How Activists Collaboratively Divide the Labor of Making Change: The Case of LGBT Rights

While theories at the crossroads of social movements and organizations have explored different strategies and challenges faced by insider and outsider activists, research examining their collaborations is just emerging. We contribute to this literature by introducing the concept of collaborative division of labor, which theorizes how social movement organizations (SMOs) collaborate through adoption of different roles, leveraging their distinct positions (insiders, outsiders, belonging to different sectors), postures (persuasive or disruptive), and expertise to pursue a common political agenda. Through a study of the LGBT movement in French workplaces, we examine the interactions among eight SMOs with regard to four strategies: amplifying one another’s actions, compelling organizations to respond, threatening organizations’ reputations, and engaging in complementary datactivism (the production and dissemination of data for a social movement cause). Our findings show that SMOs’ division of labor relied on multidirectional collaborations, as activists adopted roles that provided complementary, unidirectional, mutually beneficial, and indirect support to one another. In addition, our research offers counterintuitive insights about the postures of insider and outsider activists, as we argue that these postures do not always align with what is expected in the literature. Last, we reveal how this collaborative division of labor led to several intermediate outcomes, thereby enhancing our understanding of the effects of interactions that go beyond competitive dynamics among groups within the same movement.