From Social Movement to Moral Market
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From Social Movement to Moral Market

How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market

Paul-Brian McInerney

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eBook - ePub

From Social Movement to Moral Market

How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market

Paul-Brian McInerney

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About This Book

In From Social Movement to Moral Market, Paul-Brian McInerney explores what happens when a movement of activists gives way to a market for entrepreneurs. This book explains the transition by tracing the brief and colorful history of the Circuit Riders, a group of activists who sought to lead nonprofits across the digital divide. In a single decade, this movement spawned a market for technology assistance providers, dedicated to serving nonprofit organizations. In contrast to the Circuit Riders' grassroots approach, which was rooted in their commitment to a cause, these consultancies sprung up as social enterprises, blending the values of the nonprofit sector with the economic principles of for-profit businesses. Through a historical-institutional analysis, this narrative shows how the values of a movement remain intact even as entrepreneurs displace activists. While the Circuit Riders serve as a rich core example in the book, McInerney's findings speak to similar processes in other "moral markets, " such as organic food, exploring how the evolution from movement to market impacts activists and enterprises alike.

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Year
2014
ISBN
9780804789066
1
THE CIRCUIT RIDER MOUNTS
Establishing Worth and the Birth of a Social Movement
Prologue
A Methodist preacher, when he felt that God had called him to preach, instead of hunting up a college or Biblical Institute, hunted up a hardy pony, and some traveling apparatus, and with his library always at hand, namely, a Bible, Hymn book, and Discipline, he started, and with a text that never wore out nor grew stale, he cried, “Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.” In this way he went through storms of wind, hail, snow, and rain; climbed hills and mountains, traversed valleys, plunged through swamps, swollen streams, lay out all night, wet, weary, and hungry, held his horse by the bridle all night, or tied him to a limb, slept with his saddle blanket for a bed, his saddle-bags for a pillow. Often he slept in dirty cabins, ate roasting ears for bread, drank butter-milk for coffee; took deer or bear meat, or wild turkey, for breakfast, dinner, and supper. This was old-fashioned Methodist preacher fare and fortune. (Cartwright & Strickland, 1857: 243)
In the autobiography of a “backwoods preacher,” Peter Cartwright wrote these words in 1857 to describe the life of a Methodist Circuit Rider. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, the first successful evangelical movement, spread his new religion by sending young preachers to villages plotted along a circuit. In the 1990s, a new movement of itinerant activists traveled the country, this time preaching the gospel of information technology and its ability to promote social justice and improve the environment. Calling themselves Circuit Riders, they gave new meaning to the term.
Though avoiding the discomforts of their historical namesakes, the contemporary Circuit Rider movement faced its own set of challenges. Before 2000, most in the nonprofit sector saw little value in information technology. Despite the widespread embrace of technology in the business world, there were few programs and projects dedicated to providing information technology to the nonprofit sector. In general, foundations did not support information technology investments among their grantees throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Robertson, 2001), leaving nonprofit and grassroots organizations without resources to acquire information technologies or the skills needed to use them (Corder, 2001; Kirschenbaum & Kunamneni, 2001; Seley & Wolpert, 2002: 75). Managers in the voluntary sector often failed to recognize the importance of information technology for the work they did (Berlinger & Te’eni, 1999; Stein, 2002). Beyond resource and personnel problems, previous attempts to build technology infrastructure for the voluntary sector had already failed (Mills-Groninger, 2003). It appeared, as many Circuit Riders lamented in interviews, that the people in charge of social progress in U.S. society simply did not “get” technology. As a movement, the Circuit Riders believed that members of the voluntary sector did not understand what technology was worth.
The Circuit Rider movement was not unique in facing such challenges. All social movements grow from inauspicious roots. Social movements are groups of actors (individual people or organizations) that engage in ongoing collective action for or against some institutional actor or arrangement to produce or resist social or political change. Collective action entails those meaningful activities conducted on behalf of a group either by that group or by some claimed representative. In order to engage in collective action and form a movement, organizers must overcome exogenous barriers such as recognizing and taking advantage of political opportunities (Tilly, 1978) presenting one’s message effectively (Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986), and mobilizing resources (McCarthy & Zald, 1977) and endogenous barriers such as enrolling and motivating adherents (Olson, 1971) and creating a collective identity (Johnston, Larana, & Gusfield, 1994; Melucci, 1989; Polletta & Jasper, 2001). A key aspect of overcoming barriers to collective action lies in making and justifying claims about what a group’s cause is worth. Here and throughout this book, I use the term worth in its social (meritorious, deserving) and economic (having monetary value) dimensions. Establishing worth is a complex social process that begins discursively and relies on the ability of actors to make value claims and get other actors to evaluate such claims using the same criteria (Strauss, 1982: 174–175). People often use worth in both dimensions to describe activities in their everyday lives. For example, when a friend says that a movie she saw recently was not “worth it,” she may be claiming that ten dollars is too much money or two hours is too much time to spend on the film.
People express worth through accounts, which are transposable stories actors tell to explain what they do and justify why they do them in a certain way (Mills, 1940; Scott & Lyman, 1968; Tilly, 2006). Harold Garfinkel (1984), an eminent sociological theorist, explains that people make sense of everyday life by giving and receiving accounts. Furthermore, by expecting others to account for their actions, Garfinkel says, actors become “accountable” to one another. People create accounts by turning observations into stories, actively selecting among myriad details to report. Therefore, accounts construct as much as reflect reality (Orbuch, 1997). Stark and Bruszt (1998: 192) note that the term “account” “simultaneously connotes bookkeeping and narration. Both dimensions entail evaluative judgments, and each implies the other.” Bookkeeping and narration are forms of justification, which makes accounts of worth “generalizable and relevant for the common good, showing why or how this general claim is legitimate” (Thévenot, Moody, & Lafaye, 2000: 236). In other words, to show how an account extends beyond one’s particular experience, one relies on a story, which can be told through various means, depending on the situation and audience. For example, an investment prospectus is a formal account of worth. It describes a company and makes claims that the company is worthy of investors’ money. Investors expect such accounts to be expressed in certain ways, for example, to have standard measures of values, such as price-to-earnings ratios and profit statements (accounts of worth as bookkeeping). Alternatively, one explains the value of having a garden by virtue of the aesthetic experience (accounts of worth as narration). One’s friend does not expect the justification for having a garden to be expressed in terms of seed costs to productivity, though one could keep the books on a garden as well. When accounts express the value of something—for example, an object, activity, or idea—they are called “accounts of worth” (Stark, 2005, 2009). The moral bases that provide actors with the legitimate justifications they could give for an account are called “orders of worth” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991, 2006).
Organizers of social movements employ accounts of worth to mobilize others to engage in collective action. Francesca Polletta (2006) analyzes the stories activists use to get other people involved in protests. Told in the right way, such stories are critical for enrolling adherents into a movement by providing moral authority for collective actions. Attributions of worth link the various kinds of stories she describes. When activists tell stories about grievous injustices and how they sought to rectify them, they are trying to convince others that their cause has value—that it is worth fighting for. Such moral sources of motivation are especially important for successful collective action (Ganz, 2004). They justify one’s cause as right and just. Movement organizers often use stories to translate movement interests into moral claims. Rather than saying, “We want X because it is good for us,” movement organizers say, “We want X because it is just.” John Wesley mobilized early Circuit Riders by invoking God as a cause worth facing inclement weather, sleep deprivation, and bear-meat breakfasts as they rode around the West spreading Methodism. Throughout this chapter, I discuss how early members of the Circuit Rider movement enrolled and mobilized adherents by making moral claims to potential supporters about what technology is worth.
What Is Technology Worth?
Like many conscientious people, Gavin Clabaugh became involved in the voluntary sector to save his soul. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he and his colleagues had a small firm that wrote trend analysis software for what he later recognized as “all the bad karma people in the world” [16]. As penance, Clabaugh took his technology skills to the Telecommunications Cooperative Network (TCN), a nonprofit cooperative that purchased communications services for about 4,000 organizations in the voluntary sector. In addition to buying long-distance and other phone services in bulk, TCN began offering technology consulting services for its members. These services, Clabaugh explained, “did not work too well because nonprofits are, by definition, dedicated to mission and if given a choice between a dollar for mission and a dollar for infrastructure, they will spend it on mission” [16]. This attitude reflects why policy analysts found that nonprofit and grassroots organizations lagged behind government and private business firms when it came to information technology adoption and use throughout the 1990s (Corder, 2001). Clabaugh thought of a better way to get voluntary sector organizations to take technology seriously. Rather than wooing nonprofit managers to invest scarce resources in information technology, Clabaugh decided TCN should target the foundations that funded them. By getting foundations to pay for technology, Clabaugh could ensure that the nonprofit and grassroots organizations they supported would follow. The problem was then how to convince foundations technology was worth funding.
One foundation that worked with TCN was the W. Alton Jones Foundation (WAJF), a small philanthropy supporting environmental groups throughout the United States. In 1995, WAJF was about to embark on an initiative to fund about 50 research and advocacy groups working on developing and promoting low/zero emissions vehicles. Clabaugh approached WAJF, claiming that it was in the nature of research and advocacy groups to gather and share information, for which they required technology. Therefore, he argued, information technology was not merely part of a research or advocacy group’s infrastructure; it was necessarily their mission. Clabaugh explained the strategy:
It [approaching WAJF] was very deliberate and, in hindsight, very smart. Foundations do not like to fund general support. This stuff [technology] falls into general support. . . . Foundations fund projects, they fund programs. This [technology for research and advocacy organizations] is program dollars. . . . So we were looking for a way to make a sustainable technical services business model. This was very definitely a business model that said “go where the money is.” That is foundations. We will get them to pay for it, then we can support a direct technology service to nonprofits. The only way they are going to pay is if it is program money. [16]
Clabaugh’s innovation lay in connecting technology directly with an organization’s mission. Bruno Latour, a groundbreaking anthropologist of science, calls this strategy association (1986). According to Latour, collective action begins when actors associate two or more previously disconnected things (ideas, objects, events) and successfully convince others to accept the connection between them. As a strategy, the object of association is to get other people to act on behalf of one’s interests. Writing about the history of public hygiene in France, Latour (1988b) explains how Louis Pasteur generated support for his theory of disease and mobilized the health ministries and legions of hygienists by associating microbes and disease. In his field experiments, Pasteur demonstrated that microscopic creatures (in which hygienists and public health officials had little interest) caused disease (in which they had much interest), a connection that no one had made before. Once public health officials took Pasteur’s association seriously, preventing disease meant attacking the microbes that caused it.
Analogously, Clabaugh associated technology, which was of little interest to foundations, with mission, in which foundations were greatly interested. With his association, Clabaugh was claiming that an organization’s information technology and mission are equivalent, a powerful charge in the voluntary sector, where an organization’s mission must have taken-for-granted justifications (Clohesy, 2000). Treating technology as a program expense was claiming that nonprofits and the foundations that support them ought to take it seriously. Clabaugh’s association said, “Support technology because doing so will support mission.” In the voluntary sector, where mission drives organizations, such a claim is a moral one; it says technology support is the right (good) thing to do. In doing so, Clabaugh was constructing an account of worth to support technology in the nonprofit sector.
Drawing on his consulting background, Clabaugh recommended that WAJF hire someone to travel among its portfolio of grantees, installing various information and communications technologies in each and training leaders how to use them. Without fanfare, he and several foundation officers gave a name to the new project, which, Clabaugh recalled, “was about circuits and data” [16]. Evoking itinerant Methodist preachers of the past, they called this method of providing technology to nonprofit and grassroots organizations “Circuit Riding” and the people who did it “Circuit Riders.” With that, a new social movement was launched.
Calling the Worthy
The Circuit Rider’s job was to travel among the foundation’s grantees, delivering general technology assistance. Funded for one year, WAJF’s Circuit Rider project had an explicit goal of connecting the 50 environmental advocacy groups to the Internet and thereby to each other. Although information technology was becoming more prevalent and easier to use by the late 1990s, computer networking remained arduous. Nonprofit and grassroots organizations, at the time, would likely be working with only the most basic software applications and computer technologies, more sophisticated stuff being outside of the bud get or imagination of most managers in the sector. Having come to the sector to help people, not work with machines (Stein, 2002), nonprofit managers can be suspicious of technology (Berlinger & Te’eni, 1999). Circuit Riders would therefore need to convince them that technology was worth their time and resources, which would require social as well as technical skills.1 Clabaugh found this combination of skills in a young public policy advocate living in Washington, D.C., named Jeremy Edes-Pierotti. Before working as an advocate, Edes-Pierotti was an information technology administrator for a small nonprofit in Rhode Island, where he taught himself computer fundamentals. He explained that he was hired to be the first Circuit Rider because of his “understanding of how public advocacy worked”:
They [TCN and WAJF] thought that was a more important skill to have because the Circuit Rider for this particular project was going to be working with environmental groups helping them figure out how to mobilize their constituencies and to use technology for that. So the technology piece was secondary. That was the easy part to learn. It would have been much harder if they had decided to hire a technology person and teach them how public policy and advocacy and lobbying and all that stuff works in the United States. You cannot learn that in a couple of months. [18; emphasis added]
From its inception, Circuit Riding was more of a political/social activity than a technical one. Circuit Riders were activists first, technologists a distant second. Edes-Pierotti, who brought years of advocacy and public policy experience to the position, admits that he learned much of the technology he needed to know while on the job. Circuit Riders’ activism required a shared affinity with the nonprofit and grassroots organizations they serviced. Another Circuit Rider wrote in an online editorial, “One of the great advantages I have providing this kind of [technology] assistance to environmental groups is that people expect a technical consultant to be a ‘propeller head’ who cannot speak to the non-computer professional. What they get is someone who not only speaks in plain English, but someone who is interested in their issue and who understands ecology and the environment” (O’Brien, 1999). As a report on WAJF’s Circuit Rider project explained, “We didn’t want a pocket protector computer geek. No one who saw the world only in bits and bytes. Instead, we looked for someone who understood politics and the political process. Someone who’d be as comfortable in the halls of Congress as in the innards of a software program” (Telecommunications Cooperative Network, 1996: 4). Presenting the Circuit Rider model at a conference in 2000, Clabaugh conveyed the newly formed role on a slide:
What is a Circuit Rider?
• Teacher
• Evangelist
• Researcher
• Facilitator
• Mechanic
What they are not
• Computer geek
• Temporary help
The account of worth Clabaugh produced essentially claimed that technology was worth doing because it produced better social outcomes. The Circuit Riders proved their worth to nonprofit and grassroots organizations through their allegiance to a cause, not a technology. As Clabaugh’s slide notes, Circuit Riders are evangelists among the many roles they play. They evangelize for technology to leaders in the voluntary sector to contribute to the greater cause. To be worthy, Circuit Riders had to have a connection to a particular cause. Describing his first days as a Circuit Rider, Dirk Slater likes to tell the following story about evangelizing for information technologies to a conference of women representing grassroots social justice organizations serving low-income mothers:
The presentation before me, this woman was talking about how organizing women was different. They ate her alive. I am sitting here watching this thing and they are being so nasty to this woman. I am sitting there going, “they are going to eat me for lunch.” Here is the little white boy that is going to get up in front of them. It was awful. I was probably the most nervous I had ever been in my entire life. I got up in front of them for my workshop and the first thing I did was I said, “I just have to acknowledge that I am the only guy in the room. The second thing I want to say to you all is that I am the son of a single woman who was on and off public assistance the entire time I was growing up and I just have so much respect for all of you because I know how much my mother was going through just trying to survive and you guys are trying to change things and raise your kids and do all these things to accomplish that.” And they all started clapping. I was like, “no, no, no, do not applaud for me.” They were like, “no, honey, we are not applauding for you, we are applauding for your mother.” And then, I was seen as a son. I was seen as part of the community. [59]
Slater’s story reflects a key component of the Circuit Rider model: a commitment to the cause. He expresses this commitment by forging sympathies with the audience, claiming that he is one of them. Such expressions were important to establishing the worth of technology with managers and leaders of nonprofit and grassroots organizations, many of whom entered the sector to work with people or the environment, not machines (Berlinger & Te’eni, 1999). This commitment to the cause would prove to be a defining feature of the Circuit Rider model.
When the one-year Circuit Rider project with TCN and WAJF ended, Edes-Pierotti left for graduate school. Over the next two years, WAJF turned the project into a program and hired two more Circuit Riders. Because WAJF gener...

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