It has already been noted that informal SM leadership will rarely exist in ‘pure’ or ‘ideal typical’ form, because SMs are almost always involved with movement organisations and political institutions. But if SM leadership rarely occurs in pure form, it is also true that formal institutional leadership, in its turn, seldom lacks a ‘social movement dimension’ entirely. The following are a few relevant observations on interactions between formal and informal leadership contexts.

Social movements are, in practice, more or less closely related to the broader institutional and organisational terrain. Leaders sometimes derive their initial authority within the movement in part, at least, from their pre-existing institutional leadership positions. A perhaps minor formal or institutional position can sometimes be translated into a much expanded role within the movement. Religious office often plays this role: Martin Luther King, for example, was a minister of the church before he rose to a position of leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. Conversely, of course, SM leaders often take up positions within the institutional sphere. In Australia, Peter Garrett and Bob Brown offer contrasting lessons of the difficulties and opportunities involved in the transition from the green movement and its associated organisations to formal positions of leadership.

More generally, formal institutional leaders will also depend on qualities associated here with informal leadership. We have already mentioned Kane’s exploration of ways in which institutional leaders are reinforced or undermined by their moral capital or lack thereof. He considers the contrasting cases of Nelson Mandela, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon (2001). The ‘Machiavellian’ dilemmas faced by political leaders, who try to reconcile effectiveness in the ‘real world’ (or ‘realism’) with moral principles (‘idealism’), inevitably tend to erode their moral capital in the long run. In contrast to social capital which, according to Robert Putnam, increases the more it is used (Putnam 1993: 169), the use of moral capital does tend to use it up. The durability of formal leaders, their ability to maintain appeal and authority over time, therefore depends on their ability to manage this problem. To achieve this may require qualities more often associated with informal leadership — qualities, for example, enabling formal leaders to revive their support and/or extend their appeal beyond existing constituencies.

Evidently, the same Machiavellian dilemmas also afflict social movements and informal leadership. Partly as a result, the successful institutionalisation of a movement — the translation of its demands and values into political influence, legal and institutional recognition, party formation and even government — is not infrequently associated with the decline or disappearance of the movement as a movement. Institutional manifestations of a SM readily fall victim to the same contradictions between ideal values and political expediency besetting conventionally institutionalised politics. Leaders faced with difficult policy dilemmas are tempted to sacrifice long-term movement ideals for the sake of immediate practical gains. Drawn into the orbit of institutional politics and tempted by the rewards of office, leaders may be ‘co-opted’ by the ‘system’. Movement participants may feel ‘betrayed’ by their co-opted leaders. Perceptions of institutional recognition and satisfied demands may, in any case, encourage participants to withdraw from active involvement in the movement.

A prominent example of the price paid by a SM for institutional success is the nineteenth-century working-class movement, which gave rise to, but then was effectively replaced by its institutional offspring of trade unions, labour and social democratic parties and welfare state. The demise of the working-class movement in its revolutionary incarnations has been even more stark. Of course, some substantive gains resulted from the institutional successes of the movement — the welfare state in capitalist liberal democracies and some equivalent social protections in the former communists states. But since the 1970s at least, the welfare state has, in the absence of a strongly persisting social movement, proved vulnerable to neo-liberal counterattack. The dramatic collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ after 1989 led, by an even more direct route, to harsher versions of liberal capitalism.

The mixed outcome of the working-class movement’s ‘successful’ institutionalisation provided important, formative lessons for ‘new’ social movements. One of the most distinctive features of NSMs has been their self-consciously critical or cautious orientation towards institutional politics and the attempt to avoid such negative outcomes. NSMs have sought to achieve changes beyond and, to some extent, independently of the institutional political sphere — changes in identity, culture, consciousness, consumption and so on. When these movements have nevertheless sought institutional reforms, they have done so with the intention of preserving high levels of movement activity. The German Green Party is the most well known example of an organisation designed to pursue the benefits of institutionalisation without exhausting the transformative force of the underlying movement. The Greens were formed, in this sense, self-consciously as an ‘anti-party’ or ‘movement’ party. Their qualified successes in this regard only confirm the difficulties involved in truly achieving this goal (Hülsberg 1988).

More broadly, the fragility and enduring value of social movements are important themes in the renaissance of SM studies since the 1970s. These studies support the view of social movements and civil society as permanent and essential elements of any genuine, as opposed to merely formal or nominal, democracy (Keane 1988; Cohen and Arato 1992). By the same token, leaders and movements attempting to satisfy the ‘hybrid’ demands of both formal and informal political contexts face a complex and daunting task.