I'd like to know the stories of internal power struggles in five
noncommercial organizations within the past decade, with the following
conditions:

- No more than two of the organizations are religious in nature
- At least two are heavily or entirely volunteer-run
- At least one features a successful grassroots movement to effect
organizational change

For each, I'm looking for a summary of the type of organization, main
issues in the struggle, deciding factors, and outcome.  I'd like to be
able to use the information as a source of both illustrative examples
and general principles for discussion in an article.

Because the amount of research involved is hard to guess, I invite an
interested researcher to respond with a request for clarification
letting me know what he or she thinks it will take.

Thank you,
Archae0pteryx

Dear Archae0pteryx, and GARs,
These were collected with a very superficial look to see if they might
fit your requirements.  FOR two, I included the hit description which
seemed to fit, because a first glance at the document did not
immediately make this apparent.

A couple are political.  Politics, without being cynical, seems to all
about internal struggle and grassroots movements  - win or lose -  but
you may have tacetly excluded party politics from your selection.

You, of course, want more background on the organizations.

Trying to be helpful, myoarin

http://www.nfb.org/books/books1/wam09.htm
http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/2003/tsets-4.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/Story/0,2763,888432,00.html
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:RWGYEPhLrIsJ:web.greens.org/~jsutter/ggpusa/Message%2520to%2520the%2520Grassroots.rtf+internal+struggle+volunteer&hl=de&client=firefox-a
http://www.garynull.com/Issues/WBAI/BAIUnmasked/DiRienzoDeathofMovement.aspx

Tampa Bay's Global/Local Struggle for Sovereignty - [ Diese Seite übersetzen ]
... has been in a prolonged struggle for internal organizational
control and setting the ... While the area has a large number of
volunteer and nonprofit ...
www.isanet.org/noarchive/amen.html - 122k -

http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_9.html

Chapter 1: CAFHRI AT THE UN - [ Diese Seite übersetzen ]
... After a protracted internal struggle for control that saw the resignation of
... law firm that specializes in non-profits and non-profit incorporation. ...
www.catholicsforchoice.org/cafhri/chap1.html 

http://bluelemur.com/theuprising/index.php?p=51
http://www.savethescv.org/Reminder.htm

Thanks, myoarin, and I appreciate your attempts to be helpful.  Maybe
your leads will be useful to a researcher.  I do want this question to
remain open to researchers.

Please don't consider this a personal criticism; you are only one
among many GA customers that I've seen in recent times rushing to post
responses to questions.  As it happens, I am strongly averse to
commenters' apparently competing with researchers.  Comments that add
to or elaborate on answers or contribute personal experience and
opinions are valuable--one of the best features of GA; but I don't
like to see comments that look like they're trying to beat a
researcher to the punch.  To me that undermines the nature of this
service.  As a customer, I don't want duly qualified researchers to be
driven off my questions by comments that may or may not be
knowledgeable.

Archae0pteryx

Archae0pteryx --

I'd budget about 5 hours for a search like this, as public companies
and public organizations are likely "hits" but private organizations
will not be.  In these cases there are reasons that management
discussions need be visible under sunshine laws.  (School boards would
be a GREAT place to look for conflict.)

It could take years for for information to come out on "private
institutions" that are highly private.  Some good examples where we
know that there have been recent organizational rifts but data would
probably be weak would include:
* the Roman Catholic Church (in selecting the Pope)
* the American Red Cross
* New York Stock Exchange (actually one might be able to develop some
good speculation based on press reports)

A grassroots organization?  That's the real toughy.  Stewart Brand, an
early environmentalist, is one of several environmentalists
questioning issues being taken on by organizations like Greenpeace. 
But I don't know that you'll find many of them very influential in
policy debates, as often they're outsiders like Brand.

This may be one of those questions that's best answered by comments
from several people.

Best regards,

Omnivorous-GA

Hi, Omnivorous--

Thank you for your comments.  I was not expecting a researcher to be
able to dig into organizations' own files and/or perform a historical
account and analysis.  I was thinking that there might be two likely
sources that could be found relatively quickly through keyword
searches:  case studies done in some kind of educational or analytic
context and news stories profiling a particular organization.  For
instance, some years back there was some kind of internal struggle in
the Rosicrucian society that ended up being covered in the local
press.  I thought some researchers with their capacious memories and
their prodigious retrieval systems might even be able to think of the
names of such organizations that they'd read about and search on those
names.

When I said "grassroots movement" I was not talking about a grassroots
organization.  I was referring to a movement *within* some
organization where a struggle involved not just governing bodies and
political machinations within a ruling tier but some kind of influence
emerging from the ordinary membership.  For example, imagine a
fictitious environmentalist group with a self-appointed mission to
clean up a polluted lake:  suppose that duly elected (volunteer)
officers got caught up in personal agendas, resulting not in a
partisan division among the officers but in ordinary members' rising
up to confront the leadership and get the organization back on course.
 That's an example of what I mean by my third bullet.

Again, I am not interested in businesses or commercial organizations
where the parties are on the payroll.  I'm talking about groups whose
membership is voluntary and whose livelihoods do not depend on their
role in the organization, like a community service organization, a
cause-based organization, or a social club.

Would you still estimate five hours?  At that rate I'd do better to
make something up.

Archae0pteryx

Archae0pteryx --

Groups with nobody on the payroll will be tough.  Again maybe comments
or someone who remembers an essay in the New Yorker or such about a
non-profit would be good.  Most of the time they would escape public
purview, in part because of the he-said/she-said phenomenon and in
part because of a tendency of participants to keep the process
private.

Certainly the research process is going to be hours.  Perhaps someone
could do this in as little as 2-3 hours but the fact that you're
looking for 5 examples makes it very daunting.

I'd made a couple of organizational suggestions and you'd added
another.  Yet another organization that's faced strong conflicts has
been the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).  The decisions in the
1970s to support the Ku Klux Klan in its fight to hold a parade in
Skokie, IL, a heavily Jewish community, was a widely reported debate
between supporters of free speech and opponents of "unacceptable"
bigotry that lost the ACLU much financial support in the end.

In the 1970s, the fight against corrupt union leaders in the United
Mine Workers was a good example of a grassroots revolt, though it was
not a "voluntary" organization.

Another good example -- though it was students vs. paid staff -- was
the Berkeley Free Speech Movement back in "ancient" times:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_movement

There are dozens of university examples from the period, ranging from
fights over who scheduled concert performers at Purdue University to
antiwar protests and on-campus recruiting.

Good luck on this one.  Perhaps other commenters can find a gem or two or you.

Best regards,

Omnivorous-GA

Thank you, Omnivorous, for your thoughtful remarks.  I did not
anticipate such difficulty with this one.  I think I'll abandon this
approach and try a different tack.

Archae0pteryx

Greetings again, Archae0pteryx,

I ducked and ran for cover after your immediate response to my initial comment.
With a little distance and some additional experience, I now would
venture to suggest that one of the features of G-A is that commenters
can help questioners and researchers by leading to possible answers. 
Sure, it is fun to add personal comments that may or may not be witty
or helpful.  But finding links that could be useful helps the
questioner and the researchers, and keeps the latter on their toes  -
the questioner could be satisfied with just the links and cancel the
question.  Fair enough, G-A is there/here to provide answers, and GARs
are absolutely fair about letting answers from commenters stand.
But they also are justified to use links suggested by commenters to
develop a true "answer", and do so, and that's fine  - flattering to
see that I have provide a source used by a GAR and let her/him post a
good answer.
I knew that my links here were not an answer, and I addressed my
comment to you "and GARs" for this reason.
I am also disappointed that you have not received an answer.

Regards, Myoarin