Mitchell Centre Seminar Series
| Dates: | 4 February 2015 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff |
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| Speaker: | Cohen R. Simpson |
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Cohen R. Simpson, LSE
Bipartite Networks, Status and Competition for Financial Patronage: A Mutualistic Model of External Resource Derivation amongst Social Movement Organisations
Extant models of the financial patronage of Social Movement Organisations (SMOs) by private foundations exclusively use population density to account for competition. However, density fails to reveal how SMOs win grants whilst neglecting the strategic decision-making of entrepreneurial foundation-investors. Drawing on models of interspecies interaction, here I recast patronage as a mutualistic system represented by a dynamic bipartite network wherein SMOs and foundations cooperate across class to mutual advantage whilst SMOs compete within class for financial resources. Crucially, SMOs’ competitiveness rests with their position in a network-based status hierarchy. While previous research has predicted a positive monotonic relationship between status and patronage, using Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models I find a tendency against status-based assortativity in the mutualistic system such that high-status foundations prefer to invest in low-status SMOs. The converse also holds. I attribute this counterintuitive finding to foundations’ preferences for investments to SMOs that can innovate around social problems. Relative to their peripheral counterparts, well-funded SMOs may suffer a rigidity of goals due to the risk of alienating an existing support base through organisational change. Data consist of 3,261 grants given between 2003-2007 by 136 foundations to 66 professional SMOs associated with the Climate Change Countermovement.
Speaker
Cohen R. Simpson
Organisation: LSE
Travel and Contact Information
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G6
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
