ACTIVISTS AND INCUMBENTS STRUCTURING CHANGE: THE INTERPLAY OF AGENCY, CULTURE, AND NETWORKS IN FIELD EVOLUTION

We examine organizational field change instigated by activists. Contrary to existing views emphasizing incumbent resistance, we suggest that collaboration between in-cumbents and challenger movements may emerge when a movement’s cultural and relational fabric becomes moderately structured, creating threats and market oppor-tunities but remaining permeable to external influence. We also elucidate how lead incumbents ’ attempts at movement cooptation may be deflected through distributed brokerage. The resulting confluence of cultural and relational “structuration ” between movement and field accelerates the pace but dilutes the radicalness of institutional innovation, ensuring ongoing, incremental field change. Overall, this article contrib-utes to the emergent literature on field dynamics by uncovering the evolution and outcomes of collaborative work at the intersection of social movements and incumbent fields. The agentic turn in institutional theory has marked a shift in attention from the isomorphic forces that stabilize organizational fields toward consideration of the dynamic processes by which fields form and transform (Dacin, Goodstein, & Scott, 2002). Following early work that focused on exogenous jolts (Meyer, 1982) and institutional en-trepreneurs (DiMaggio, 1988), field-level change has been increasingly characterized as the outcome of collective action involving social movement