ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how an innovative policy pedigree—a proposed and enacted legal form—appears and then diffuses throughout a highly structured and institutionalized organizational field. It discusses the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) as a policy pedigree to examine how the institutional arrangements characterizing the organizational field shape the nature of collective action undertaken by an organizational field. The chapter describes the VAWA as an innovative legal response to the problem of violence against girls and women in the United States. It explores the VAWA as a key element in the institutional environment, one that redefines the constitutive elements of violence against girls and women. “Feminists activists in the antiviolence movement have been ambivalent about the relationship between violence against women and the state”. The general rationale underlying the VAWA is that harassment, intimidation, and assault directed at women assume a particularly offensive, dangerous, and socially disruptive character when motivated by animus based on gender.
