Social Movements and Solidarity Structures in Crisis-Ridden Greece

Front matter

Amsterdam University Press

Social Movements and Solidarity Structures in Crisis-Ridden Greece

Protest and Social Movements

Introduction

Part |

Boundary Enlargement and Anti-Austerity Mobilizations

1.1 1.2

1.3 1.4

Why Boundary Enlargement?

Dismantling the process of boundary enlargement

1.2.1 Social Movement Scenes

1.2.2 Organizational Structure, Resources and Identity

1.2.3 Sub-mechanisms, Combinations and Interconnections Limitations

Conclusion

2.1 2.2 23

2.4

2.5

Part Il

Three decades of mobilizations

From December 2008, onwards

The Period of Austerity

2.3.1 Crisis and Austerity

2.3.2 Anti-austerity mobilizations

2.3.3 The square movement and its decentralization Alternative Repertoires of Action

2.4.1 The social movement scene of Food 2.4.2 The social movement scene of Health 2.4.3 The social movement scene of Labour 2.4.4 Institutional and Hybrid Space Conclusion

Social Movements in Food, Health and Labour

3.1

Organizational Structure 3.1.1 Markets without Middlemen

29 31 42 43 47 52 55 58

107 108 108

3-4

3.1.3 Collection and Distribution of Food Parcels Resources

3.2.1 Markets without Middlemen

3.2.3 Collection and Distribution of Food Parcels Identity

3.3.1 Markets without Middlemen

3.3.3 Collection and Distribution of Food Parcels Conclusion

4.4

Organizational Structure

411 Affinity Groups Modeling and the Coordination of

Autonomy 4.1.2 Internal Structure 4.1.3 Core and Peripheral Networks Resources 4.2.1 Fixed Costs 4.2.2 Medical and Office Equipment 4.2.3 Drugs and Medication Identity

4.3.1 Social Appropriation through Organization and Resources 4.3.2 Translation and Bricolage Conclusion

Organizational Structure

5.1.1 Assemblies and Participation

5.1.2 Procedures of Entry and Exit

5.1.3 Networked Cooperativism Resources

5.2.1 Initial Capital

5.2.2 Compensation, Demand and Supply 5.2.3 Investing within

161 162

182 187 190

5.3 Identity 5.3.1 Contentious Origins of Self-management 5.3.2 Aggressive and Defensive Self-management 5.4 Conclusion

Part lll Different Applications of Boundary Enlargement

6 Different Scenes, Different Trajectories but the Same Process: A Within-Case Comparison 6.1 Comparing the Scenes 6.11 Comparing the Organization of the Scenes 6.1.2 Comparing the Resources of the Scenes 6.1.3 Comparing the Identity of the Scenes 6.2 Comparing the Trajectories 6.2.1 Trajectories in Organizational Structure 6.2.2 Trajectories in Resources 6.2.3 Trajectories in Identity

7 Boundary Enlargement in Different Contexts 7.1 The Spanish anti-austerity mobilizations 7.1.1 The case of PAH 7.1.2 The cases of Marea Verde and Marea Blanca 7.1.3 Municipalism and the Feminization of Politics 7.2 The 2001 Argentinean Crisis 7.21 Neighbourhood Assemblies 7.2.2 Piqueteros Unemployed Workers Movement 7.2.3 Recuperated Factories and Enterprises 7.2.4 Affective Politics

8.1 Expanding the notion of boundary enlargement 8.2 Future Research

225 226 233 239

314 325

Index

List of Figures and Tables

Figures Figure 2.1

Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Tables Table 2.1 Table 3.1

Table 4.1

Table 5.1 Table 5.2

359 Repertoires and actors in the social movement scene of Food 81 Repertoires and actors in the social movement scene of Health 89 Repertoires and actors in the social movement scene of Labour 94

System of Health Accounts of year 2014 (ELSTAT, 2016a:1) 85 Mechanisms and sub-mechanisms in the social movement scene of Food 149 Mechanisms and sub-mechanisms in the social

movement scene of Health 191 Political and Social Homogeneity 231

Mechanisms and sub-mechanisms in the social movement scene of Labour 240

Acknowledgements

When reading a new book, I always start with the acknowledgements section. The point here is to realize that the author’s name only partially reflects the effort of the exercise, since a number of visible and unknown “heroes” helped in constructing, reflecting and questioning the path that the study has come through. The same also applies to this research.

First and foremost, I wish to thank Donatella della Porta and Lorenzo Bosi. Donatella’s encouragement gave me the opportunity to enroll in the PhD programme at Scuola Normale Superiore and produce this piece of work, while her overall guidance structured my way of thinking. Lorenzo’s detailed comments, inspiring discussions, and emotional support paved the way for the completion of this research. It was the smoothest and the most motivating relationship I could imagine and, therefore, I could not be more grateful. I wish also to thank Maria Kousis, Eduardo Romanos and Lorenzo Zamponi for their fruitful comments and encouragement to undertake the task to turn this research into a book, as well as James Jasper for welcoming it in the series of Protest and Social Movements he edits with Jan Willem Duyvendak.

I would like to thank the faculty members, administration staff, visitors and students of Scuola Normale Superiore and the Centre on Social Movement Studies for providing me with the resources and granting me a privileged position from which I carried out my research. Special thanks go to Silvia, Giulia, Serenella, Michela, Christian and Alessandra for creating a welcoming environment as well as to Lorenzo Mosca, Andrea Felicetti, Pietro Castelli and Cesar Guzman for commenting early drafts of the research design. For the same reason, I would like to acknowledge the Contentious Politics Lab in Athens and the Labouratory of Social Analysis and Applied Social Research in Crete. Special thanks also go to Tracey Rosen and Evaggelos Evaggelinidis for their comments, as well as to Antonio Willox, Hara Kadere, Foteini Dimirouli, Niamh Keady-Tabbal and Lina Altiparmaki for their help in editing.

This inquiry would not have been accomplished without the full engagement of my interviewees. Words cannot express my gratitude for devoting their time and trust to narrate their experiences for this research project. I hope this book will manage to highlight their courage and worries during the harsh times of austerity and correspond to the seriousness of their efforts.

Moreover, I wish to thank my friends in Florence: Andrea and Elias, Argyris, Taygeti, Anna, as well as Silvia, Anna, Daniela, Giorgos, Filip, and all the Sardo community for their hospitality and encouragement; as well as my friends in Greece: Haris and Nena, Vasilis and Kostas, Panagiotis and Kostis, Andriana, Konstantinos, Margarita, Dimitra, Michalis, Eva, Lia, Antonis and Tamagos, Anestis, Haris, Kostas and Leonidas. My sincere thanks to the Prefigurativa collective and the Recreation thread, and particularly to Regina and my personal book sponsor, Mike. And of course, Hara, whose enthusiastic support was a necessary companion along this trip. Most of them were not familiar with the object of my research but all of them shared my fears and encouraged me to complete it.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents, my brother Miltos as well as Nikos, Lefteris and Rene. Inspiring and getting inspired by people from different ages, lifestyles and educational backgrounds, who share the same desire for knowledge, was the most retributive part in the course of this research.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the overall topic of the book. It starts by relating the recent developments of the social movement community in Greece, to the discussions on movements’ structural and cultural boundaries. It provides the aims of the manuscript and situates it within current academic and public debates. The chapter proceeds by presenting the research design and provides information about the methods of data generation. In particular, document analysis, qualitative semi-structured interviews and participant observation employed in more than 50 social movement organizations in Greece’s two major cities, Athens and Thessaloniki. Finally, it illustrates the politics and research ethics that accompanied the course of this study and offers the book’s outline, in order to orientate the reader.

Keywords: Anti-austerity movements; Alternative repertoire of actions; Boundary enlargement; Qualitative methods

Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the breakdown of the financial system in the USA, the economic crisis quickly spread to the other side of the Pacific, predominantly affecting the national economies of the South. Found at the epicentre, Greece has experienced an explosion of movements against austerity which challenged the legitimacy of neoliberal representative democracy. Nevertheless, rampant austerity measures provoked the rise of service-oriented repertoires, with numerous social solidarity structures providing welfare services to the suffering population (Kousis et al., 2018; Papadaki and Kalogeraki, 2017), which came to the forefront once the dynamic of the protests started to decline.

This period of transition provides the setting for the focal point of this book. By positioning the recent economic crisis and the subsequent austerity measures within the realm of contentious politics, this manuscript suggests that between 2008 and 2016 the social movement community in Greece, consisting of formal and informal social movement organizations (SMOs),

Malamidis, Haris, Social Movements and Solidarity Structures in Crisis-Ridden Greece. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 DOI: 10.5117/9789463722438/INTRO grassroots networks and individual activists (Staggenborg, 2013), has gone through a transformative process which enabled the shift of social movement organizations’ interests towards the exercise of service-oriented repertoires of action. These service-oriented repertoires should not be confused with what critical scholars frame as the neoliberal institutionalization and professionalization of voluntarism (Rozakou, 2008, p. 114). Rather, it acquires the meaning of what anthropologists describe as gift-giving, with the provision of medical services, clothing, food, agricultural products and jobs to the victims of austerity (Papataxiarchis, 2016, p. 207).

During the period of austerity, the cognitive and structural boundaries of SMOs seem to change form and become more flexible, leading to the inclusion of new and the transformation of old repertoires. Boundaries that used to distinguish SMOs with clear aims in mobilizing people from other organizations advocating and lobbying for collective purposes, as well as from those organizations with supportive roles that framed the movements’ overall culture, get blurred. Crisis-ridden Greece witnessed this change of boundaries by incorporating service-oriented repertoires. However, this does not assume a path-dependent course. In line with post-modern accounts pointing to the fluidity of well-defined structures, organizational boundaries may change by engaging with activities other than service-oriented practices. In order to describe this process, we introduce the term boundary enlargement. By boundary enlargement, we refer to a process where previously defined boundaries are extended, enabling social movement organizations to move beyond their delimited cognitive and structural perimeter and adopt practices and repertoires that up to that point have been issued by distant and often antagonistic actors.

The connection between different organizations of the Greek social movement community and the employment of protest repertoires under similar claims between 2010 and 2012, forced some scholars to speak in favor of an anti-austerity campaign (Diani and Kousis, 2014). Nevertheless, protests took place well beyond 2012, and the anti-austerity collective actions also included forms that are not compatible with the usual street politics. The emergence of these new forms of action also affected the focus of the academic community, giving birth to a number of definitions regarding the service-oriented repertoires. Bosi and Zamponi (2015) speak for the repetition

1 We often refer to the recipients of these services as beneficiaries, in order to differentiate them from activists. Although we are aware that this term is problematic, since it grants the individual a passive role and establishes a power relation between the providers and recipients of these services, here the term is used only with descriptive purposes, without bearing analytical insight.

of old “direct social actions”, which opt for social change without turning their claims towards the state. From a different perspective, the combination of economic and social characteristics forced Kousis and Paschou to present the framework of “alternative forms of resilience”, the actions of which aim to create a strong social resilience in times of crises (Kousis and Paschou, 2014, 2017). In the same vein, Forno and Graziano (2014) refer to “sustainable community movements” by focusing on actions which mobilize citizens through their economic power; while the incorporation of the third sector, including church and municipal organizations exhorted Loukakis (2018) to frame them as “alternative action organizations”.

The provision of informal welfare services by social movement actors is not something new. Neither are the various expressions of solidarity. The self-help fund organized by the workers of the self-managed factory of Vio.Me in Thessaloniki presents great similarities with practices of the traditional labour movement. Additionally, the emergence of numerous collective kitchens organized by individuals and grassroots collectives has many points in common with the tradition of the Italian autonomous movement. Moreover, the first social clinic in Greece was established in Chania, Crete in 1990, long before the eruption of the crisis. Taking into consideration other forms of social provision, the literature on welfare state policies emphasizes a trend of outsourcing basic social services towards non-state actors already from the beginning of the 1990s (Stasinopoulou, 2002). Nevertheless, as we analyse below, a number of factors complicate the picture.

In particular, the actions in the context of crisis-ridden Greece present a wide variety in terms of the provided services, the actors who employ them, as well as those who use them, since they do not refer only to activists but to larger parts of the population. Traditional SMOs turned their attention to the provision of services, and new organizations were established specifically for this purpose. These organizations seem to employ traditional repertoires of social movements, but at the same time deny having clear political identities. Moreover, they engage participants from a wide range of the political spectrum, while increased intensity alongside the deepening of austerity raises doubts as to whether they can be considered self-help groups. Along these lines, the importance of these repertoires stems from the significance they have acquired in the agenda of SMOs.

This research refers to alternative? repertoires of action in order to define the group of solidarity structures and the repertoires preoccupied with the

2 Although the term “alternative” implies something different to the mainstream capitalist system, it is often criticized for reducing any radical features. In this respect, it feels that unofficial provision of services, which used to be provided by the welfare state and the market. More precisely, we refer to the cases of social clinics, collective and social kitchens, markets without middlemen, time banks, bazaars and barter clubs, educational courses of language and art, selfmanaged workers’ collectives and other similar forms. The range of these actions is so wide that it tends to cover a great part of the social, economic and cultural life, as well as the basic livelihood needs of a human being. These actions are implemented either by new organizations founded specifically for this reason, or by traditional SMOs which have incorporated these service-oriented actions in their repertoires. According to Hadjimichalis ‘these solidarity actions vary considerably depending on the social group and the community they target, the needs they aim to cover, the relationships among volunteers and the relationship with institutions’ (2017, p. 161). Coming across the rich empirical reality that gave birth to several different theoretical understandings, this study explores the transformative character of the recent economic crisis and the subsequent austerity measures concerning social movements and their relationship to the state. In particular, our attention is drawn to the scenes of food, health and labour and the respective efforts accomplished by social movement actors, through the application of qualitative research on approximately 50 organizations. These three scenes have been widely studied by social movement scholars, each one contributing valuable insight that helped the construction of the social movement stream of research in social sciences, as well as its extension to other fields. Research on health-related movements usually touches upon institutional theories and practices, and also deals with cognitive issues by challenging certain identities and belief systems (see for instance Banaszak- Holl et al., 2010). Inquiries on the food scene have been mostly connected with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as well as urban studies and political geography, while the labour scene dominated the social movement interest for more than a century. Nevertheless, the attention of this research on these three scenes is not due to their rich tradition in social movement studies; rather, our decision is grounded in three reasons. First, food, health and labour scenes were severely damaged by the recent economic crisis and the subsequent austerity measures, thus dramatically changing the everyday reality of the Greek population. Second, these three scenes host active and

“alternative” practices are being coopted by the dominant system, used within and not aside or against of it, and, at the end, they serve its reproduction. However, the use of the term “alternative” here aims only to distinguish the new forms of action from the traditional protest-oriented repertoires of social movements, without implying other analytical connotations.

intense activity by a wide variety of social movement actors concerning the Greek context. Third, the two aforementioned conditions indicate that the scenes of food, health and labour are adequate cases to analyse the development of the boundary enlargement process. Therefore, instead of approaching each of these scenes separately and analysing the evolution of the respective movements as single-issue movements, we perceive food, health and labour as complementary social movement scenes, which have attracted the interest of wider parts of the social movement community in Greece. This way allows us to discover how the different social mechanisms in each scene lead to the similar process of boundary enlargement.

Although scholars tend to distinguish organizations focusing on protest actions from those organizations with service-oriented practices, our approach treats these repertoires as two sides of the same coin. Our suggestion is based on the fact that the crisis and austerity accelerated the outburst of a process through which previously fixed boundaries of SMOs are transformed, enlarged and acquire new shapes. Although similar turbulent conditions in other settings may lead to different changes in the respective boundaries of SMOs, the most representative case of this change of boundaries within the Greek context is the incorporation of service-oriented repertoires. Therefore, we refer to anti-austerity mobilizations in order to describe the street actions that took place from 2008 onwards, while through alternative repertoires of action we point to those practices employed by social movement actors that were hitherto provided by the welfare state and the market. Similar to Hadjimichalis (2013) approach, we argue that these alternative repertoires are cases of continuities of the traditional protest activities, in the sense that they have been developed within and not aside the broader struggle against austerity.

Aim and Contribution

Political, economic and social crises are often conceived as the end of a period and the beginning of another, bearing transformative effects that foster further social evolution. Crisis-ridden Greece, among the salient cases where austerity brought fear and loathing, experienced tremendous changes in its political, economic and social environment (Serdedakis and Tompazos, 2018). Additional changes took place with regards to the country’s social movement community. The development (and more precisely the decline) of the anti-austerity mobilizations initiated the advent of the alternative repertoires, concentrated on the provision of welfare that had previously been provided by the state and the market. This study argues that the eruption of the crisis and the imposition of a state of austerity facilitated important changes in the boundaries of the social movement community in Greece. SMOs incorporated a series of alternative repertoires of action with important effects on their relationship with the state and other institutional actors. The aim of this study is to unravel the mechanisms that constitute the process of boundary enlargement between 2008 and 2016.

First, the alternative repertoires of action have provoked changes within the boundaries of the social movement community. In particular, the incorporation and provision of service-oriented practices along with protest politics seems to inaugurate a new era for social movement actors, as they are confronted with new dilemmas and challenges. From conceptual debates regarding the definition and (potential) innovative approaches of these activities and their engagement in the charity-solidarity debate, to issues regarding self-management, costs and efficiency, these alternative repertoires pose questions to social movements whose elaboration with the provision of welfare services was previously attached only at a theoretical level.

Second, the association of social movements and their organizations with institutional actors add another important element to the inquiry’s object of study. Either with official affiliations or with unofficial connections following similar means, the discrete line that used to distinguish movements from institutional actors becomes blurred. The degree of movements’ engagement with the state, their organizational and operational interconnection, the substitution by or outsourcing of welfare provision to unofficial actors, as well as relatively similar aspects are some of the topics that need further clarification.

The aforementioned issues are closely related to the hardships provoked due to austerity. In this regard, this exercise adds important empirical insight into the literature related to the transformative role of crises and to bottom-up welfare practices. In particular, it manages to bridge the severe changes brought to the livelihood of Greek citizens with the macro-structural adjustments of the national and international environment. Hence, it demonstrates how these are reflected in the heart of social movements, namely the meso-level of SMOs.

In our attempt to explore the mechanisms that shape the crisis’ transformative nature, we focus on social movement theories, and specifically to the framework of Contentious Politics? as this was first introduced by

3 Contentious politics describe those political actions where actors form groups and networks, which mobilize without the support of and outside institutional boundaries. At the same time,

Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly (McAdam et al., 2001). The theoretical framework used in this study favors a dynamic model and aspires to further contribute to the social movement literature that bridges the gap between the structural and cultural approaches. What is crucial here is the aspect of resources. Despite the loss of its popularity in the current social movement analyses, this study brings it back by arguing that during times when there is a scarcity of wealth, resources become important components for the development of social movements. Most importantly, taking into consideration the fluid and liquid accusations of late modernity and post-modernity, this research introduces the process of boundary enlargement in its attempt to explain how structures and identities are interlinked and mixed. By approaching the shift towards the provision of services as one example of this process, this inquiry explains the similarities and differences among the trajectories of SMOs and engages in a dialogue with scholarship on the subject. Although social movement studies constitute the basic lens for explaining the process of boundary enlargement, our analysis also touches upon the frameworks of social and solidarity economy and the commons, and underlines features related to alternative economies often discussed in organization and marketing literature (Campana et al., 2017).

Overall, this book facilitates the better understanding on how collective action changes in times of crisis, as well as the dynamics of social movements in periods of latency and silence. It shows how during protest cycles not only do new actors rise, but also those who already exist are transformed internally. In this respect, although it deals with a relatively recent phenomenon, it still does not lose its historical perspective.

Research Design

Starting by observing the changes that occurred in the Greek social movement community within the period 2008-2016, our interest in explaining the process which took place led us to the framework of Contentious Politics. The framework of Contentious Politics aims to explain the emergence of collective action in different episodes of contention through the identification of common mechanisms and processes. In this respect, the updated version of Contentious Politics (Tilly and Tarrow, 2015) urges researchers to it describes a specific theoretical framework for the analysis of social movements and collective action. Following Kotronaki (2015, p. 2), we use capital letters (Contentious Politics) when referring to this framework.

first understand what they want to explain, then to identify the relevant sites, conditions, streams and episodes of contention, and finally, to specify which are the mechanisms and processes that appear. At this stage, the initial empirical-driven study was combined with the application of theory. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the dynamic and relational character of contention lacked a definition regarding the changes and transformation of boundaries — the process of boundary enlargement. This has set in motion a continuous interaction between the field and the theory, combining the inductive approach with deductive elements.

Although the initial scope was not the application of theory to a case, the outcome of this exercise is the combination of inductive and deductive approaches with the potential to explain a relatively new reality of the crisis-ridden universe of collective action. At the same time, it aimed to contribute to the development of the Contentious Politics framework. The framework of Contentious Politics strongly favors comparative research as a means to enhance the broader knowledge and to theoretically stabilize the framework which argues that similar mechanisms exist in different contexts. Our study does not follow this tradition. Instead, our aim to reveal the new reality and the process of boundary enlargement forced us to adopt a case-study research design, although this was achieved by applying a within-case comparison. Among a considerable number of scenes employing these alternative repertoires, the large consequences of austerity policies on the living conditions of the population forced us to direct our attention to actions focused on addressing basic needs. As indicated by the systematic research of relevant inquiries‘, the issues of food, health and labour reflect adequate fields of study and, therefore, serve as the units of analysis of this research. In particular, we focus on the cases of markets without middlemen, social and collective kitchens and collection and distribution of food parcels in the food scene, social clinics in the health scene, and workers’ collectives dealing with labour issues.

We are aware that by selecting specific social movement scenes, we inevitably exclude others. Thus, the housing scene could also fit under the umbrella of basic needs, while this selection does not allow us to take into consideration cultural or educational scenes. Nevertheless, the nature of our field helps us to overcome this issue, since the variety of actions employed by the Greek SMOs and grassroots collectives enables us to extract information concerning other scenes. In respect to this, SMOs that were established before the advent of the crisis and have incorporated the alternative repertoires,

4 LIVEWHAT Work Package 6, Integrated Report on alternative forms of resilience in times of crises (2016), http://www.unige.ch/livewhat/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/LIVEWHAT_D6.4.pdf as well as social centres, squats and neighbourhood assemblies that offer food, health or labour services, are taken into consideration.

During the process of case selection, we first turned our attention to the social movements and third sector literatures. Greece has been accused of being among the European countries with the lowest score on social capital (Huliaras, 2014). Nevertheless, research into the Greek civil society finds a rather great number of civil society organizations currently active, mostly in Athens and Thessaloniki (Afouxenidis and Gardiki, 2014, p. 13; Loukidou, 2014). Although helpful, these inquiries failed to include the full length of grassroots activities, since they referred mostly to formally registered organizations with clear non-profit action, leaving aside solidarity networks and neighbourhood assemblies (Afouxenidis and Gardiki, 2014, p. 4). As the researchers observe, there is a rising tendency to establish unofficial organizations, such as self-help groups and grassroots collectives, which do not have any intention of formally registering in state’s archives. Subsequently, this places obstacles in the path of identifying them. This tendency seems to reflect a broader preference towards unofficial structures observed in Southern European movements, more so than in their North European counterparts (Kousis et al., 2008, p. 1628). Contemporary research on solidarity structures during the crisis-context found more than 3500 formal and informal organizations providing social welfare as a response to austerity (Loukakis, 2018). However, still it is not clear whether these organizations are clearly linked with the Greek social movement community. Taking into consideration the aforementioned studies and our experience from previous research in the field (Malamidis, 2018), we tried to tackle this issue based on snowball sampling.

Our research focuses on the meso-level of organizations. In particular, we took into consideration approximately 50 organizations in the two largest cities in Greece, Athens and Thessaloniki, as well as two organizations in Crete. Among the 50 organizations, more than fifteen of them operate in the social movement scene of food, ten in the social movement scene of health, around fifteen in the social movement scene of labour, and the rest of the organizations studied have a rather active role in employing traditional forms of protest repertoires. Our field research took place between May 2016 and January 2017, with an additional round of field research in September 2017.5 Field research came to an end when we were confronted with the saturation

5 Although later improvements in the organizations under study have caused internal conflicts and resulted either in their institutionaliation by their incorporation in the respective units of local administrations or their dissolution, we do not take them into consideration since they exceed the timespan of the field research.

effect, a déja vu feeling of narrative repetition (Bryman, 2012, p. 452). This study does not apply a representative research design, since our research focuses on resourced, urban communities with longer social movement history than rural and less resourced ones. As Kriesi once commented, ‘data on the most important SMOs of a social movement give only a partial idea of the extent and the character of its organizational development’ since ‘these SMOs constitute only the tip of a movement’s organizational iceberg’ (Kriesi, 1996, p. 166). Nevertheless, we believe that this sampling approach allows for a more informed understanding, concerning the shift from protest to service-oriented activities.

Among other research methods, the case-study research design embraces qualitative fieldwork for data generation. Almost fifteen years ago, McAdam suggested that ‘movement researchers will need to supplement the traditional macro and micro staples of movement analysis — case studies or event research in the case of the former and survey research in connection with the latter — with a more serious investment in ethnography and other methods designed to shed empirical light on the meso-level dynamics that shape and sustain collective action over time’ (McAdam, 2003, p. 282). Together with naturalistic experiments and quantitative variable-based analysis, McAdam et al. (2009) included the known as ‘ethnographic fieldwork’ among the preferred methods for the study of mechanisms and processes.

In our research, data generation was mostly based on qualitative semi-structured interviews, document analysis and participant observation. In particular, we conducted 63 interviews with members of new and traditional SMOs and solidarity structures, as well as with key informants from hybrid, non-governmental and institutional organizations linked with the provision of social solidarity.® The interviews were assisted by the use of an interview guide, while all of them had been conducted, recorded and transcribed by the researcher’ in Greek, with an average duration of 1.15 hours. In this respect, any potential confusion the reader might have or mistakes in the quotations used is attributed to the researcher’s misuse of information. Moreover, we employed document analysis on the organizations’ founding declarations, political positions, denouncements, affiliations with other