ABSTRACT
Social Movement Organizations (SMOs) are a species of more or less formalized human associating, albeit a specialized one because their beliefs challenge mainstream conceptions of reality. SMOs are organizations nonetheless and after first asking about beliefs that make them "movements", researchers have a prime interest in them as organizations. As in practically every other area of life, SMOs vary in how they organize themselves to deal with their common plight qua organizations. Or, put more broadly, SMOs form an analytic category, but they vary in a great many ways within that category. In a significant but unknown portion of SMOs, the unit of membership is another organization rather than the individual person. Even though correlated with "organizations of organizations," fragility and temporariness are variables in their own right irrespective of the organization-individual unit of membership. Processes analyses of SMOs qua organizations have more commonly been in the form of sequences than of cycles or spirals.
