Ideologies have been considered central elements of social movement fields, helping to hold diverse actors together and guide action. What we know less about, however, is how ideologies shift over time in emerging fields. Especially, it is unclear how this may be intertwined with stages of change as social movement fields move from ideas to action and look to concretize their idealized visions. In order to investigate these questions further, we observe how the emerging field ideology evolves in the Platform Cooperativism movement, a movement aimed at challenging the inequalities and power dynamics of traditional platform businesses and envisioning a future of platforms built around the cooperative model and its associated ideals. Through a Structural Topic Modeling analysis of the discursive exchanges in four conferences held by the Platform Cooperativism movement between 2015 and 2021, we have identified three kinds of discourses: ideological, practical, and integrating, the final one aimed at embedding the field’s ideology into new structures and practices. By observing how these discourses unfold over time, we reveal how social movement field ideology evolves in relation to field development and change.
