In this article we examine political advocacy by nonprofit organizations. Relatively little is known about the types of organizations that participate in advocacy, their characteristics, the issues for which they advocate, and the resources they devote to it. This is especially the case for nonprofits that operate at the state or local level. Copyright (c) 2007 Southwestern Social Science Association.

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Scholars and critics tend to regard social enterprise as a paradoxical organizational form. And yet those who are closest to the apparent paradox in at least two prominent social enterprise industries—fair trade and socially responsible investing—are not inclined to regard their work as paradoxical. How is this so? Drawing upon, and then extending, the sensemaking literature, I argue that practitioners of social enterprise do not experience their working conditions as paradoxical because they frame away the potentially paradoxical elements of their work. Specifically, they employ three frames: looking at the big picture, engaging with potentially paradoxical conditions rather than turning from them, and making favorable comparisons that ease the paradoxical strain. These insights form the basis of a refined model of sensemaking in organizations, which accounts not only for how members of organizations deal with paradox but also how they come to recognize (or frame away) paradox in the first place.

As social movements co-evolve with changes in states and markets, it is crucial to examine how they make particular kinds of actors into focal points for the expression of grievances and the demand for rights. But researchers often bracket the question of why some kinds of organizations are more likely than others to become targets of social movement pressure. We theorize the “social production of targets” by social movements, rejecting a simple “reflection” model to focus on configurations of power and vulnerability that shape repertoires of contention. Empirically, we extend structural accounts of global commodity chains and cultural accounts of markets to analyze the production of targets in the case of the anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s. Using a longitudinal, firm-level dataset and unique data on anti-sweatshop activism, we identify factors that attracted social movement pressure to particular companies. Firms’ power and positions strongly shaped their likelihood of becoming targets of anti-sweatshop activism. But the likelihood of being a target also depended on the cultural organization of markets, which made some firms more “shamable” than others. Contrary to suggestions of an anti-globalization backlash, globalization on its own, and related predictions about protectionism, cannot explain the pattern of activism.

Over time, according to popular and academic accounts, alternative trade initiatives [such as fair trade, organics, forest certification, and socially responsible investing (SRI)] almost invariably lose their oppositional stance and go mainstream. That is, they lose their alternative, usually peripheral, and often contrarian character. In this paper, I argue that this is not always the case and that the path to going mainstream is not always an unproblematic one. I observe that while scholars have documented various aspects of specific alternative trade initiatives, little comparative work has been done to theorize their different trajectories. To advance the scholarship, I compare two alternative trade movements, fair trade and SRI, and develop three hypotheses-the relation motivations hypothesis, the material interests hypothesis, and the organization of credibility hypothesis-that explain why going mainstream has been so hotly contested in the fair trade movement but not the SRI movement. I articulate these hypotheses and evaluate their merits.