Social movement theory
Encyclopedia
Social movement theory is an interdisciplinary study within the social sciences that generally seeks to explain why social mobilization occurs, the forms under which it manifests, as well as potential social, cultural, and political consequences. More recently, the study of social movements has been subsumed under the study of contentious politics
.
Collective behavior
Sociologists during the early and middle-1900s thought that movements were random occurrences of individuals who were trying to emotionally react to situations outside their control. Or, as the "mass society" hypothesis suggested, movement participants were those who were not fully integrated into society. These psychologically-based theories have largely been rejected by present-day sociologists and political scientists, although many still make a case for the importance (although not centrality) of emotions. See the work of Gustav LeBon, Herbert Blumer
, William Kornhauser, and Neil Smelser
.
Relative deprivation
People are driven into movements out of a sense of deprivation or inequality, particularly (1) in relation to others or (2) in relation to their expectations. In the first view, participants see others who have more power, economic resources, or status, and thus try to acquire these same things for themselves. In the second view, people are most likely to rebel when a consistently improving situation (especially an improving economy) stops and makes a turn for the worse. At this point, people will join movements because their expectations will have outgrown their actual material situation (also called the "J-Curve theory"). See the work of James Davies
, Ted Gurr, and Denton Morrison.
, Mark Lichbach, and Dennis Chong. In Theories of Political Protest and Social Movements, Karl-Dieter Opp incorporates a number of cultural concepts in his version of rational choice theory, as well as showing that several other approaches surreptitiously rely on rational-choice assumptions without admitting it.
Resource mobilization
Social movements need organizations first and foremost. Organizations can acquire and then deploy resources to achieve their well-defined goals. Some versions of this theory see movements operate similar to a capitalist enterprises that make efficient use of available resources. Scholars have suggested a typology of five types of resources:
Framing
Certain claims activists make on behalf of their social movement "resonate" with audiences including media, elites, sympathetic allies, and potential recruits. Successful frames draw upon shared cultural understandings (e.g. rights, morality). This perspective is firmly rooted in a social constructivist ontology. See the work of Robert Benford and David Snow. Over the last decade, political opportunity theorists have partially appropriated the framing perspective. It is called political theory of a social movement
New Social Movements
This European-influenced group of theories argue that movements today are categorically different than in the past. Instead of labor movements engaged in class conflict, present-day movements (such as anti-war, environmental, civil rights, feminist, etc.) are engaged in social and political conflict (see Alain Touraine
). The motivations for movement participants is a form of post-material
politics and newly-created identities, particularly those from the "new middle class". Also, see the work of Ronald Inglehart
, Jürgen Habermas
, Alberto Melucci, and Steve Buechler. This line of research has stimulated an enduring emphasis on identity even among prominent American scholars like Charles Tilly
.
In the late 1990s two long books summarized the cultural turn in social-movement studies, Alberto Melucci’s Challenging Codes and James M. Jasper
’s The Art of Moral Protest. Melucci focused on the creation of collective identities as the purpose of social movements, especially the “new social movements,” whereas Jasper argued that movements allow participants a chance to elaborate and articulate their moral intuitions and principles. Both recognized the importance of emotions in social movements, although Jasper developed this idea more systematically. Along with Jeff Goodwin
and Francesca Polletta, Jasper organized a conference in New York in 1999 that helped put emotions on the intellectual agenda for many scholars of protest and movements. He has continued to write about the emotional dynamics of protest in the years since.
In 1999, Goodwin and Jasper published a critique of the then-dominant political opportunity paradigm, using Jasper’s cultural approach to show that political opportunity was too structural as a concept, leaving out meanings, emotions, and agency. Charles Tilly
and a number of other scholars responded, often vituperatively.
In The Art of Moral Protest Jasper also argued that strategic interaction had an important logic that was independent of both culture and structure, and in 2006 he followed up on this claim with Getting Your Way, which developed a vocabulary for studying strategic engagement in a cultural, emotional, and agentic way. By then, his theory of action had moved closer to Pragmatism
and Symbolic Interactionism
. In the same period, Wisconsin social theorist Mustafa Emirbayer had begun writing in a similar fashion about emotions and social movements, but more explicitly deriving his ideas from the history of sociological thought. In France, Daniel Cefaï arrived at similar conclusions in Pourquoi se mobilise-t-on?, a sweeping history and synthesis of thought on collective action and social movements.
Contentious politics
Contentious politics is the use of disruptive techniques to make a political point, or to change government policy. Examples of such techniques are actions that disturb the normal activities of society such as demonstrations, general strike action, riot, terrorism, civil disobedience, and even...
.
Collective behaviorCollective behaviorThe expression collective behaviour was first used by Robert E. Park, and employed definitively by Herbert Blumer, to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure , but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way.Collective behavior might also be defined as action...
Sociologists during the early and middle-1900s thought that movements were random occurrences of individuals who were trying to emotionally react to situations outside their control. Or, as the "mass society" hypothesis suggested, movement participants were those who were not fully integrated into society. These psychologically-based theories have largely been rejected by present-day sociologists and political scientists, although many still make a case for the importance (although not centrality) of emotions. See the work of Gustav LeBon, Herbert BlumerHerbert Blumer
Herbert George Blumer was an American sociologist. Continuing the work of George Herbert Mead, he named and developed the topic of symbolic interactionism. According to Blumer himself, his main post-graduate scholarly interests were symbolic interactionism and methodological problems...
, William Kornhauser, and Neil Smelser
Neil Smelser
Neil Joseph Smelser is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research has been on collective behavior....
.
Relative deprivationRelative deprivationRelative deprivation is the experience of being deprived of something to which one believes oneself to be entitled to have. It refers to the discontent people feel when they compare their positions to others and realize that they have less than them....
People are driven into movements out of a sense of deprivation or inequality, particularly (1) in relation to others or (2) in relation to their expectations. In the first view, participants see others who have more power, economic resources, or status, and thus try to acquire these same things for themselves. In the second view, people are most likely to rebel when a consistently improving situation (especially an improving economy) stops and makes a turn for the worse. At this point, people will join movements because their expectations will have outgrown their actual material situation (also called the "J-Curve theory"). See the work of James DaviesJames Davies
James Davies may refer to:* James Davies Lewin , Canadian businessman and politician* James Davies , Wrexham F.C. and Wales international footballer* James J...
, Ted Gurr, and Denton Morrison.
Rational choice
Individuals are rational actors who strategically weigh the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action and choose that course of action which is most likely to maximize their utility. The primary research problem from this perspective is the collective action dilemma, or why rational individuals would choose to join in collective action if they benefit from its acquisition even if they do not participate. See the work of Mancur OlsonMancur Olson
Mancur Lloyd Olson, Jr. was a leading American economist and social scientist who, at the time of his death, worked at the University of Maryland, College Park...
, Mark Lichbach, and Dennis Chong. In Theories of Political Protest and Social Movements, Karl-Dieter Opp incorporates a number of cultural concepts in his version of rational choice theory, as well as showing that several other approaches surreptitiously rely on rational-choice assumptions without admitting it.
Resource mobilizationResource mobilizationResource mobilization is a major sociological theory in the study of social movements which emerged in the 1970s. It stresses the ability of movement's members to 1) acquire resources and to 2) mobilize people towards accomplishing the movement's goals...
Social movements need organizations first and foremost. Organizations can acquire and then deploy resources to achieve their well-defined goals. Some versions of this theory see movements operate similar to a capitalist enterprises that make efficient use of available resources. Scholars have suggested a typology of five types of resources:
- Material (money and physical capital);
- Moral (solidarity, support for the movement's goals);
- Social-Organizational (organizational strategies, social networks, bloc recruitment);
- Human (volunteers, staff, leaders);
- Cultural (prior activist experience, understanding of the issues, collective actionCollective actionCollective action is the pursuit of a goal or set of goals by more than one person. It is a term which has formulations and theories in many areas of the social sciences.-In sociology:...
know-how)
Political opportunity/Political process
Certain political contexts should be conducive (or representative) for potential social movement activity. These climates may [dis]favor specific social movements or general social movement activity; the climate may be signaled to potential activists and/or structurally allowing for the possibility of social movement activity (matters of legality); and the political opportunities may be realized through political concessions, social movement participation, or social movement organizational founding. Opportunities may include:- increased access to political decision making power
- instability in the alignment of ruling elites (or conflict between elites)
- access to elite allies (who can then help a movement in its struggle)
- declining capacity and propensity of the state to repress dissent
FramingFraming (social sciences)A frame in social theory consists of a schema of interpretation — that is, a collection of anecdotes and stereotypes—that individuals rely on to understand and respond to events. In simpler terms, people build a series of mental filters through biological and cultural influences. They use these...
Certain claims activists make on behalf of their social movement "resonate" with audiences including media, elites, sympathetic allies, and potential recruits. Successful frames draw upon shared cultural understandings (e.g. rights, morality). This perspective is firmly rooted in a social constructivist ontology. See the work of Robert Benford and David Snow. Over the last decade, political opportunity theorists have partially appropriated the framing perspective. It is called political theory of a social movementNew Social MovementsNew social movementsThe term new social movements is a theory of social movements that attempts to explain the plethora of new movements that have come up in various western societies roughly since the mid-1960s which are claimed to depart significantly from the conventional social movement paradigm.There are two...
This European-influenced group of theories argue that movements today are categorically different than in the past. Instead of labor movements engaged in class conflict, present-day movements (such as anti-war, environmental, civil rights, feminist, etc.) are engaged in social and political conflict (see Alain TouraineAlain Touraine
Alain Touraine is a French sociologist born in Hermanville-sur-Mer. He is research director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he founded the Centre d'étude des mouvements sociaux . He is best known for being the originator of the term "post-industrial society"...
). The motivations for movement participants is a form of post-material
Post-materialism
The concept of post-materialism is a tool in developing an understanding of modern culture. It can be considered in reference of three distinct concepts of materialism...
politics and newly-created identities, particularly those from the "new middle class". Also, see the work of Ronald Inglehart
Ronald Inglehart
Ronald F. Inglehart is a political scientist at the University of Michigan. He is director of the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the publics of over 80 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing 85...
, Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
, Alberto Melucci, and Steve Buechler. This line of research has stimulated an enduring emphasis on identity even among prominent American scholars like Charles Tilly
Charles Tilly
Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University....
.
Emerging Cultural Perspective
Taking up some of the achievements of new social movement theorists, a number of scholars have developed a powerful critique of the currently dominant political opportunity approach. This emerging cultural perspective argues that:- Politics and power should be defined more broadly to include "all collective challenges to constituted authority."
- Structures not only constrain actors but constitute actors (no dichotomy between culture and structure)
- Contention is as much a contest over meaning as it is a struggle over resources
- The rational actor model is problematic, whether applied to collectives or individuals
- Opportunities are made as often as they are recognized
- Emotions are an important part of how we construct and understand our worlds
In the late 1990s two long books summarized the cultural turn in social-movement studies, Alberto Melucci’s Challenging Codes and James M. Jasper
James M. Jasper
James Macdonald Jasper is a writer and sociologist who has taught Ph.D. students at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York since 2007...
’s The Art of Moral Protest. Melucci focused on the creation of collective identities as the purpose of social movements, especially the “new social movements,” whereas Jasper argued that movements allow participants a chance to elaborate and articulate their moral intuitions and principles. Both recognized the importance of emotions in social movements, although Jasper developed this idea more systematically. Along with Jeff Goodwin
Jeff Goodwin
Jeff Goodwin is a professor of sociology at New York University. He holds a BA, MA and PhD from Harvard University.His research interests include visual sociology, social movements, revolutions, political violence, and terrorism...
and Francesca Polletta, Jasper organized a conference in New York in 1999 that helped put emotions on the intellectual agenda for many scholars of protest and movements. He has continued to write about the emotional dynamics of protest in the years since.
In 1999, Goodwin and Jasper published a critique of the then-dominant political opportunity paradigm, using Jasper’s cultural approach to show that political opportunity was too structural as a concept, leaving out meanings, emotions, and agency. Charles Tilly
Charles Tilly
Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University....
and a number of other scholars responded, often vituperatively.
In The Art of Moral Protest Jasper also argued that strategic interaction had an important logic that was independent of both culture and structure, and in 2006 he followed up on this claim with Getting Your Way, which developed a vocabulary for studying strategic engagement in a cultural, emotional, and agentic way. By then, his theory of action had moved closer to Pragmatism
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
and Symbolic Interactionism
Symbolic interactionism
Symbolic Interaction, also known as interactionism, is a sociological theory that places emphasis on micro-scale social interaction to provide subjective meaning in human behavior, the social process and pragmatism.-History:...
. In the same period, Wisconsin social theorist Mustafa Emirbayer had begun writing in a similar fashion about emotions and social movements, but more explicitly deriving his ideas from the history of sociological thought. In France, Daniel Cefaï arrived at similar conclusions in Pourquoi se mobilise-t-on?, a sweeping history and synthesis of thought on collective action and social movements.