When organizational survival and leader interests displace an organization's goals, an organization experiences oligarchy. In a 1911 study of the German Social Democratic Party and labor movement, Robert Michels discussed how bureaucratization, or large-scale organization, allows leaders' interests to dominate over the masses. Michels's iron law of oligarchy asserts that organizations are specialized. To pursue goals such as social change, individuals must collectively organize. As the collective grows, members designate leaders to take care of administrative and coordination needs. The resulting hierarchy gives leaders access to power and resources but also reduces members' influence and participation. To protect their positions, leaders become conservative, resistant to reform, and even repressive. As leaders replace unattainable goals with more diffuse goals or make goals conform to those of the larger society, organizations undergo goal transformation. Organizing activities shift from attaining goals to organizational maintenance, such as securing members, funds, and other resources. When power is concentrated to a few individuals, the organization relinquishes democratic practices and thus fails to reflect members' interests.

Using Michels's law, several social movement researchers have critiqued formal organization as derailing effective mobilization. To secure resources and support, particularly from elites and the state, organizations may soften their strategies and thus moderate their agenda. To maintain their power, for example, leaders may refuse to help newcomers because of concerns that new demands will alter power relations. To avoid such concentration of power and conservatism, a few researchers have recommended spontaneous grassroots disruption as a more effective means for gaining concessions from opponents than formal organizing. However, critics agree that organizations are crucial for successfully mobilizing persons and resources.

Increasingly, researchers have posited oligarchization as conditional rather than inevitable. An organization's susceptibility to oligarchy depends upon conditions such as the type of organizational goals and membership, congruency of organizational goals with larger societal norms, and competition with other groups. Recent studies show that not all organizations abandon their goals as they grow or appoint leaders. When environmental conditions render mobilization difficult, professional management can improve a social movement's abilities to reach goals. Under conditions such as a political crisis within the organization, previous activist experience, and support from other organizations, leaders can reinvigorate organizational efforts in a more radical rather than a conservative direction. In addition, checks such as a two-party system can temper oligarchization.

References:

1) Clemens, Elisabeth S. and Debra C. Minkoff. 2004. "Beyond the Iron Law: Rethinking the Place of Organizations in Social Movement Research." Pp. 155-70 in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, edited by D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule, and H. Kriesi. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

2) Michels, Robert. [1911] 1962. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: Free Press.

3) Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward. [1977] 1979. Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Pantheon.

4) Zald, Mayer N. and Roberta Ash. 1966. "Social Movement Organizations: Growth, Decay, and Change." Social Forces 44(3):327-41.

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