Social Movements : An Introduction. Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Chapter 7. (2nd edition “Action Forms, Repertoires and Cycles of Protest.” 3rd edition “Eventful Protests”) Defines protest as unconventional, seeking influence through indirect persuasion mediated by mass media. “Logics” of protest: numbers, damage, witness. 3rd edition adds prefiguration. Strategic options, repertoires and cycles of protest. Diffusion of protest across time and place. 3rd edition adds “Eventful protest”.
Tarrow, chapters 9 (cycles), 10 (struggling to reform)
Sidney Tarrow. “Cycles of Protest.” BC 441-456. reprints a selection from Power in Movement.
Diffusion and Coevolution
Sarah Soule and Conny Roggeband. 2019 “Diffusion Processes Within and Across Movements.” Chapter 13 in Snow et al Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements available through UW library. What is diffused, mechanisms and catalysts to diffusion, cycles of protest and repertoires of contention, impact of diffusion.
Koopmans, Ruud R. (2004). Protest in Time and Space: The Evolution of Waves of Contention. The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule and H. Kriesi. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK, Blackwell Publishing: 19-46. Essay on expansive processes: political opportunities, diffusion, reactive mobilization. And transformative mechanisms: Mechanisms of strategic change: strategic anticipation, strategic adaptation, environmental selection. Then a discussion of punctuated equilibrium, contingency, path dependence. Discussion of problem of scope conditions for generalizations. Contractive mechanisms (how they end): restabilization through interactive convergence, conflict mediation and resolution, external effects.
Soule, Sarah A. (2004). Diffusion Processes within and across Movements. The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule and H. Kriesi. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK, Blackwell Publishing: 292-310. Review of diffusion research. Concepts, Direct ties, indirect ties. Theory. Suggestions. Short overview.
(*) Andrews, Kenneth T. and Michael Biggs (2006). “The Dynamics of Protest Diffusion: Movement Organizations, Social Networks, and News Media in the 1960 Sit-Ins.” American Sociological Review 71(5): 752-777. The authors use event-history analysis to trace the diffusion of sit-ins throughout the South and to compare cities where sit-ins occurred with the majority of cities where they did not. They assess the relative importance of three channels of diffusion: movement organizations, social networks, and news media. The authors find that movement organizations played an important role in orchestrating protest; what mattered was a cadre of activists rather than mass membership. There is little evidence that social networks acted as a channel for diffusion among cities. By contrast, news media were crucial for conveying information about protests elsewhere. In addition, the authors demonstrate that sit-ins were most likely to occur where there were many college students, where adults in the black community had greater resources and autonomy, and where political opportunities were more favorable.
Pamela E. Oliver & Daniel J. Myers. “The Coevolution of Social Movements” Mobilization 8: 1-25. 2003. Abstract. PDF of publication
Ruud Koopmans. “The Missing Link between Structure and Agency: Outline of an Evolutionary Approach to Social Movements” Mobilization: An International Journal, 2005, 10, 1, Feb, 19-35 PDF file
Strategy and Tactics
Brian Doherty and Graeme Hayes. “Tactics and Strategic Action.” Chapter 15 in Snow et al Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements available through UW library, Repertoires of Contention, tactics are particular events, an actor-centered approach, strategic action.
Taylor, Verta and Nella Van Dyke (2004). “Get up, Stand up”: Tactical Repertoires of Social Movements. The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule and H. Kriesi. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK, Blackwell Publishing: 262-293. Focus on analysis of tactics and the problem of evolving tactics and tactical repertoires that lags research coding schemes. Emphasis on cultural performances. Factors that influence tactical repertoires: external and internal. Factors that affect outcomes: novelty, militancy, variety, size, cultural resonance.
Jasper, James M. (2004). “A Strategic Approach to Collective Action: Looking for Agency in Social-Movement Choices.” Mobilization: An International Journal 9(1): 1-16. For a study of strategic choices that takes cultural & institutional contexts more seriously than game theory. Presents several strategic dilemmas that organizers & participants face. Emphasize agency and culture in these choices.
Sidney Tarrow. “Cycles of Collective Action: Between Moments of Madness and the Repertoire of Contention.” Social Science History 17: 2 (Summer) pages 281-308. 1993. MS 328-339.
Frank, A. G. and M. Fuentes (1994). “On Studying the Cycles in Social Movements.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 17: 173-196. PDF
Steven Boutcher and Hollly McCammon. “Social Movements and Litigation. Chapter 17 in Snow et al Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements available through UW library, How do social movements litigate and why, what are the impacts?
Snow, D. A. and D. M. Moss (2014). “Protest on the Fly: Toward a Theory of Spontaneity in the Dynamics of Protest and Social Movements.” American Sociological Review 79(6): 1122-1143. This article reexamines spontaneity as an important, albeit neglected, mechanism in collective action dynamics, and elaborates on its operation and effects in protest events and social movements. We do not presume that spontaneity is routinely at play in all collective actions. Rather, based on our grounded analysis of historical and ethnographic data, we contend that spontaneity is triggered by certain conditions: nonhierarchical organization; uncertain/ambiguous moments and events; behavioral/emotional priming; and certain ecological/spatial factors. We conclude by elaborating why the activation of spontaneous actions matters in shaping the course and character of protest events and movements, and we suggest that spontaneity be resuscitated in the study of collective action and everyday life more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
State-Movement Interactions
(*) Koopmans, Ruud and Susan Olzak (2004). “Discursive Opportunities and the Evolution of Right-Wing Violence in Germany[1].” American Journal of Sociology 110(1): 198-230. This article explores the link between violence and public discourse. It suggests that media attention to radical right violence and public reactions to violence affect the clustering of targets and the temporal and spatial distribution of violence. The notion of “discursive opportunities” is introduced, and the article argues that it can serve to link political opportunity structure and framing perspectives on collective action. Using a cross-sectional and time-series design to model event counts in states in Germany, this study finds that differential public visibility, resonance, and legitimacy of right-wing violence significantly affected the rate of violence against different target groups.
Ruud Koopmans. The Dynamics of Protest Waves: West Germany, 1965 to 1989. American Sociological Review 1993, 58, 5, Oct, 637-658. Cycles of protest in Europe; action repertoires diverge in response to repression. MS 367-383. PDF file
Kim, Q. Y. (1996). “From Protest to Change of Regime: The 4-19 Revolt and the Fall of the Rhee Regime in South Korea” Social Forces, Vol. 74, No. 4. (Jun., 1996), pp. 1179-1208. Economic deprivation was the most important cause of the collective protest during the first phase of the movement. The authorities’ violent response to the protest & the mobilization of public opinion against the violence facilitated protest & transformed it into a major upheaval that overthrew the regime. Stable URL
Soule, S. A., D. McAdam, et al. (1999). “Protest Events: Cause or Consequence of State Action? The U.S. Women’s Movement and Federal Congressional Activities, 1956-1979.” Mobilization 4(2): 239-255. More consequence than cause
Markoff, John (1997). “Peasants Help Destroy an Old Regime and Defy a New One: Some Lessons from (and for) the Study of Social Movements.” American Journal of Sociology 102(4): 1113-1142. A dataset of 4,689 rural insurrectionary events, drawn from a literature review, are used to examine interactions of elites and insurrectionary mobilization, shaping each other. Stable URL
For a good set of articles on the institutionalization of protest, see Meyer & Tarrow The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century
Kriesi, H. (1996). The Organizational Structure of New Social Movements in a Political Context. CP: 152-184. Theory & typologizing on state-movement interactions.
Voss, K. (1996). The Collapse of a Social Movement: The Interplay of Mobilizing Structures, Framing, and Political Opportunities in the Knights of Labor. CP: 227-258. Argues the Knights lost not because they were weak but because organized employers were strong.
Other Dynamics
Whittier, Nancy “Political Generations, Micro-Cohorts, and the Transformation of Social Movements”. American Sociological Review; 1997, 62, 5, Oct, 760-778. Cohort replacement and movement change. PDF File .
Joseph Gusfield. “Social Movements and Social Change: Perspectives of Linearity and Fluidity.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 4: 317-339. 1981. Argues for looking for the cultural and indirect influences of movements.
Breakdown/Contexts
Snow, D. A., D. M. Cress, et al. (1998). “Disrupting the “Quotidian”: Reconceptualizing the Relationship between Breakdown and the Emergence of Collective Action.” Mobilization 3(1): 1-22. Provides theoretical refinement & empirical specification for the breakdown variant of strain theory. The relationship between social breakdown & movement emergence is reconceptualized in a fashion consistent with strands of cultural theory, phenomenology, & symbolic interactionism. This reconceptualization resonates with prospect theory & research on collective action in a diversity of settings. It is argued that the key to the breakdown-movement relationship resides in the actual or threatened disruption of the quotidian. Four conditions are especially likely to disrupt the quotidian & heighten prospects of collective action: accidents that throw a community’s routines into doubt &/or threaten its existence; actual or threatened intrusion into &/or violation of citizens’ sense of privacy, safety, & control; alteration in subsistence routines because of unfavorable ratios of resources to claimants or demand; & dramatic changes in structures of social control. The relationship between these conditions & movement emergence is elaborated by drawing on literature regarding the emergence of collective action in various contexts & on fieldwork on 15 homeless social movement organizations in eight US cities. Also explored are the implications for understanding more fully the generality of various conditions & processes commonly thought to apply to social movement emergence. 1 Table, 70 References. Adapted from the source document
Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1996). “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille.” Theory and Society 25: 841-891. The theoretical organization of historical events as sequences of occurrences resulting in durable transformations is discussed. Social structures are defined as mutually sustaining & overlapping sets of cultural schemas, distributions of resources, & modes of power that combine to reproduce consistent patterns of social action. Based on this definition, historical events are theorized as occurrences that inspire a set of related occurrences & lead to long-term transformations of social structures. Further, historical events must be recognized as important by contemporaries. Drawing on the case example of the French Revolution & the taking of the Bastille, a number of other characteristics are cited as fundamental to historical events: the rearticulation of social structures, cultural transformations, heightened emotion, acts of collective creativity, ritualization, production of future events, & articulation through authoritative sanction. It is concluded that the boundaries of an event are determined by arbitrary judgments. T. Sevier.