Interests, Identities, and Relations: Drawing Boundaries in Civic Organizational Fields

This paper combines social movement and organizational theory to explore boundary definition in civic organizational fields. Drawing upon evidence from two British cities, and applying network analysis to relations between organizations interested in environmental and ethnicity and migration issues, we show that identities shape network patterns more consistently than interest in specific issues. While this finding supports previous insights from organizational and social movement research on the relation between identities and fields, we go beyond them, in showing that the role of identities is pivotal regardless of the nature of local political opportunity structures and cultures. We conclude by discussing possible strategies for exploring the link between organizational and social movement fields.