Compare And Contrast Mccarthy And Wolfson

John McCarthy and Mark Wolfson from the University of Minnesota collected data emphasizing on three distinct features that facilitated the mobilization of resources. These three features are strategy, agency, and organizational structure. Agency is related to the mobilization of volunteer labor and membership. Here McCarthy and Wolfson use this term to describe it as “the sheer amount of effort activists invest in collective action rather than its caliber” (McCarthy and Wolfson p. 1071). Through this concept of agency, they expected the more the organizations put their effort in their movement, the more the resources are mobilized. Strategy is related with the mobilization of membership based on the emphasis on victim services. It has been viewed by previous scholars as the most important feature in the success of the organizations’ movement against drunk driving.
Organizational structure related to the mobilization of volunteer labor, revenue, and membership, based on the particularity of the number of task committees.
McCarthy and Wolfson first gathered data by conducting a census and developed a questionnaire of the existing organizations. The methods and outcome were similar to what McCarthy gathered with Dorius; 370 out of 458 groups operating since 1985 completed the survey. With this data, they were able to compare the number of members, the finances the organizations were able to make, and hours of volunteer labor.
Their first set of data described the statistics and comparisons between the MADD and RID organizations. The scholars discovered that both organizations are modest in membership number, financial resources, and mobilization of volunteer labor. Both organizations were near exclusively volunteer-based, since at the time of the survey, only two MADD groups and none of the RID groups reported having full-time staff (McCarthy and Wolfson p. 1076). Then the display of the three features of mobilization with three attributes contributed to both MADD and RID groups.
In all the statistics, MADD showed more effort in their anti-drunk driving movement than RID.
McCarthy and Wolfson suggested that “the mobilization of volunteers is less predictable than the mobilization of membership and revenue—the resources that have received the most attention” (McCarthy and Wolfson p. 1083), whereas membership is more predictable. They also suggested that the levels of collected revenue depend on the public appearances made by the group leaders. Victim services depend strongly on membership levels i.e. the more the members, the more the service is carried out. When they predicted mobilization outcomes, they came up with an assumption that the measures of mobilization of resources are the membership size, the number of hours committed to volunteer-based labor, and the amount of revenue collected each year. They also see these measures as “the empirical connections between mobilization and agency, strategy, and organizational structure” (McCarthy and Wolfson p. 1079). They concluded that mobilization of resources is dependent without local effort and organizational
structure.