Professor Pamela Oliver Department of Sociology

September 7, 1995

Social Movements Theory

Lecture Notes: Overview of Concepts/Theory in Social Movements

1. A social movement is a complex set of different types of actions by different actors all oriented toward some general social change goal. (e.g. the peace movement, the women's movement, the black movement). [Oliver's definition] Another definition (McCarthy and Zald, 1977) that is more commonly used: a social movement is a set of preferences for social change. Both definitions define the boundaries of an SM in terms of a social change goal, but McZ say the movement is the preferences, while Oliver says the movement is the actions. Other definitions agree about the goal but say the movement is a set or group of people pursuing the goal. For most purposes, you don't need to choose between these definitions, as they generally point you in the same direction. Most social movements have diffuse and vague boundaries, with movement participants disagreeing about who is in the movement and who is not.
1. Adherents support the goals of the movement. Beneficiaries stand to benefit personally from the movement. Constituents are adherents who identify with the movement. If you support the goals but hate the movement, you are an adherent who is not a constituent. Conscience constituents are people who support a movement even though it won't benefit them (e.g. white supporters of black movement, wealthy supporters of working class movement).
2. Participants engage in movement activities; contributors give money to movement organizations. Members would have to be members of particular organizations (see below); a "movement" as a whole is not a single entity with a membership list, but it is common for the term "movement member" to be used casually by non-specialists to refer to participants, contributors, constituents, or sometimes even adherents.
2. Resource Mobilization
1. The resource mobilization paradigm originates in the public goods problem, especially Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. Old idea was that all common interests would be acted upon. But Olson points to the collective dilemma: you can hope that someone else will do the work, take the risks, and you can "free ride" and get the benefit without the effort. E.g. if segregation is overturned, if employment inequality is eliminated, you can benefit whether you helped produce the change or not. Olson argued that all collective action was individually irrational and no one would do it on a rational basis unless there were individual side payments for acting, either payoffs for joining or coercion. This was important for problematizing mobilization: making you realize that you could not just assume that interests were perfectly reflected in action.Most work has gotten beyond Olson.
1. "rational" or not, empirical research shows that people who work in social movements are motivated by collective purposes.
2. nevertheless, the "side payments" ideas usefully points to the importance of "social incentives" of solidarity and sociability and the "purposive incentives" of morality and commitment.
3. instrumentalist cost-benefit ideas remain helpful for understanding strategy and tactics, and the ideas of when people will act and how they will act.
2. B Key assumptions of resource mobilization (from Zald 1992):
1. Behavior entails costs, requires resources. Grievances or deprivation do not automatically or easily translate into movement activity. You may care about an issue, but either not have the capacity or be unable to bear the costs of action.
2. It is not easy or automatic to coordinate the behavior of people who care about an interest. You require communication networks, and the resources and capacities to plan, coordinate, and communicate about an action. Organizing and mobilizing these resources and actions are central activities.
3. Resources can come from within the group of people who care about an issue, but also from outside it.
4. The costs of participating may be raised or lowered by state and elite support or repression. "Repression works." States and elites sometimes foster mobilization of non-elites for purposes of their own, usually conflicts among elites or to bolster the legitimacy of a regime.
5. Movement outcomes are not assured, and are the product of strategic interactions between movements and their targets.
3. Two older traditions
1. European, political sociology. The study of "the movement" the working class movement. The development of social democracy and the working class parties of Europe. Rudolf Heberle, Social Movement.
2. US, collective behavior and social movements as a part of social psychology. A reaction to fascism and Leninism. popular support for totalitarianism. Lynchings. The violence of the French Revolution. Why would people do that? Fear, loss of control. Written generally from standpoint of calm outsider, seeing people overreact. Or from standpoint of fear.
1. "Chicago School" concerned with the creation of new society at the micro level, links to today's symbolic interactionism, framing theory.
2. "Harvard School" movements develop in response to social strain, seen today in concerns about social disintegration.
3. Status politics. people are concerned with their symbolic position in society, not with direct material interests. Kriesberg's interpretation of temperance movement, as fearful middle class fighting immigrants. Trow on McCarthyism, radical right of 1950s, small businessmen, defense of status in face of decline, rise of big business. Commonly invoked today in accounts of right-wing movements.
4. Political process.
1. Model: structure of political AND ECONOMIC opportunities, level of organization within the population, collective assessment of prospects for insurgency. The idea is that there is an ongoing interplay and struggle between those who have power and those who do not. This is sometimes oversimplified as a mechanistic matter of counting political resources, but that would be incorrect.
5. Contrary to much previous theory which had used psychological models to explain individual action, resource mobilization theory said that much of the action occurred in organizations. The organizational capacity of a constituency is thought to be an important predictor of mobilization and success.
1. Especially in the U.S., the vast majority of movement actions are organized by organizations. (But this is an empirical statement, not a definition of a social movement. You can, and sometimes do, have a movement without any organization.)
2. Social Movement Organizations (SMOs or sometimes MO's, movement organizations, or sometimes PMO's, protest movement organizations) are organizations whose reason for existence is the social movement: NAACP, CORE, SNCC, SCLC; National Right to Life, Operation Rescue, National Abortion Rights Action League, Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights; National Organization for Women. In the U.S., almost all movements have one or more SMO's in them (and the big movements have many), but you can have a social movement with no SMO's, and there are other countries in which this is common.
3. Other organizations which exist for other reasons are often important players in social movements, including especially professional organizations, unions, political parties, interest groups, churches and other religious groups (both local congregations and national organizations), social clubs, colleges and universities (and sometimes high schools), mutual benefit associations, and charitable foundations and organizations. "Pre-existing organizations" in social movements parlance. The historical record shows such organizations sometimes starting movements, sometimes joining them in process in "bloc recruitment," and sometimes acting as allies or off-stage providers of resources.
4. There are also smaller special-purpose organizations like neighborhood groups, or ad hoc committees around some issue. Again, these may be a peculiarly American phenomenon, although they have become increasingly common in some other countries. These groups sometimes are parts of, or the origins of, larger social movements. Other times, they just stand alone on their own terms.
5. Much of social movement life is inter-organizational relations, cooperation and competition, coalitions, alliances, conflicts, and disputes. Organizations research and theory has a lot to say about organizations in social movements. However, this theory must recognize that most SMO's (and "preexisting organizations," for that matter) are voluntary associations, and volunteers create rather different organizational dynamics from paid employees. All the organizations involved in social movements, except the Catholic Church (viewed globally), are on the small side. Although the larger ones have paid staff, they do not approach anything like the scale of big business. Those with paid staff have some of the dynamics of small businesses. Paid staff sometimes have the job of coordinating and managing volunteers.
6. Some social movements are rooted in or create communities in addition to or instead of organizations. The constituents of many movements live together in the same regions or urban areas, either in relatively homogeneous areas, or intermingled with others. Even if their areas are physically mixed, many movement constituents have a social community that is entirely or overwhelmingly other movement constituents. They live, eat, socialize, and worship (if they worship at all) with people who share their commitments. They may also study or work together. Movements differ in the extent to which their constituents create communities. (Buechler; also much research, e.g. Kriesi, Opp, Portes, Epstein, McAdam, Morris, Johnston, J. Miller on SDS etc etc etc)
7. Small groups are always important in movements, sometimes on their own, other times embedded in larger organizations or communities. People often decide what they believe and decide what to do within the context of small groups of friends and family. Even big national organizations tend to have small groups within them where people spend their time: local chapters, study groups, task forces, committees, support groups, base communities. (Gary Alan Fine)
8. "Free Space" (Evans and Boyte). People who are being oppressed cannot organize action or create new ideologies if they cannot talk to each other without their oppressors watching. In repressive or oppressive contexts, talking may be virtually impossible. Places where people can meet are crucial. Churches have often played this role, presumably because the religious cloak was at least somewhat protective. Any other available place that opens up can play the same role. In countries which do not repress civil associations, there are many potential places to meet, but often (at least in the US), it is hard to get people out, away from the TV.
9. It is important to remember that the organized parts of a constituency usually (not always) have the most influence in a movement. You need to look at specifically who is organized, not just the broader constituency whom they represent. People can and often do represent the interests of others, and people will often feel that someone legitimately represents their interests even if they are wealthier or more educated. But this relationship is always problematic, and one should never assume either that people do represent whom they claim to represent, or that people have to be from a group to be able to speak for the group.
6. STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINTS AND OPPORTUNITIES
1. Political opportunities. context. State repression, conventional politics, state crises, all create the contexts within which movement possibilities increase or decrease.
1. ups and downs in state repression. state terrorism, armies in the streets. criminal prosecutions. colleges can be closed, admissions processes can screen out radicals.
2. close elections, swing votes, appeals to the lower classes to win elections.
3. elite support, for their own ends (or to quell protest). elites can and do seek to mobilize "the masses" in support of wars, in attacks on ethnic or racial minorities, in favor of environmental cleanup and women's rights.
4. other movements at the same time create a context of disruption or a model for success.
5. regime crises, general instability. economic collapse. state vulnerability can open the possibility of seizing power, or at least being left alone, but can also make it impossible for the state to do what you want (social provision, protect minorities).
2. Older ideas were simple more vs less protest, but newer ideas are more the relations between structures and what kind of action or protest.
3. Economic structures. What is capital doing. Class relations. Is economy strong or weak. Position in global economy. You need to look both at the nation as a whole, and at the specific circumstances of the groups and local communities in question.
4. Global politics and economics. Who has military power. Who controls the international purse strings. Global pressures often have major effects on the actions and policies of nation-states.
5. Resources can come from outside the constituency. There is a continuum from completely outside to completely inside with many gradations along the way. The most usual pattern in a protest mobilization is for initial protest and resources for protest to come from inside a group, and the initiators pull in outside resources. Those inside often ask outsiders for financial or political help. Once a protest is rolling, outside money and help often comes in larger quantities.
1. In the US and Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s, money was often donated by elites to try to channel or control protest into moderate directions; this pattern still is common. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, other elite money and other support comes from private charitable foundations and organizations, often apparently as movement supporters, not controllers. It is nevertheless true that a dependence on money pulls movement groups in the directions people are willing to pay.
2. This seems especially true for religious groups. Black church in the US, of course. Fundamentalist and evangelical Christian churches in the US seem to be funding a lot of right-wing politics, although there is some evidence that it was right-wing politicians who initiated this activity. Factions of the Catholic Church, and the protestant World Council of Churches and National Council of Churches from the 1970s on had fairly radical ideologies and social change agendas with themes of "liberation theology," "preferential option for the poor," and "peace and justice"; these church organizations were major players in the pro-democracy movements in Latin America.
3. Besides money, outside groups can help create organization. Highlander Folk School in US; Midwest Academy. Communist Party. Brazilian Catholic Church pioneered creation of base communities, which became political force.
4. Early theorists sometimes claimed that external resources were causative: for the civil rights movement, at least, the daily clearly indicate that the protests started first and the external resources followed. Nevertheless, national and, increasingly, international resource flows are important. Labor organizers, communist/socialist organizers have been important. Foundation and church money is very important for supporting social change organizations in the US and, increasingly, around the world. UN and World Bank money is often crucial in determining which projects will happen.
6. It is important to remember that there are always differences within any movement, especially class differences within other movements. Different factions of a movement generally have different political and economic resources, and often differ in their ability to attain their specific goals within the larger movement context.
7. Ideologies, Ideas, Constructions of Collective Identities, Issues, and Frames.
1. To be able to act in a movement, people have to understand the meaning of their actions, they have to decide that what they are doing makes sense within the way they understand the world. This is ideology.
2. Components of a Movement Ideology: Diagnosis = What the problem is and what caused it; Prognosis = What needs to be done; Call to Action = why you need to do it now.
3. Additionally, there is (perhaps only sometimes) a sense of group identity, a "we" that the movement represents and that one is part of. A "collective identity" is usually understood as a political group identity, as sense of a group's political stance and meaning. Ethnic, racial, or class identities may have something of a similar corporate character. This is related to, but not the same as an individual's sense of him or herself. There are also "activist identities," a sense that one is a change agent.
4. Insurgent consciousness = social change is needed and possible. = sense of injustice. Three components:
1. There is a problem, change is needed;
2. It is the fault of the system, or of another group, not luck or the individual (attributions);
3. Change is possible.
5. "Consensus mobilization" [Klandermans] = the act of getting people to agree with your ideology or definition of the situation.
6. Frame = a way of looking at a situation (David Snow, Rob Benford, and others) Uses this instead of older concepts of ideology. The frame concept comes from communication & journalism, where there is an explicit idea about how you frame a story, e.g. as crime or a protest. Is the issue equality or rights? I don't believe frame is an adequate substitute for ideology, but it does capture important aspect, and we will be using it a lot in our papers. Is affirmative action about giving preferences on the basis of race, about compensating for past wrongs, or about assuring that minorities are not discriminated against? Are American Indians an ethnic group, or a separate nation? "Frame Alignment" (David Snow, Rob Benford) is the process of getting people in the population to align their frames with the movement. Recent work stresses the interplay between frames and resources and opportunities: you frame an issue a certain way to attract adherents or resources, successful frame alignment attracts resources. The key idea is that the same situation can be interpreted differently. Movement activists as agents actively signifying the meaning of their actions. To frame as a verb: to assign meaning to situations and events. Term frame is borrowed from Goffman
7. "Collective identity" (Melucci) is a term for a group's sense of the meaning of their actions. Melucci emphasizes the idea that self-definition of one's group is created in ongoing process of interaction within group and outside group. Actors produce meanings and collectively construct their situation. [This has strong kinship with US symbolic interactionism within social psychology.] Other theorists of the construction of race, for example, show how people in a society socially create "race" categories, and debate about the meaning or content of those categories, which then become the groups in collective action. Once understood, these ideas can be applied to a wide variety of contexts. There are two versions of collective identities important in ethnic relations. 1) Ethnic collective identities. How do you define your own and others' ethnicity in relation larger groups, and what do you think the boundaries and characterizations of the groups are? 2) Political collective identities. Do you view yourself as part of a political movement, do you view the group as having a political purpose or meaning?
8. McAdam and others stress that consciousness, ideology, and identity develop in micromobilization contexts, the small groups where people know each other and talk. This is why organizations, groups, communities, and free space matter.
9. Mass media play a significant role. The large national media are elite-dominated and tend to pursue their own agenda. The popular understanding of movement events is filtered through media portrayals. There are many studies of the behavior of newspaper and TV journalists, how they do their job, and how that impact on movements and the way the are covered. However, there are also specialized media (newspapers, magazines, radio stations, books) that circulate within movements and communities, including Black publications, Spanish-language publications, feminist publications, racist publications, etc. These have a major influence on the people who read them.
10. Discourses, long-range communication. Ideas have local character, but they are also global. You can trace the transmission of ideologies around the world. Most of this is very non-mystical: particular people travel or live abroad and bring ideas home, particular books or papers from abroad are read and circulated in a new locale, people organize and write propaganda.
8. Cycles of Protest. Protest comes in waves, and all movements go up and down. Early political process ideas attributed all of this to exogenous changes in the political system (e.g. party competition). Tarrow's early cycle ideas are fairly endogenous: protest spirals and then dies of its own logic, as activists first try to top each others' radicalism, and then collapse when they cannot get any crazier. Later research in this tradition separates types of actions, and suggests a scheme: early protest is disruptive but nonviolent, police react ineffectively and protest grows; effective protest both generates increasingly effective police response, so that disruption is reduced, and pulls in outside resources supporting the moderates, so that nondisruptive protest and organizations grow while those who wish to continue to be radical and disruptive become increasingly marginalized and increasingly violent; when everything is calm and orderly, resources are gradually withdrawn and the moderate organizations die. Even this scheme is probably overgeneralized, but it is a starting point for thinking about the dynamics of movements.
9. Movements and Countermovements. Most social movement theory works with the image of one movement which seeks to influence either the state or the general public. But often there are movement-countermovement pairs (e.g. prochoice/proabortion vs prolife/antiabortion; feminist vs antifeminist; antinuclear vs pronuclear power; black movement vs racist white; antiwar vs "support our troops"). In these cases, each side is attempting to influence the state or general population, and they each react to and try to hinder the efforts of the other side. Often, the countermovement has close ties to the entrenched elites, and commonly is created by them only when they begin to "lose." Over time, however, it can often be the case that both sides have elite support, often entrenched in different parts or level of the government.
   

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