From lobby to party : organisational development and change in the Scottish Home Rule Movement, 1880-1930

In this thesis I trace the processes of organisational development and change in the Scottish Home Rule movement between 1880 and 1930. Employing an ecological framework, I detail the field of organisations that developed in two distinct periods, 1886-1914 and 1918-1930, and the way their interactions facilitated the emergence of new organisational forms, principally lobbies and parties. To bring discipline to this jumble of events, I employ three formal models to colligate the qualitative data presented: 1) co-evolutionary dynamics; 2) ecological control; and 3) the garbage model of organisational choice. My argument follows three broad moves. The first is movement away from nationalism to contentious politics as a frame of reference for these events. The second move is away from substances to a focus on intercalated processes. This entails a focus on networks of interaction, sequences of attention and social matching dynamics. The third is a move away from teleology and to a realisation of the contingent nature of these events. There was no necessity for either lobbies or parties to form. Rather organisational emergence was a contingent process of refunctionality—the use of existing organisational forms for new purposes. Operationalizing these processes I focus on the way that changes in the operating environment shaped three mechanisms: careers; organisational embedding; and ecological control. What I discover is that organisational change in the Scottish Home Rule movement was product of the matching of availability, attention and authorisation to act.