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buying resources. While previous attention to the legality dimension underscored key
differences among strategies, the introduction of the autonomy dimension not only reveals
additional differences, but also highlights surprising commonalties among strategies. For
example, the seemingly disparate rogue and bootstrap methods of service acquisition are both
self-sufficient strategies—a key observation for understanding the impact of privatization on
available strategy choices, as a fully privatized service cannot typically be acquired through
either militant demands or conformist solicitations directed at the government.
Analytic Tools: The Strategy Life Cycle
Based on 10 case studies, qualitative analysis yields an evolutionary strategy life cycle
that explains the strategy preferences of new types of invasion organizations. Combined with
paired-case comparisons and process-tracing (George and McKeown 1985) of neighborhood-
level cases, analysis of both invasion organizations and organizational strategies reveals how
types of organizations share a common menu of strategy types, but differ in their preferences and
methods of strategy selection. Old Guard organizations have clear and consistent strategy
preferences: while such organizations may sometimes "cross over" to use other methods, in
general either legal methods (soliciting and buying) or extralegal methods (seizing and
demanding) dominate their strategy choices.
By contrast, the Next Generation and the Innovators follow a dynamic strategy life cycle.
These groups initiate their life cycle with rogue seizures of land and services. They soon begin
using militant protest and pressure tactics to demand additional services and legal recognition.
Organizations then fluctuate between militant strategies and conformist strategies of formally
soliciting government agencies or establishing exchange-based relationships with politicians.
Finally, a few invasion organizations give up on the government and manage to "pull themselves
up by their bootstraps" by building the needed infrastructure themselves and paying for service
provision.
Figure 2 illustrates the archetypal trajectory of this strategy life cycle. The actual path of
a Next Generation or Innovator organization is messier, and involves changes in direction and
sometimes simultaneous activity in two or more quadrants of the figure, but Figure 2 still
usefully portrays the linear trend that typifies the general evolution of strategy choices.
The reasons for this evolutionary pattern of strategy selection are three-fold. First,
changes in settler identity across organizational types (see Table 1) make such change possible.
While Old Guard rigidity prohibits such strategic dynamism, the flexibility of newer
organizational types permits greater variation in strategy choices.
Second, these changes in the framing of settler identity also make an evolution in strategy
selection more likely. While the pragmatic attitudes of veterans makes them more likely to "stay
with what they know," the bold sense of entitlement of novice Next Generation leaders makes
them willing to indiscriminately employ all the tactics of the older generation, as they are
convinced they will succeed and need not fear, for example, alienating political allies with
disruptive protests. The Innovators exhibit a different kind of boldness and two traits make them
even more likely to employ a dynamic combination of strategies: they intend to be different from
the Old Guard and their creative innovation of new tactics yields highly diverse strategies.
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3
In his study of protest and politics in Italy, Tarrow (1989) argues that movement cycles are triggered by tactical
innovation. The present study associates the evolution of organizational type with this kind of innovation, but does
not claim such innovation actually triggers the change; rather, it constitutes a measurable change indicative of the
new movement organizations.
Convention