Inhabited Ecosystems: Propelling Transformative Social Change Between and Through Organizations

Two research streams examine how social movements operate both “in and around” organizations. We probe the empirical spaces between these streams, asking how activism situated in multi-organizational contexts contributes to transformative social change. By exploring activities in the mid-1990s related to advocacy for domestic partner benefits at 24 organizations in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, we develop the concept of inhabited ecosystems to explore the relational processes by which employee activists advance change. These activists faced a variety of structural opportunities and restraints, and we identify five mechanisms that sustained their efforts during protracted contestation: learning even from thwarted activism, borrowing from one another’s more or less radical approaches, helping one another avoid the traps of stagnation, fostering solidarity and ecosystem capabilities, and collaboratively expanding the social movement domain. We thus reveal how activism situated in multi-organizational contexts animates an inhabited ecosystem of challengers that propels change efforts “between and through” organizations. These efforts, even when exploratory or incomplete, generate an ecosystem’s capacity to sustain, resource, and even reshape the larger transformative social change effort.

Becoming the AIDS Scribe

Shilts joins The San Francisco Chronicle as its first openly gay reporter on the newsroom staff. Hired to cover the “gay beat” in San Francisco, Shilts also is given general assignment stories. Shilts coordinates Chronicle coverage of the deadly October 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Newsroom colleagues overcome suspicions of the new “gay reporter” as Shilts lobbies publishers for non-discrimination policies and domestic partner benefits. Shilts picks up on rumors of a “gay cancer” affecting gay men in the Castro district. Reporting includes very first stories attempting to link exotic immune system related diseases with homosexual men in San Francisco and elsewhere. Shilts is becomes convinced the AIDS story is a major story and devotes himself nearly full-time to the subject.

“I’d Only Let You Down”: Guilt Proneness and the Avoidance of Harmful Interdependence

Five studies demonstrated that highly guilt-prone people may avoid forming interdependent partnerships with others whom they perceive to be more competent than themselves, as benefitting a partner less than the partner benefits one’s self could trigger feelings of guilt. Highly guilt-prone people who lacked expertise in a domain were less willing than were those low in guilt proneness who lacked expertise in that domain to create outcome-interdependent relationships with people who possessed domain-specific expertise. These highly guilt-prone people were more likely than others both to opt to be paid on their performance alone (Studies 1, 3, 4, & 5) and to opt to be paid based on the average of their performance and that of others whose competence was more similar to their own (Study 2 & 5). Guilt proneness did not predict people’s willingness to form outcome-interdependent relationships with potential partners who lacked domain-specific expertise (Studies 4 & 5). It also did not predict people’s willingness to form relationships when poor individual performance would not negatively affect partner outcomes (Study 4). Guilt proneness therefore predicts whether, and with whom, people develop interdependent relationships. The findings also demonstrate that highly-guilt prone people sacrifice financial gain out of concern about how their actions would influence others’ welfare. As such, the findings demonstrate a novel way in which guilt proneness limits free-riding and therefore reduces the incidence of potentially unethical behavior. Lastly, the findings demonstrate that people who lack competence may not always seek out competence in others when choosing partners.

Why mutual helping in most natural systems is neither conflict-free nor based on maximal conflict

Mutual helping for direct benefits can be explained by various game theoretical models, which differ mainly in terms of the underlying conflict of interest between two partners. Conflict is minimal if helping is self-serving and the partner benefits as a by-product. In contrast, conflict is maximal if partners are in a prisoner's dilemma with both having the pay-off-dominant option of not returning the other's investment. Here, we provide evolutionary and ecological arguments for why these two extremes are often unstable under natural conditions and propose that interactions with intermediate levels of conflict are frequent evolutionary endpoints. We argue that by-product helping is prone to becoming an asymmetric investment game since even small variation in by-product benefits will lead to the evolution of partner choice, leading to investments by the chosen class. Second, iterated prisoner's dilemmas tend to take place in stable social groups where the fitness of partners is interdependent, with the effect that a certain level of helping is self-serving. In sum, intermediate levels of mutual helping are expected in nature, while efficient partner monitoring may allow reaching higher levels.

Variation in partner benefits in a shrimp—sea anemone symbiosis

Symbiotic interactions, where two species occur in close physical proximity for the majority of the participants’ lifespans, may constrain the fitness of one or both of the participants. Host choice could result in lineage divergence in symbionts if fitness benefits vary across the interaction with hosts. Symbiotic interactions are common in the marine environment, particularly in the most diverse marine ecosystems: coral reefs. However, the variation in symbiotic interactions that may drive diversification is poorly understood in marine systems. We measured the fecundity of the symbiotic shrimpPericlimenes yucatanicuson two anemone hosts on coral reefs in Panama, and found that while fecundity varies among host species, this variation is explained largely by host size, not species. This suggests that shrimp on larger hosts may have higher fitness regardless of host species, which in turn could drive selection for host choice, a proposed driver of diversification in this group.