may correspond, e.g., to the reduction of competition by

establishing ties to potential competitors; in the field of voluntary action, it may prevent limited

resources, controlled by one organization’s potential allies, from being concentrated onto agendas that

are not relevant to the organization’s itself.

“[alliances are] important to us because we provide specific services for specific client group

and it is most important for us to network with other organisations and have alliances with

other organisations so that we can refer people on as well as make some of those other

3

organisations accountable to providing services and support to people in the mainstream of

society.” (Representative of capacity building organization in the black and minority sector,

Bristol)

3.2 Ties, relations, interactions

One problem is, of course, how to study alliances, or even better, and more broadly, cooperative ties

between civic organizations. Establishing the nature of social ties represents a fundamental question for

sociologists, and one we are not going to address – not to mention solve – in the context of this book.

At the same time, our – admittedly far more modest – task, namely, mapping the structure of civil

society, strongly resonates with broader discussions. Structural analysts have handled the distinction

between interactions and social relations in different ways. In explicit critique of network analysis,

Bourdieu associated for example networks with ephemeral and contingent interactions, while leaving

the term ‘social relations’ to designate deep differences between social positions in terms of power and

access to material and symbolic resources (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 113–114).3 Leading analysts

of social movements have been relatively ambiguous on the issue. In their last synthesis of the

contentious politics approach, Tilly and Tarrow introduced the distinction between ‘social movements

campaign’ (the classic ‘sustained challenge to powerholders…..’) and ‘social movement bases’,

consisting of ‘movement organizations, networks, participants, and the accumulated cultural artifacts,

memories and traditions that contribute to social movement campaigns’ (Tilly and Tarrow 2007a, 114).

They kept a neat distinction between networks and interactions, but turned Bourdieu’s approach on its

head: they used the term ‘networks’ to designate the more stable social relations that facilitate

collective action, while collective action proper consists of sustained interactions between conflicting

actors. In other writings, however, they put forward a view of social structure as emerging from

repeated interactions (e.g. Tilly 2005; see also Diani 2007), suggesting a high degree of continuity

between interactions and relations.

3 However, Crossley (2002) has developed an approach to social movements inspired by Bourdieu but

far more open to consider the heuristic potential of network analysis.

4

The view of social structure as the outcome of patterned, relatively stable interactions is also the one

dominant among social network analysts (Wellman 1988; Monge and Contractor 2003), and is the one

explicitly adopted in this book. While the ties that develop within organizational fields may not display

the same resilience and stability as those linked to class position or ethnic group membership, they

nonetheless may achieve some constraining power, and may be seen as the foundation of a peculiar

form of social organization (see also ch.1). At the same time, there is no denying that certain types of

ties be more stable and indicate stronger links than others, and therefore be better indicators of the

structure of civil society: the frequency of interactions, their emotional intensity, the amount of shared

risks and resources may differentiate between alliance ties within civil society; or, certain types of ties

may prove stronger than others, e.g., sharing resources in a series of jointly promoted campaigns may

be seen as more demanding, and therefore as evidence of a stronger tie, than the exchange of

information, or the sharing of some basic facilities (e.g. Diani 1995). Later in this chapter we’ll

introduce the difference between transactions and social bonds, that attempts to link the present

discussion to the exploration of modes of coordination (Lemieux 1998; Baldassarri and Diani 2007).

Analysts of collective action fields also have to choose whether relying on ‘objective’ measures of the

links between actors, or on actors’ perceptions of the strength of their ties, regardless of empirically

measurable criteria. We may for instance associate strength of ties to frequency of collaboration,

assuming that two organizations will be more strongly linked, if they are involved in a larger number of

jointly promoted events over the years, or to the number of shared activists. On the other hand, two

organizations might regard each other as particularly important partners even though they do not

necessarily interact most frequently. For example, one neighborhood environmental group may regard

a major national environmental organization as a most important partner even though they most

frequently interact with other neighborhood-based groups on specific initiatives and campaigns (Diani

1995, chap. 1).

This study largely focuses on perceptions rather than objective measures, although chapter 6 pays some

attention to organizations’ joint participation in events. This is due to both substantive and

methodological reasons. In methodological terms, it has long been shown that social actors’ accounts of

the actual frequency/intensity of their exchanges with other actors are less accurate than their

qualitative assessment of the presence and relevance of specific ties (P. Marsden 1990; 2005; Casciaro

1998). Moreover, intensity or frequency of interaction is by definition strongly dependent on other

5

factors such as organizations’ overall centrality or size.4 In substantive terms, perceptions5 are more

relevant to the main goal of this project, namely, the identification of informal yet relatively stable

patterns of social organization, originating from recurrent exchanges between formally independent

partners. It is sensible to assume that each actor, when planning an activity, will look first for

resources/support from its closest and most reliable partners and will refer to others only if the latter are

obviously relevant for the specific project being considered.6

In order to identify relevant inter-organizational ties we proceeded in two steps. Respondents were

asked to name “up to five groups/organizations with which you collaborate most intensely”. While they

were not submitted any predetermined list as a stimulus, later in the interview they were also asked

whether, on top of the five partners already mentioned, they had connections to organizations in any of

the following types: environmental groups, ethnic minority and migrants organizations, community

organizations, unions and other economic interest groups, religious organizations, political parties,

other political organizations, other voluntary associations, any other organization. Participation in a

formally constituted organization, coordinating a number of different groups on a specific campaign,

was recorded as an inter-organizational tie, similarly to an alliance between two any other formally

independent organizations. On the basis of these criteria, in principle each organization might have

identified up to a maximum of 37 alliance partners (the five most intense ties plus up to four ties for

4 For example, one monthly meeting between a neighborhood environmental group and a major

environmental association may be a strong tie for the former but a weak tie for the latter. 5 The role of perceptions in the development of collective action (in particular, actors’ perceptions of

their environment and the opportunities it offers) has long been recognized by movement analysts

(Gamson 1992; Gamson and Meyer 1996). 6 One should at least acknowledge another important distinction, running between cooperative and

adversarial ties. When using network approaches to look at organizational fields, analysts of collective

action and social capital have largely focused on cooperative ties (B. Edwards, Foley, and Diani 2001;

Diani and McAdam 2003; Diani 2004). This book follow the same approach, although it would have

also been interesting to pay attention to adversarial ties. Unfortunately, the traditional reluctance of

civil society organizations to identify explicit opponents in their organizational fields resulted in the

impossibility of conducting a systematic analysis of adversarial ties (we consider, on the other hand,

conflictual ties to other, public and private, actors).

6

each of eight organizational types). Unsurprisingly, the average number of partners was much lower,

and very similar in the two cities (9.1 in Glasgow and 9.7 in Bristol). Of those ties, in the average 2.83

in Glasgow and 1.96 in Bristol were directed to other organizations included in our unit of analysis, to

suggest a stronger clustering inclination among Glaswegian groups.

We also urged respondents to specify the content of the link, in order to qualify the nature of the tie.7

Specifically, we asked whether the tie implied 1) conducting joint projects; 2) sharing information; 3)

pooling resources;8 4) sharing core members; 5) activists with strong personal ties to each other. We

operationalized transactions as those links that only consisted of exchanges of resources, as measured

by tie types 1-3. In contrast, social bonds were multiplex links which could be seen as the composition

of ‘transactions’ and ‘personal ties’, measured by ties 4-5.9 The distinction will be crucial to the tracing

of different modes of coordination in the next chapter.

It is worth noting that, against current trends, we did not pay specific attention to relations mediated by

information technology. There might have been good reasons for doing so, and not only because this

particular sphere of political activity has attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years (Van de

Donk et al. 2004; Earl and Kimport 2011): but also because new technologies play a specific role in

sustaining underground critical communities of activists that were somehow present in both cities. In

7 As Kenis and Knoke (2002, 276) argue, most tie contents “may be classified under five broad

substantive headings: information transmissions, resource exchanges, power relations, boundary

penetrations, and sentimental attachments." 8 While the conduction of joint projects implies shared information and resources, the reverse does not

necessarily apply. Organizations may also collaborate through regular exchanges of information, or

through the pooling of resources (a classic example being sharing offices). 9 As suggested in ch.1, in principle one could also conceive of situations in which organizations are

involved in the same sub- or counter-cultural milieus, organizational industries, or movement sectors

through the multiple forms of participation and the personal connections of their members (ties of the

type 4-5), yet are not engaged in any type of resource exchange (V. Taylor and Whittier 1992; Melucci

1996). While, in principle, one organization might identify as an important partner another one with

which has no resources exchanges but only shared activists and friends, in practice this never happened

in our specific case.

7

particular, at the time of the project there was already in Bristol an active radical community that

operated largely through fanzines and other forms of communication10 rather than through more

conventional inter-organizational contacts. Their presence in the local political life is probably

somehow underestimated, precisely because of the lack of attention to ICT-mediated communication.

On the other hand, systematic studies of the role of ICT in local communities have conclusively

demonstrated the enormous level of overlap between ‘virtual’, computer-mediated ties and ‘real’, face

to face interactions (Wellman and Gulia 1999; Hampton and Wellman 2003). For these reasons,

neglecting the role of new technologies should not alter our understanding of local structural patterns in

any significant ways.

3.3 What drives and what prevents alliance building

If being able to count on alliances is universally regarded as an important organizational asset, it is far

less obvious on what bases do organizations choose their partners. The building and managing of

alliances entails considerable costs, their outcomes are far from certain, and risks involved are non

negligible (Gulati and Gargiulo 1999, 1440). Partners may prove unreliable and unwilling to pull their

weight in campaigns, thus leaving one organization to face the whole burden of collective action.

Symbolic differences may also play a role. Much more than business organizations, voluntary

organizations may hugely differ in their framing of issues and in their ethical and ideological starting

points, despite having what on first sight might look quite compatible agendas (Gerhards and Rucht

1992; Diani 1995, 11–14; Roth 2010). Such differences may represent a serious obstacle to the

establishing of an alliance. For example, the extent to which some organizations are perceived to be

close to institutions may render them implausible allies for the most radical sectors of civil society:

“Whereas the protest folk, I know of certain people in Bristol that regard us as the

establishment and therefore they would not work with us, not because they’d ever asked us

what we think about something, that would be seen as a [treason] to their view of

themselves and their place in society to work with what they regard as centralist types of

10 For example, militant newsletters like Schnews (http://www.schnews.org.uk) or webpages like South

West Activists Network (http://www.myspace.com/swactivists).

8

organizations like [us]. But what is seen as radical is the actual particular form of action

they take. If you are seen as strong on the protest scene you will be less seen on the

alliance scene” (Representative of international NGO, Bristol).

Conversely, protest-inclined organizations may voice positions and adopt tactics that the members,

supporters and sympathizers of other organizations find controversial and possibly embarrassing. Once

again, this may seriously affect opportunities for alliance building:

“…. for example, in the anti-globalisation movement, some sectors, parts of the anarchist

end in Bristol have such a clear oppositional stance that a lot of people that might regard

them as useful allies instead view them as complete no go areas.”(Member of sustainability

group, Bristol).

Far from being a purely instrumental problem, alliance building requires the overcoming of several

potential barriers, linked to cultural and/or ideological differences, the legacy of past experiences, lack

of mutual trust, etc. (Griggs and Howarth 2002; Shumate, Fulk, and Monge 2005; Beamish and

Luebbers 2009). Alliance building depends heavily on a sustained work of assessment – we could call

it a ‘preliminary investigation’ - of organizational fields in order to acquire appropriate knowledge of

prospective partners, and cues about their reliability (Diani 1995, 8; Gulati and Gargiulo 1999, 1442).

When looking at the main mechanisms behind alliance building it is advisable to consider both factors

that facilitate, and factors that discourage the start of an alliance. The obvious starting point, that

alliance will be more likely if the interdependence between two organizations is higher (e.g. Gulati and

Gargiulo 1999, 1444), largely reflected in the priorities of our respondents. In both Glasgow and

Bristol, when asked to indicate up to three main reasons behind their choice of allies, about half of civic

organizations mentioned shared interests (table 3.1 below).

“People would work together if they have got a common cause or a common reason to do it.

Like the Stop the War coalition, CND and Muslim Association in Britain, and the march on

Saturday [February 15 2003] so they work together but normally they wouldn’t agree on

things or work together …. partnership building is probably lower on my list of priorities but

9

where we have things that we can work with we will do and we have been working with a

number of people anyway.” (Representative of Muslim organization, Bristol).

The capacity of other actors to provide organizations with essential resources, and to act as a source of

information and advice, was also highly rated (about 40% in both cities). The relevance of one

organization in its own field also mattered for a non negligible share of respondents (about one

quarter). If we also take into account less popular reasons for alliance building, such as one

organization’s capacity to provide access to important political connections, and the simple

accessibility linked to having an office, we see how about two thirds of civic organizations somehow

regarded resource interdependence as an important element behind their choices:

“Over time if you deliver successful services, word of mouth will spread, more organisations

will come to you ... you are almost forced into a situation of creating alliances which say

there are other groups who empathise with the issues that are there …. the organisation has

come to that realisation that we don’t have and will never have that capacity as a single

organisation to deal with an issue and therefore we need to form these alliances to better

understand reactively and proactively how to deal with them.” (Representative of community

association, Bristol)

“many of the groups will seek to form an alliance and a partnership that is funding driven.

Much of the energy of groups is going into funding, contractual arrangements and so on and

so where there are pots of money, groups will be looking for players and alliances in order to

access those things mostly” (Representative of umbrella organization, Bristol)

Table 3.1 about here

At the same time, commonality in basic values and principles was by far the most frequently mentioned

facilitator of alliance building, by four out of five respondents (see also Ellingson, Woodley, and Paik

2012). This applied in the same way to organizations that also assigned relevance to shared interests

and resource interdependence, and to organizations that did not: about forty percent of the total

respondents considered both value proximity and similarity of interests as important, while ten percent

stressed the role of interests while denying that of values. On the other hand, few organizations

10

emphasized the role of more specific values and cultural traits, such as those linked to membership in

the same religious or ethnic group.11 It was certainly recognized that some minority groups might be

inclined to work mainly on their own, but that was largely imputed to a hostile environment:

“the Afro-Caribbean communities in Bristol are not willing to be engaged…… I think that is

to do with defensive attitudes on all sides and where people have made strong efforts, then I

see promising results of that. I see St. Paul’s Carnival as an opening point for a mixture of

white protests and white radical and other groups” (Representative of Black and minority

sector umbrella group, Bristol)

The rhetoric of inclusion and pluralism, and the negative framing of religious and ethnic intransigence,

that characterized Britain –and indeed the West in general – in the aftermath of 9/11, may also have

discouraged some from emphasizing the role of ethnic or religious identities in alliance building, and

encouraged broader approaches:

“ the younger Muslims are much more prepared to be involved on issues other than issues

related to their faith …. Certainly round the time of 9/11, since then there has been a feeling

among some of the younger Muslims, they feel they are being victimised. ….. I find that by

being part of an organisation which is not built around their own ethnic principles they find it

actually quite liberating to be able to say, “we are part of this because of nothing to do with

whether I’m Muslim, Christian, whatever. I’m involved on something which I find important

socially” and they are able to be just citizens of Bristol …. the younger generation, the ones I

work with, are feeling positive and are being part of something else other than Muslim

culture and society. It gives them an extra identity.” (Representative of inter-faith

organization, Bristol)

11 Those items might have been by most subsumed under the broader heading ‘shared values’ – only 3

out of 17 that identified either religion or ethnicity as an important factor did not also tick off ‘shared

values and principles’ .

11

Many organizations (about 40%) were also keen to stress the importance of having complementary

rather than overlapping roles and functions with their allies. As the representative of a cycling

association in Bristol put it:

“we have always said it was down to the “3 Ps” so there’s provision of infrastructure for

cycling, so Sustrans would be doing that, they are building a national cycle network, safe

routes to schools, safe routes to stations, infrastructure so that provision. Policy change

would be people like Bristol Cycle Campaign trying to affect the political arena. The third

‘p’ is promotion and that’s what we do. That would be the division of labour and that’s why

there are three different organisations.”

Assigning importance to division of labour correlated negatively, if quite weakly, with emphasis on

commonality of interests: in Glasgow, 39% of those that did regard division of labour as important also

stressed the relevance of shared interests, vs. 60% of those who did not (p<.05); in Bristol, the figures

were 42% and 60% (p<.05). In Glasgow, the importance of division of labour also correlated

negatively with the emphasis on resource interdependence (52% vs. 78%, p<.01). Among

organizational properties, shared tactics did not seem to facilitate alliances, while divergences on

tactics were important negative reasons for not setting up an alliance (table 3.2 below). Arguments

about the importance of organizations’ previous embeddedness for alliance building received mixed

support, as those factors seemed far from negligible, yet perhaps less than previous analyses might

have led one to expect (Gulati and Gargiulo 1999).

Altogether, about one fifth of respondents acknowledged the role of different indicators of social

capital. The presence of trustworthy figures within prospective partner organizations seemed

particularly important (Corrigall-Brown and Meyer 2010), and so was commitment to long term

collaboration: 12

12 Interestingly, organizations stressing the role of social capital were significantly under-

represented among organizations highlighting at the same time the importance of shared interests

(16%, p<0.05) and incentives and opportunities (10%, p<.000).

12

“Reputation. It’s down to the way you behave in particular situations….. it’s about actually

not hiding behind the organisation, but saying I am me, I happen to be part of that but it’s

about me.” (Representative of inter-faith organization, Bristol)

“Everytime I speak to a new community [group] who started an initiative, I always make a

point that as an organisation we are not here to run it and go away….. I think you are

looking at three years into working, before people trust you and begin to understand that

you are not going to run away when it gets difficult as people have done in the past.”

(Member of conservation group, Glasgow)

Let’s look now at what kept organizations apart, according to their own perceptions (table 3.2). First of

all, only one third of the respondents actually identified factors that might prevent them from

establishing alliances with other groups. It remains to be seen whether this stemmed from the urge to

underline their inclusive, totally pragmatic and non ideological approach, consistently with the rhetoric

of times in which social conflict has been ejected from political language (Mouffe 2005), or not.

Among those groups that actually identified some reasons for not setting up alliances, differences in

principles still mattered a lot, while few groups seemed prepared not to engage in alliances because of

mere differences in specific interests, or because of prospective partners’ inability to provide relevant

resources. In other words, interdependence drove alliance building, but lack of it did not seem to

discourage alliances.

Alliances were rather prevented by factors that were relatively less important as positive motives, such

as tactics or social capital. Lack of trust in leaders, and lack of previous personal or political

connections with members of other organizations, seemed to discourage alliances, as risks attached to

engaging with other groups become more difficult to assess. Trust building was often recognized as an

essential step to counter risks of manipulation:

“Groups like ours operate on understanding the historical experiences that we come out of

and part of that historical experiences is that ….. we have been used as a [group] that

somebody in order to secure funding or secure a position comes and wants to form a

partnership with or want to be part of the network. Then once they have secured the funding

13

or secured whatever it was the goal… you are forgotten about, you’re a thing of the past.”

(Representative of black and minority organization, Bristol)

Table 3.2 about here

As for tactics, although the 1990s had seen both a substantial growth in protest activities and a rise in

the number of individuals prepared to engage in protest, or at least to view it benevolently (see ch.2), a

sizeable proportion of organizations (about one fifth) still regarded differences in tactics as a major

reason for not engaging in alliances. On the one hand, one could have expected more moderate

organizations to refrain from setting up alliances with more radical ones, due to their disagreements

about acceptable courses of action, and their evaluations of the possible negative consequences for their

own and their constituency’s position in the political process. In the words of the Glaswegian

representative of an international NGO,

“We’ll be very careful, we don’t get involved in a lot of protest stuff, we just don’t. We don’t

exclude it utterly, there are things we will do, we will protest outside embassies, in general

not slugging it out with them with tear gas ….. we are very choosy about what we do e.g. if

people wanted to protest outside Sainsbury’s because they were allowing asylum seekers to

use vouchers we won’t do that because that is not the way we are choosing to conduct this

campaign. Partly there’s a whole political thing about charity status but also it was the wrong

target, it was the Home Office was the target, they are the ones setting this on track and so

strategically it was like don’t waste your energy on Sainsbury’s.”

Some black and minority leaders in Bristol reiterated this point in reference to the consequences of the

major riots that back in 1981 had taken place in the St Paul’s neighborhood (Rex 1982):

“…we would perhaps not be over keen in supporting some of the direct action things….

and not because it isn’t important but because we feel that, again some of us have had

experience where we’ve been at the brunt for protesting…… [in the St Paul’s riots] the

majority of people who were jailed were black yet the thing was that there were black

people and white people out on the front line, throwing stones. ….. somebody says well

14

there were some members from white organizations making cocktails and giving it to the

black youths to throw.” (Leader of Black and minority organization, Bristol).

Conversely, groups that were more sympathetic towards protest might have been wary of organizations

who refused even to consider more radical tactical options, thus limiting their range of possible allies:

“…. the leadership of [group X] fields itself in opposition to Oxfam, to the paid salaried,

funded NGO’s – [the leader] is a volunteer and activist and he draws a line between those

who are self-motivated, self-financing activists, often on the dole, and people who receive

salaries……” (Member of sustainability group, Bristol).

“We just got frustrated waiting for something to happen and so we decided to approach the

Parliament by disrupting proceedings, hanging a banner from the public gallery and singing

songs and being arrested, we did it [on our own terms], not as CND… and it certainly stirred

it up ….. we would never want to be in the position where we have to be sort of careful on

the toes we tread on, that we can’t take action.” (Peace direct action group, Glasgow)

It is also important to note that no consistent differences – indeed, hardly any difference at all – could

be found between the two cities despite their different political and cultural profiles. Among factors

positively encouraging alliances, only access to resources turned out to be significantly more present in

Glasgow than in Bristol. However, that only applied to the aggregate measure, that took into account

the presence of at least one motivating factor that could be linked to resource interdependence. No

significant differences emerged when looking at the indicators one at a time (see table 3.2). Among

factors discouraging alliances, the only significant difference challenged common sense expectations.

One might have reasonably expected Glaswegian organizations, embedded in a more polarized political

culture, to assign greater importance to consistency in values and principles. However, it was Bristol

organizations that gave relatively more importance to that element, despite the supposedly more

pragmatic and less ideological political culture of their city (see chs. 2 and 9).

3.4 Finding the perfect match: Why do organizations choose (or not choose) certain specific partners?

15

So far we have just discussed actors’ perceptions of what facilitates and discourages alliance building.

How such perceptions matched the ties in which actors were actually involved, is another matter. We

explore this question in two steps. First, we focus on direct ties, as we try to identify what accounted

for the presence or absence of an alliance between a pair of organizations. Next, we look for factors

that may contribute to explain the similarity between two organizations in their patterns of alliances to

third parties. In this case, two organizations were not similar because they were necessarily directly

connected, but because they had relatively similar allies. In the first case, the explanandum consisted of

matrices that recorded the presence or absence of a tie between two organizations; in the second, of

matrices that reported for each pair of nodes (in our case, organizations) their structural proximity.13

The explanans consisted of several matrices, representing the proximity or dissimilarity between pairs

of organizations on a number of theoretically relevant properties. Unless explicitly indicated, each

matrix reported the absolute difference between the scores of two organizations on a given property.

Consistently with the ‘null hypothesis’ that inter-organizational alliances be mainly driven by resource

dependence mechanisms, four matrices were built on the basis of four variables, that reflected as many

aspects of such mechanisms. The higher the values of a cell in the matrices originated from these

variables,14 the more dissimilar two organizations on that particular variable. Two matrices focus on

issue priorities: one reported the similarity between organizations in their interest in issues connected to

the new social movement agenda, the other, their interest in issues linked to the overarching theme of

exclusion and deprivation.15

13 More specifically, proximity was measured by the so-called positive-matching index (also known as

Jaccard’s index), which expresses the ratio of partners that two organizations have in common to their

overall number of partners. If, as it normally happens, two nodes had a different number of partners,

the index was computed using the lowest of the two numbers as a denominator (Hanneman and Riddle

2005, 211). This measure can also be seen as an approximation of two organizations’ structural

equivalence (Steve Borgatti and Everett 1992), or structural embeddedness (Gulati and Gargiulo 1999). 14 Matrices from these and other variables were created with the Ucinet routine ‘data\attribute to

matrix’. 15 More specifically, the ‘NSM issue’ variable combined the ‘environment’ and ‘globalisation’ issue

scales identified in table 2.4; the ‘exclusion and deprivation’ variable combined the ‘social exclusion’,

‘housing’ and ‘ethnicity and migration’ scale. See Appendix for details.

16

Two matrices also focused on organizational properties. One reported differences in levels of

organizational formalization (see table 2.1), in order to test the hypothesis that organizations tended to

engage in ties to actors with similar organizational profiles. The other measured the difference in the

number of times that organizations had been identified by other organizations as leaders in the local

civic sector. The main question here was whether organizations with similar levels of local influence

and/or prestige would tend to join forces; or whether, consistently with the expectations of dependency

theory, asymmetrical relations will prevail between local leading organizations and other less

influential actors. Another matrix reported in each cell the number of public events in which

organizations had been involved in the past,16 in order to check to what extent past experiences of

collaboration might have shaped network configurations at later stages. This matrix provided the best

possible approximation of what has been defined as ‘relational embeddedness’, namely, “the extent to

which a pair of organizations (dyad) had direct contact with each other in the past” (Gulati and

Gargiulo 1999, 1462).17

A third set of matrices measured the similarity or dissimilarity of pairs of organizations on the basis of

their relations to institutional and protest politics. One matrix measured the extent to which two

organizations differed in their overall evaluation of the approach to civil society and citizens’

participation brought about by New Labour since the late 1990s. Another matrix measured the overall

involvement of civic organizations in public-private partnerships, with high value cells reflecting

greater differences in the number of public private partnerships (PPPs) in which two organizations were

involved. In principle, similar levels of involvement in these policy-oriented fora might have been

expected to create indirect ties that might in turn prove conducive to alliance building. Finally, one

matrix measured how much two organizations differed in their adoption of a protest repertoire. This

16 The full list of events (26 in Glasgow, 17 in Bristol) is discussed at length in ch.6. Here we only look

at events that took place before the year 2001. Annual events (e.g. May 1st or International Women’s

Day) have been excluded from this particular matrix. 17 However, it does not represent a direct measure of relational embeddedness as the presence of a tie is

inferred from involvement in the same event, and not from respondents’ direct identification of another

organization as a partner in intense past exchanges.

17

enabled us to look at the crucial role of tactics in shaping alliance building (see table 2.4 for details on

these measures).

The whole exercise may be summarized in a nutshell as a test of the homophily principle, applied to

organizational populations. Studies focusing on networks consisting of individuals have identified a

range of sources of homophily, including, with a varying salience depending on context and nature of

the tie, gender, ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, age, occupation, etc. (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and

Cook 2001). In a similar vein, it’s important to check whether similarity on some property affects the

probability of a tie and/or of similar allies between pairs of organizations. Table 3.3 below reports the

standardized coefficients of analyses in which adjacency and similarity matrices for both cities are

regressed on the matrices we have just introduced, using QAP (quadratic assignment procedure).18

However, as the direct interpretation of those coefficients is not straightforward, my comments on the

findings will refer to table 3.4. It only reports the sign of the coefficients that turned out to be

significant at .05 level or below, and has adapted it in order to match the logical relation between

matrices.19

First, arguments by resource dependence theorists were carried quite consistently across the two cities,

on two grounds at least. Similarity in organizational profiles showed significant correlations to the

presence of an alliance, suggesting that bureaucratic organizations would be more likely to set up

18 As the data reported in these matrices are by definition non independent, traditional regression

methods are not really suitable. QAP allows for the non independence of the observations (Hanneman

and Riddle 2005, chap. 18). It is also worth remembering that in QAP regressions the overall amount of

explained variance is not very meaningful. It is certainly not comparable to results obtained from an

ordinary least squares regression (see e.g. Mizruchi 1993, 287–289). 19 For example, the negative coefficients in row 3 in table 3.4 suggest that the more two organizations

differ in their organizational structure, the lower will be the chance of an alliance between them, and

viceversa. Accordingly, table 3.5 reports a positive sign for the corresponding cells, to indicate a

positive relation between similarity on that particular property and the chances of an alliance. In

contrast, the sign of the coefficients in row 5 has not been changed, as higher scores in the matrix

measuring number of joint involvements in past events actually predict higher chances of alliances

going on at the time of the project.

18

alliances to their likes, and that grassroots, informal organizations would do the same. No evidence was

found for grassroots groups engaging disproportionately with more formalized organizations, providing

them e.g. with militancy on specific occasions and receiving technical advice and material resources in

return. This seems to depend at least in part on the scepticism of some of the most participatory –

although not necessarily radical – groups towards the role played by of big, professionalized charities.

They were sometimes blamed for focusing on their self-reproduction and attracting substantial funds to

the detriment of more informal but more committed and engaged actors:

“We are more suspicious of big charities….. there are plenty of examples there in Scotland of

organisations that get a lot of money and you wonder exactly what they are doing and a lot of

their money gets spent on a lot of expensive research for a lot of PR and less gets spent on

tackling the issues that are coming up from the ground, e.g. in relation to refugees…..

governments round the world will say “Yes, well we have heard of them and people keep

saying things about them, therefore we must give them money” whereas organisations that

are grassroots who perhaps deserve the money don’t get anything because they are not

established enough, they are not playing the language of the people that are giving the money

out.” (Representative of black and minority housing association, Glasgow)

This attitude cannot be equated to the simple rejection of any imbalanced collaboration. To the

contrary, organizations showed a significant inclination to set up alliances with actors that had a

different level of prestige and influence within the civic sector than their own. In this sense, the fact

that ‘likes ally with likes’ in terms of organizational profiles did not imply symmetric, horizontal

patterns of alliance building in the civic sector. Both formalized organizations and informal grassroots

groups actually seemed involved in exchanges which were somehow imbalanced, if one looked at the

perceived influence of the partners in the local civic sector.

Tables 3.3-3.4 about here

Differences across cities were quite substantial for all the other factors included in the analysis. In

Bristol, alliance building was easier between organizations with similar levels of interest in deprivation

or in themes closer to the new social movements such as the environment or globalization. None of this

was found in Glasgow, where issue agendas were very poor predictors of alliance building. The picture

19

is reversed if we look at organizations’ levels of involvement with institutions. Sharing similar opinions

on New Labour’s approach facilitated alliance building in Glasgow, while had no impact in Bristol.

Likewise, Glaswegian organizations with similar levels of involvement in public-private partnerships

were also more likely to work together as allies, while Bristolian ones were not.

Interestingly, the overall impact of similarity in action repertoires was quite modest, with a significant

positive correlation with alliance building to be found only in Bristol, and only for the adjacency

matrix. Despite claims about the depth of the differences in action repertoires, as shown in section 3.3,

in practical terms they did not seem to constitute a major practical obstacle when it came to alliance

building, as long as controversial tactics were not used on the occasion of jointly promoted events. A

quite detached attitude towards more confrontational tactics seemed to prevail. When they were

rejected, this was not necessarily on principles, but rather stemmed from the recognition, once again, of

the need for some sort of division of labor within civil society:

“All our staff have [been involved in direct action] but we are very careful to say that none of

that action is part of [our organization]. You are not representing [us] when you are doing

that. For all those reasons for being a charity, people we work with, local authorities,

regional government, national government and all of the difficulties you face. So that’s not

part of our brief, we don’t work in that way. But all of our staff do it.” (Representative of

cyclists association, Bristol)

“We wouldn’t engage in some of the tactics that they engaged [in the campaign against pool

closure], we wouldn’t get involved, I mean, people occupied the buildings and things like

that, we wouldn’t discourage it but we wouldn’t get involved in it, we wouldn’t like to be

labelled in that way…. we wouldn’t say, “no don’t do it” but we wouldn’t want to be labelled

as that sort of organisation because it closes down too many other avenues of influence and

discussion. We are quite happy for someone else to go and do it because it is a pressure on

another front.” (Representative of Muslim organization, Glasgow)

Finally, previous ties between organizations once again facilitated alliances in Glasgow but not in

Bristol. As path dependence mechanisms are usually regarded as a powerful predictor of inter-

organizational alliances (Gulati and Gargiulo 1999), it is worth asking why they seemed to operate in

20

one city but not in the other. One possible explanation, consistent with arguments that assign previous

ties the role of reducing the complexity of a certain organizational environment (Gulati and Gargiulo

1999), points at the higher levels of political fragmentation in Glasgow. As we have seen (chapter 2),

accounts of Bristol civil society portrayed it as dominated by a largely pragmatic political culture. This

in turn resulted in alliance building being largely dependent on the similarity of the interests that two

organizations had in specific issues. In contrast, the political environment in Glasgow seemed more

complex, and more fragmented across traditional political cleavages. This resulted in alliance building

mechanisms that depended more heavily on differences in attitudes towards New Labour policies. The

greater depth of ideological differences might have also rendered alliance building more dependent on

stronger ties between prospective partners, forged through shared past experiences of collective action.

In Glasgow, however, divergences of opinions on the role of New Labour were just one aspect of the

complex relationship between traditional left and civil society organizations. For example, the trade

unions’ closeness to the Labour Party appeared in some cases to discourage alliance building with civil

society organizations, even on issues where there was an objective convergence of interests. This was

candidly acknowledged by a Scottish Trade Union Council representative:

“That’s what I’ve always found, an inclusive approach is the best way, ‘let’s highlight the

issue and let’s not get party political here’…. but that is very difficult within the trade union

movement because about half of our affiliates are also affiliated to the Labour party and …..

sometimes the wish to disagree with your political enemies and agree with your political

allies dominates more than your commitment to the issue”.

The picture was even more problematic if one looked left of Labour. The Socialist Workers Party (who

in Glasgow in 2001 had merged with other left-wing groupings to form the Scottish Socialist Party,

from which was to split in 2006) was frequently singled out as a problematic alliance partner in both

cities:

“they are really hard to work with …… they are just going to like take up issues and use them

for their own political ends and basically we won’t work with them. It’s hard because on the

asylum issue they were very strong and they were saying lots of good things and that is an

issue but it is hard we don’t want to go for an all out anti-Labour Party line again either, we

21

do oppose the Labour Party policies but not the kind of general “let’s just ditch the Labour

Party” kind of a way” (Representative of international NGO, Glasgow)

“they try to take over everything that they are involved in and make it their cause, you go to a

public meeting, somebody from SWP will always stand up and make a very long speech

pushing their party line. You go to any protest, they will be there with ready-made banners

giving them out to people with ‘Socialist Workers Party’ across the top. People don’t like

that” (Bristol activist)

However, other accounts were more positive regarding the role of SWP in local alliances. According to

the representative of an umbrella organizations working on inequality and deprivation issues in

Glasgow,

“Because of the nature of their involvement in various campaigns and their relatively healthy

membership in [our organization], well, a couple of local groups involved and …. one board

member for a few years as well so, there has been a relationship there but it was never one

where they have ever attempted to “use” [us] for their own political work.”

3.5 Conclusions

The analyses presented in this chapter illustrate the differences between the two cities, that emerge

when we pass from the analysis of organizations’ behaviour and attitudes taken as an aggregate, to the

analysis of relational patterns. If we look at the overall propensity of organizations to get involved in

alliance ties, as well as, most important, to the factors that individual organization representatives

identified as crucial facilitators or obstacles to alliance building, the profiles of the two civic sectors

appear remarkably similar (tables 3.2-3.3). If, however, we look at how the same factors affected the

probability of alliances between specific pairs of organization, then differences between cities are not

negligible. There was certainly homogeneity in the tendency of organizations to exchange resources

with organizations with a similar structure (either bureaucratic or grass-roots) while at the same time

engaging with organizations with a different level of perceived influence (with less influential group

looking for stronger partners, and influential groups aiming at extending their area of influence over

22

more marginal actors). However, there was overall quite a mismatch between the criteria that actors

identified as driving alliance building in general, and what seemed to lay behind the alliances that

actually took place. In the latter, differences between cities were quite pronounced.

The findings presented here may be at least partially imputed to differences in local political cultures

and traditions. Alliances between civic organizations were embedded in a previous history of joint

participation in events and in similarity of opinions on the state of the civil sector and on relations to

institutions in Glasgow. Given the stronger resilience of the left-right divide in the Scottish city,

conditions might have been more favourable for the development of alliances between ideologically

homogeneous actors, who had developed some level of mutual trust over time. In contrast, alliances

seemed primarily driven by proximity in issue interests in Bristol. In a context in which cleavages

appeared to be largely pacified, the only factor keeping organizations with a common agenda apart was

disagreement on protest repertoires, as protest might be perceived by many as in contrast with the

compromise-oriented style of policy making, dominant in the city.

Focusing on the factors that lead to the formation or absence of a tie between two organizations, i.e., on

the most basic components of network structures, has enabled us to illustrate the two most important

themes of this book: the tension between properties (in the specific, organizational properties) and

relations, and how different settings (or local opportunity structures) may affect network structures. It is

now time to move ahead, and explore how the interplay of attributes and relations shapes modes of

coordination in different local contexts. To this purpose, however, we need to show how specific,

dyadic alliances combine in more complex network patterns, and how such combinations may be

associated to specific modes of coordination. That’s the task for next chapter.

23

Table 3.1 Facilitators of alliance building (percentages)

Glasgow Bristol Total Same specific interests 52 52 52 Social capital 22 18 20 Trustworthy leaders 11 14 13 Previous personal bonds to their members* 9 4 6 Members have similar past political background 2 0 1 Shared culture 6 6 6 Same religious practice 3 2 3 Same ethnic group 3 5 4 Resources & access* 69 59 64 Provided us with resources/ information/advice 43 39 41 Major player in our field/area 27 23 25 Important source of political/media connections 6 6 6 Easy to contact 5 4 4 We have complementary roles/functions 37 41 39 We tend to adopt similar tactics 3 5 4 Shared values and principles 79 83 81 Do not identify any facilitator 1 2 2 *p<0.1

24

Table 3.2 Obstacles to alliance building (percentages)

Glasgow Bristol Total Different specific interests 6 13 9 Social Capital 14 16 15 Their leaders are untrustworthy 11 8 10 No personal bonds to their members 2 5 4 Members have different political background 2 3 2 Shared Culture 0 2 1 Different religion 0 2 1 Different ethnic group 0 1 0 Resources & Access 6 13 9 Unable to provide us with resources/information 1 2 2 Minor players in our field/area 2 3 2 Alliance with them would damage our political/media connections 3 6 4 Difficult to contact 1 3 2 We are competing for the same resources 0 0 0 We disagree with their tactics 21 16 18 Different fundamental principles** 11 25 18 Do not identify any constraint on alliance building** 73 55 64 **p<0.01

25

Table 3.3 QAP regression predictors of alliances (adjacency matrices and Jaccard similarity matrices) Glasgow Glasgow Bristol Bristol

Adjacency Jaccard Adjacency Jaccard

Organizational formalization -.033*** -.016** -.025** -.017*

Influence in the civic sector .069*** .058** .079*** -.001

Deprivation issues -.012 .009 -.018* -.037***

NSM issues .017 .028 -.034*** -.023*

Joint involvement in events before 2000

.043** .044* -.010 .019

Opinions on New Labour approach

-.021* -.046** -.013 -.018

Involvement in PPPs -.022* -.044** -.004 -.004

Protest repertoire -.017 -.027 -.018* -.017

R2 .010 .011 .01 .003

* p<.05; **p<.01; *** p<.001

26

Table 3.4 Predictors of alliances (summarizing table; signs of coefficients have been adapted to reflect logical relation; only coefficients significant at p<.05 or lower are reported) Glasgow Bristol

Adjacency Similarity (Jaccard)

Adjacency Similarity (Jaccard)

Similar organizational structure

+ + + +

Similar influence in the civic sector

- - -

Similar agenda on deprivation + +

Similar agenda on NSM issues + +

Joint involvement in events before 2000

+ +

Similar opinions on New Labour approach

+ +

Similar involvement in PPPs + +

Similar adoption of protest repertoire

+

27

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