Overcoming the latecomer dilemma: the unintended effect of successful strategies in the community university movement in Taiwan

The existing research highlights how effective strategies facilitate social movements in recruiting participants and attracting resources. Less effort has been done to investigate the relationship between strategies and their long-term impact on the movement. In this article, I examine a grassroots education reform movement – the Community University Movement in Taiwan since 1998 to shed light on the dynamic relationship between initial strategies and the movement development. Specifically, I examine the latecomer phenomenon – one of the crucial consequences brought by initial strategies. Movement leaders often face a dilemma that encouraging broader participation runs the risk of attracting latecomers with diverse backgrounds to the movement. Based on my ethnographic work, I find that the latecomers bring four types of impacts to the community university movement – fragmentation, competition, goal replacement, and political-patronage. I further investigate how movement leaders coped with this situation. The findings show that without sufficient organizational capacity, movement leaders were in a weak position to harness the influence of the latecomers. I also find that those community universities founded by activists, in order to compete, had become more like their competitors to emphasize performance and efficiency. These findings thus highlight the importance of choosing the initial strategies that would minimize the potential negative effects brought by the latecomers.