Suzanne Staggenborg. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Editor: George Ritzer, Volume 2, Sage Reference, 2005.
Social movement theory attempts to explain the origins, growth, decline, and outcomes of social movements. Current theory builds on several different approaches: European new social movement theory and North American collective behavior, resource mobilization, and political process theories. The field has expanded enormously and made important theoretical advances in the past 30 years. Current theory is at a stage of synthesizing ideas from different approaches, tackling neglected problems, defining scope conditions, and devising new research agendas. Although much social movement theory has been developed through studies of movements in Western countries, research is increasingly conducted in other parts of the world, and theories are beginning to incorporate this work as well as to deal with the globalization of social movements. Key areas of social movement theorizing include movement organization, political opportunities and processes, culture, and social psychology.
Organization in Social Movements
Resource mobilization theory brought organization to the forefront of social movement theorizing. Although earlier collective behavior theories recognized organization as a factor in the rise of social movements, they tended to explain movement mobilization by focusing on determinants such as discontent and the emergence of generalized beliefs. Early resource mobilization work identified the “social movement organization” (SMO) as a key entity within movements. More recently, movement analysts have examined a broad range of “mobilizing structures” in social movements, including movement organizations, social networks, preexisting organizations, and alternative institutions. Scholars have analyzed and debated the ways in which preexisting organizations affect movement emergence and maintenance, the effects of different types of SMO structures on strategy and outcomes, interorganizational cooperation and competition, and the changing organizational composition of movements.
Resource mobilization theorists have viewed organization as critical to both the emergence and maintenance of movements. A variety of preexisting organizational forms, such as social networks and established institutions, are involved in the process of mobilization. Preexisting organizations connect new recruits to movement participants and provide leaders and frames that can be adapted for collective action. New social movement theorists such as Alberto Melucci emphasize how movements develop out of the “submerged networks” of everyday life. Through interactions in small groups, individuals experiment with new cultural forms and develop collective identities, creating the cultural bases for collective action.
To explain movement survival and change, scholars have examined the evolution of various types of organizational structures, including social movement organizations and other organizational forms within social movement communities. After the decline of a period of visible movement activity, movements are sustained through various means. In some cases, movement organizations that attract an exclusive group of participants with a shared culture or that are staffed by professionals keep a movement alive during slow periods. In other cases, a loosely knit movement community, including cultural groups and alternative institutions, sustains a movement during periods of scant political action. One of the interesting avenues of current research is an examination of the ways in which movements move into institutional and cultural domains, creating social changes and spreading movement ideology to these arenas.
Studies of organizational structures are critical to our understanding of social movement strategies and outcomes. In a seminal study, William A. Gamson (1975) demonstrated how organizational characteristics, such as bureaucratization and centralization, affect a challenging group’s ability to remain mobilized and achieve movement goals. Further research has continued to specify the advantages and disadvantages of different types of organizational structures, including both the internal characteristics of movement organizations and networks among participants and groups within and across movements. In a study of efforts to unionize California farmworkers, Marshall Ganz (2000) shows how organizational structures that create connections to constituents, opportunities for meaningful and open deliberations among leaders, and leadership accountability are associated with the capacity for effective strategies. Research also suggests that linkages between national and local organizations and connections between a movement and other social movements result in more effective strategies than those employed by movements without such ties.
Studies of interorganizational dynamics have demonstrated the importance of looking at the effects of organizations and movements on one another. Sidney Tarrow’s (1998) analysis of “cycles of contention” points to the importance of early movements in demonstrating political opportunities and creating models of protest for movements that come later in a protest cycle. Research suggests that the size of social movement industries and the social movement sector, consisting of all movement industries, is important; the expansion of a population of organizations creates legitimacy for protest strategies and also generates competition among organizations. The ideological composition of movement industries is also significant; radical organizations may have both positive and negative “radical flank effects” on more moderate organizations within a movement. One effect of radical organizations, as Herbert Haines (1984) found in his analysis of radical flank effects in the civil rights movement, might be to increase funding for moderate organizations. Researchers have also analyzed the ways in which movements influence one another through shared activists and organizational, tactical, and ideological influences.
Movement organizations operate within multiorganizational fields consisting of other movement organizations as well as other types of organizations, such as established voluntary organizations. These organizations cooperate or compete with one another and influence one another’s goals and tactics. Analysts have looked at the ways in which internal characteristics of movement organizations as well as overlapping memberships and other ties among organizations facilitate cooperation or encourage competition. They have also examined the ways in which mesolevel groups and organizations coordinate the actions of individual actors. Although macrolevel environmental factors are also important, organizational analyses show that the ways in which organizations are structured, and the nature of connections among groups, affect cooperation and competition within and among movements.
The characteristics of a “social movement industry,” consisting of all SMOs working for the same general goals, change over time, affecting mobilization, strategies and tactics, and outcomes. The number and size of organizations in a movement expands or shrinks, and the forms of movement organizations change. For example, some movement organizations become more professionalized over time; some become influential within institutions; and some become decentralized and submerged. Research suggests that organizationally dense movements are likely to generate more protest. Movement industries that contain formalized and professionalized organizations are most likely to persist but are not necessarily more conservative in their strategies. Besides political movement organizations, social movement communities consist of a variety of organizational forms, including cultural and institutional entities. The impact of movement industries and communities on the culture and organization of other domains is a pressing concern for social movement theory.
Political Opportunities and Processes
While resource mobilization theory focuses our concern on organizational dynamics, political process theory (which might be considered an extension of the resource mobilization approach) brings to center stage the interactions of states and social movements. Political opportunities are elements of the political environment that affect perceptions as to the likelihood that collective action will succeed or fail. There has been much debate over the concept of political opportunity, and scholars have proposed various factors as components of the “political opportunity structure.” One key issue is how broad the concept should be and, particularly, whether cultural factors should be included. Some scholars argue for a narrowly political use of the concept, lest it lose all meaning, and some propose distinctions between cultural and political opportunities. Tarrow’s (1998) elaboration of the major elements of political opportunity, which is confined to key political variables, is widely employed. In his schema, political opportunity includes the extent of openness in the polity, shifts in political alignments, divisions among elites, the availability of influential allies, and repression or facilitation by the state (pp. 77-80).
A focus on political opportunities directs our attention to the structural obstacles and opportunities for collective action in various political systems. Critics have argued, however, that the approach neglects agency in its focus on political opportunities as structures. Movements are not only influenced by political opportunities; they also create opportunities for themselves and other social movements. Although some elements of political opportunity, such as characteristics of state institutions, are relatively stable, other dimensions, such as policy changes, are more subject to movement influence. Movement strategies are critical to political processes because collective action can produce new opportunities and because movement leaders must perceive and interpret opportunities. However, perceptions of opportunities are influenced by organizational structures, and both agency and structure are clearly important in understanding the creation and impact of political opportunities.
Another important issue for political process theory is the role of political opportunities in the emergence of social movements. Political opportunities are often viewed as encouragements to collective action; when opportunities expand generally, we are likely to see a “cycle of contention” such as the widespread protest of the 1960s. Movements that are “early risers” in a protest cycle open up opportunities for later movements by exposing the vulnerabilities of opponents (Tarrow 1998:77). Doug McAdam (1996:32-33) argues, however, that in reform movement cycles, there is not necessarily an increase in system vulnerability for “spin-off” movements. In fact, political opportunities may contract for movements that come later in a cycle as the state is preoccupied with the demands of the early movements. McAdam suggests that the diffusion of protest tactics, ideologies, and organizational forms may be more important to the emergence of spin-off movements than are political opportunities.
Theorists have also recognized that threats as well as opportunities mobilize movements by outraging constituents and increasing the costs of failing to act. Thus, favorable conditions for mobilization are different from opportunities for winning new advantages. Adherents flock to movements during times of threat, when they feel their contributions are most needed and when they feel emotionally upset or outraged, but they are more difficult to mobilize when there is less opposition to movement goals and conditions are more advantageous for making gains. The appearance of a countermovement to oppose movement goals is particularly effective in stimulating movement participation. Assessment of political opportunity and its effects is therefore complicated and involves analysis of the interactions of challengers and a variety of other actors within changing political contexts.
McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001) argue for a dynamic model of mobilization in which opportunities and threats are not objective structures but are subject to attribution by potential challengers. They contend that the political process model is overly static, failing to capture the interactions among multiple actors involved in attributing threats and opportunities, appropriating sites of mobilization, constructing meanings, and devising collective action. To develop a more dynamic approach, McAdam et al. call for identification of the mechanisms and processes underlying contentious politics. Although this approach has not yet achieved the authors’ goal of revolutionizing the field, political process researchers are clearly moving toward the development of more dynamic, interactive models that identify common patterns in the workings of contentious politics. Comparative analysis of movements in different types of political and cultural contexts is critical to this research agenda.
Culture and Social Movements
Criticisms of resource mobilization and political process theorists for focusing too heavily on political organization and interactions with the state have resulted in a “cultural turn” in social movement theory. This new emphasis on culture returns to some of the themes from collective behavior theory and also incorporates ideas from new social movement theory into social movement research. Three of the major topics addressed are the cultural conditions and opportunities that encourage movements, the internal cultures of movements, and the cultural outcomes of movements. A large literature on social movement framing and a growing body of work on collective identity are central to social movement theorizing about culture.
Collective action frames are ways of presenting issues that identify injustices, attribute blame, suggest solutions, and inspire collective action. Master frames perform similar functions on a larger scale, making them useful to a number of different movements and organizations. Preexisting organizations and institutions are a source of cultural meanings and leaders, who adapt meanings and create collective action frames based on their experiences in such institutions. By drawing on cultural resources and developing frames that can be used to mobilize participants and win new advantages, movements then create cultural opportunities for subsequent movements. The availability of master frames, developed within both preexisting organizations and movements, helps to account for the growth of protest cycles (Snow and Benford 1992).
Master frames and other elements of culture cannot, however, simply be selected or manipulated at will. Social movement culture necessarily draws on the larger culture, which can both facilitate and constrain movement frames and strategies. Existing political discourse sets boundaries on the range of issues considered appropriate for meaningful public debate and policy action. If current political discourse does not include understandings that can be expanded or adapted as collective action frames, it is difficult for movements to create effective frames. Large-scale changes may be needed before movements can spread new discourse. Although theorists often treat cultural and structural opportunities as distinct, there are important connections between cultural and structural changes.
As in the case of political opportunities, both agency and structure are important to our understanding of cultural dimensions of movements. Large-scale cultural changes open up ideological space for social movements, but participants must actively develop and disseminate new cultural understandings. Thomas Rochon (1998) suggests that cultural change often occurs through a two-step process: New ideas and values are first developed “within a relatively small, interacting, self-conscious critical community” (p. 57) and later spread to a wider public by a mass movement. An important question for social movement theorists is how such critical communities develop in different types of cultural and political contexts. In some times and places, lack of “free space” or civil society may constrain the emergence of social movements as much as lack of political opportunity.
Once social movements arise, they not only influence public discourse, but they create their own internal cultures, which influence movement growth, survival, and strategies. In addition to generating collective action frames, movements develop values, collective identities, rituals, and discourse. Research on the women’s movement has been particularly important in demonstrating the role of culture in sustaining movements and in shaping their organizational structures and strategies. During abeyance periods, feminism is found in the submerged networks of institutional and cultural venues as well as in surviving political organizations. Protest may take the form of discourse aimed at cultural and institutional as well as political targets. Shared political identity, nurtured through movement culture and the submerged networks of movement communities, is critical in keeping feminism alive.
Internal movement cultures foster the development of collective identities, which influence movement emergence, recruitment, strategies and tactics, and outcomes (see Polletta and Jasper 2001). As new social movement theorists have emphasized, large-scale socioeconomic changes such as urbanization make it possible to mobilize around new identities such as homosexuality. New identities are shaped within networks and institutions, and recruitment to movements builds on these structures and identities. Collective identities are incorporated into the frames that movement organizations devise to mobilize activists, and they influence the choice of strategies and tactics. Depending on their collective identities, activists prefer certain organizational forms and tactics. Identities may also be used strategically, with differences between activists and mainstream actors emphasized or de-emphasized depending on the political and cultural context. The deployment of movement identities through collective action frames and tactics potentially changes the broader culture by introducing new ideas, values, and lifestyle choices to the public.
In focusing on goal achievements such as the passage of legislation, early resource mobilization theory tended to neglect the cultural consequences of movements. Recently, however, theorists have attempted to assess outcomes such as changes in public discourse and the placing of issues on the public agenda as well as changes in everyday life, such as gender relations. For example, changes in consciousness brought about by the women’s movement influenced the decisions of women to run for public office in the early 1970s, and the rhetorical strategies of Quebec nationalists influenced aboriginal peoples in Canada to use similar discourse. In both cases, cultural changes had political implications, demonstrating the importance of analyzing the interactions between “culture” and “politics” rather than treating the two as separate domains.
The Social Psychology of Social Movements
Concepts such as framing and collective identity suggest the importance of social psychology in movement theory. And, indeed, a renewed interest in the social psychology of social movements accompanied the cultural turn in movement theory. Lack of attention to social psychology by early resource mobilization and political process theorists was in part a reaction to those collective behavior theories that depicted movement actors as irrational and their actions as strictly expressive rather than instrumental. In distancing themselves from such approaches, scholars emphasized continuities between collective protest and institutional action, rational choices over emotional reactions, and organization over spontaneity. They tended to neglect even those collective behavior theories that made no assumptions about the irrationality of participants in emphasizing grievances and emergent norms. By the 1980s, however, social movement theorists began to return to social psychology as theorists attempt to synthesize approaches and address neglected topics.
A number of theorists who turned to social psychology criticized rational choice theory as an inadequate conception of human motivation and group relations. By treating individuals as rational actors making separate choices, critics argue that rational choice theory fails to explain differences in participation, levels of involvement, and ongoing commitment. In response to such criticism, some theorists have worked to revise rational choice theory, moving “away from models of individual decisions toward models of group mobilization processes” (Snow and Oliver 1995:585). Others have turned to alternative social psychological concepts to address key questions regarding individual motivation and commitment.
Bert Klandermans (1997) examines the processes involved in recruiting individuals to social movements and maintaining or losing their commitment, including the generation of collective action frames, the transformation of discontent into action, and the erosion of support. In doing so, he attempts to combine resource mobilization and political process approaches with social psychological concepts, connecting different levels of analysis. Collective action framing involves both the societal level construction of pools of beliefs through public discourse, persuasive communication during mobilization campaigns, and consciousness-raising during episodes of collective action and the individual level appropriation of frames through cognitive information processing and interpersonal interactions. The mobilization of participation involves the interaction of structural and social psychological factors. Movements reach out to potential supporters through networks, demonstrations of effectiveness, and persuasive communications, while individuals make calculations about costs and benefits and the likelihood of movement success. Disengagement results from insufficient gratification and a decline of commitment on the part of individuals, which is related to both macrolevel factors, such as shifts in public opinion, and the mesolevel structures that keep individuals connected to movements.
Collective identity, consisting of “an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution,” (Polletta and Jasper 2001:285) is an important concept for understanding the participation, ongoing commitments, and departures of individuals from social movements. Individuals who share a preexisting sense of common identity with a group are likely to participate in collective action, although collective identity does not necessarily precede movement involvement; identities are also created and reinforced after recruitment through interactions within movements. Taylor and Whitter (1992) argue that collective identity is constructed within movement communities in three ways: (1) through the erection of boundaries differentiating challenging group members from dominant groups; (2) through the development of consciousness as a group with common interest opposed to the dominant order; and (3) through negotiation of new ways of thinking and acting, both privately and publicly.
Individuals who continue to participate in the process of constructing collective identity are likely to remain committed to a movement, whereas those who no longer feel identified with the group are likely to withdraw. Collective identities change with shifts in movements and organizations, such as the influx of new activists (Klandermans 1997:136). Activists entering movement organizations at different times, under different political conditions, are likely to have different collective identities, and long-lived organizations typically need to negotiate conflicts among cohorts. Although some theorists have discussed collective identity primarily in terms of cognitive beliefs and interests, others have noted “the emotional satisfactions of collective identity” (Polletta and Jasper 2001:290). Many individuals participate in collective action because they find the experience emotionally rewarding and because participation allows them to act on personal values.
Until recently, the emotional aspects of collective action were neglected as social movement theorists focused on the instrumental, politically targeted actions of collective actors and shied away from any implication that social movement participants are irrational. However, new scholarship argues that rationality and emotion are not dichotomous, and that we need to recognize the role of emotion in individual decisions to participate in collective action, framing processes, collective identity, and protest tactics. Empirical research is beginning to demonstrate how emotions are central to organizational, political, and cultural processes. For example, Deborah Gould (2002) analyzes the ways in which emotions were critical to the development of ACT UP and militant AIDS activism. She shows how the negative political opportunity structure of the 1980s helped to change gay and lesbian ambivalence into anger, and how ACT UP’s “emotion work” affected its interpretation of the AIDS crisis and fueled militant direct action.
Challenges for Social Movement Theory
Social movement theory has advanced greatly in the past 30 years, yet fundamental theoretical challenges remain. One of the key unresolved issues has to do with the very nature of the phenomena studied by social movement theorists. McAdam et al. (2001) argue that social movements should be treated as one form of “contentious politics” along with revolutions, nationalism, and strike waves. These forms of “collective political struggle” are all episodic and public interactions among claimants that involve governments as either claimants, targets, or mediators. The “public” part of this definition of contentious politics excludes “claim making that occurs entirely within well-bounded organizations, including churches and firms” (p. 5). At the same time, McAdam et al. challenge the distinction between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized politics, arguing that the parallels and interactions between conventional and nonconventional contentious politics need to be analyzed.
Other scholars have also proposed broadening the scope of the social movement field, offering different takes on the problem. Mayer N. Zald (2000) suggests that we think of movements as including all actions shaped by ideological concerns or as “ideologically structured action.” This approach would connect collective action to culture and allow theorists to explore, at the microlevel, how individuals develop and maintain commitments and, at the meso- and macrolevels, how movements penetrate institutions, political parties, and government. Although Zald focuses on extending movement analysis into political parties and government agencies, his approach is in line with research on movement activity within institutions and with efforts to locate movements within loosely shaped movement communities and the structures of everyday life. Zald shares McAdam et al.’s (2001) view of the connections between social movements and institutionalized actions, but in contrast to them, he includes nonpublic activity within bounded organizations as ideologically structured action.
David A. Snow (2002) argues that the concept of “contentious politics” advocated by McAdam et al. (2001) is too restrictive in that it excludes social movement activity that is not connected in some way to the state, such as religious movements and self-help movements. He warns that the emerging dominance of the contentious politics approach hinders consideration of alternative conceptualizations such as Zald’s ideologically structured action approach. Snow proposes that we think of social movements as collective challenges to systems or structures of authority, including governmental units, but also various types of nongovernmental structures such as corporations, universities, and religious denominations. This approach directs students of social movements to examine cultural and institutional as well as political challenges, and to compare processes of change in different arenas.
The challenge of broadening the scope of social movement theory is related to central theoretical problems facing social movement scholars, including the need to connect levels of analysis and organizational, political, cultural, and social psychological processes. To adequately explain movement mobilization, strategies and tactics, and outcomes, social movement theory needs to examine the ways in which microlevel transformations and reactions are connected to mesolevel organization and macrolevel cultural and political structures. How are perceptions of political opportunities affected by organizational structures and cultural understandings? How do social psychological reactions vary across political and cultural contexts? How does movement organization affect culture and organization in other domains? These and other key questions require detailed empirical examinations of movement processes across levels of analysis.
Most important, social movement theory needs to examine these processes dynamically, showing how interactions among collective actors, their targets, and other actors change over time along with organizational, political, cultural, and social psychological developments. This poses both methodological and theoretical challenges. Case studies continue to be an important means for examining movement growth, development, and change, but other methods are also required, including comparative studies of movements in different countries. McAdam et al. (2001) argue that episodes of contentious politics in a wide variety of settings need to be compared so that underlying mechanisms and processes of change, rather than general laws, can be identified. This approach holds great promise, but critics note that the precise nature of mechanisms and processes remains unclear. Thus, social movement theorists continue to search for ways to examine the dynamic, interactive workings of social movements in different historical, political, and cultural settings.