Social movements are often thought of as vehicles for attracting like-minded actors to sacrifice for a common cause or political objective. Much ink has been spilled examining the mechanisms or incentives employed to recruit new members, the material and symbolic resources available to organizers and activists, and the impact of the state and wider social environment in facilitating or impeding successful mobilization. While this rich body of work has illuminated many of the hidden processes of social movement growth and decline, it has largely ignored a simple but profound truth about social movements: that the individuals who comprise them are in most cases already members of existing organizations. Building a social movement, then, is largely a process of coalescing sympathetic groups into a wider and therefore more powerful coalition, yet we know surprisingly little about the underlying dynamics of coalitional activity upon which any successful social movement rests. This project is designed to fill this lacuna by examining the conditions under which social movement coalitions endure rather than dissolve.

To address this issue, I will compare three distinct trajectories of labor-community coalitions in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee. Although unions and community organizations with working-class memberships are often seen as potential partners, recent attempts to work together have been marked by conflict and limited success. Labor-community coalitions attempting to bridge the persistent divides between unions, churches, and the offshoots of various civil rights movements—themselves often split along race, gender, class, and place-based social cleavages—provide an especially challenging test for the theory and practice of coalition-building and community empowerment.

Data will be gathered through in-depth semi-structured interviews and content analysis of campaign materials and news reports, focusing on how participants think about and experience relationships within each coalition. This research is relevant to ongoing debates within the labor movement and politics more generally. Beyond specifying the conditions under which dialogical coalition-building processes lead to enduring collective action, this study has the potential to shed light on how “rational actors” are created, how dichotomies such as difference and unity are balanced by organizers, and how the resulting confluences that we call social movements ever beat the odds to emerge at all, questions of considerable relevance to scholars and activists alike.