Social movement theory
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.
Classical approaches
The classical approaches emerged at the turn of the century. These approaches have in common that they rely on the same causal mechanism. The sources of social movements are structural strains. These are structural weaknesses in society that put individuals under a certain subjective psychological pressure, such as unemployment, rapid industrialization or urbanization. When the psychological disturbance reaches a certain threshold, this tension will produce a disposition to participate in unconventional means of political participation, such as protesting. Additionally, these approaches have in common that they view participation in contentious politics as unconventional and irrational, because the protests are the result of an emotional and frustrated reaction to grievances rather than a rational attempt to improve their situation. These psychologically-based theories have largely been rejected by present-day sociologists and political scientists, although many still make a case for the importance of emotions. See the work of Gustav LeBon, Herbert Blumer, William Kornhauser, and Neil Smelser.Collective behavior theory
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. An important writer in this area of research was Gustave LeBon. In his book , he studied the collective behavior of crowds. What he concluded was that once an individual submerges in a crowd, his behavior becomes primitive and irrational and he is therefore capable of spontaneous violence. This transformation happens under certain conditions. Once individuals submerge themselves in a crowd, they gain a sense of anonymity and this causes them to believe that they cannot be held accountable for their behavior within the crowd. This is combined with a sense of invisibility by being part of a crowd. Under these conditions, critical reasoning is impossible and an unconscious personality emerges: a personality which is dominated by destructive instincts and primitive beliefs. This theory has been picked up and further developed by other theorists like Herbert Blumer and Neil Smelser.Mass society theory
Mass society theory emerged in the wake of the fascist and communist movements in the 1930s and 1940s and can be seen as an attempt to explain the rise of extremism abroad. The central claim of mass society theory is that socially isolated people are more vulnerable to extremismAn important underpinning of this theory is Émile Durkheim's analysis of modern society and the rise of individualism. Durkheim stated that the emergence of the industrial society caused two problems:
- Anomie: There were insufficient ways to regulate behavior due to the increasing size and complexity of the modern society.
- Egoism: The excessive individuation of people due to the weakening of local communities.
Arthur Kornhauser applied this theory to social movements in his book The Politics of Mass Society. He stated that in a mass society, anomie and egoism cause small local groups and networks to decline. What is left after this are powerful elites, massive bureaucracies, and isolated individuals? In this society, intermediate buffers between the elite and the non-elite erode and normal channels for non-elites to influence elites become ineffective. This makes non-elites feel more alienated, and therefore more susceptible to extremism.
Relative deprivation
People are driven into movements out of a sense of deprivation or inequality, particularly in relation to others or 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 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. See the work of James Davies, Ted Gurr, and Denton Morrison.Contemporary approaches
During the 1960s there was a growth in the amount of social movement activity in both Europe and the United States. With this increase also came a change in the public perception around social movements. Protests were now seen as making politics better and essential for a healthy democracy. The classical approaches were not able to explain this increase in social movements. Because the core principle of these approaches was that protests were held by people who were suffering from structural weaknesses in society, it could not explain that the growth in social movement was preceded by a growth in welfare rather than a decline in welfare. Therefore, there was a need for new theoretical approaches.Because of the fact that deprivation was not a viable explanation anymore, researchers needed to search for another explanation. The explanations that were developed were different in the United States than in Europe. The more American-centered structural approaches examined how characteristics of the social and political context enable or hinder protests. The more European-centered social-constructivist approaches rejected the notion that class-struggle is central to social movements, and emphasized other indicators of a collective identity, like gender, ethnicity or sexuality.
Structural approaches
Political opportunity/political process
Certain political contexts should be conducive for potential social movement activity. These climates may 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 ; 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
- Access to elite allies
- Declining capacity and propensity of the state to repress dissent
Resource mobilization
- Material ;
- Moral ;
- Social-Organizational ;
- Human ;
- Cultural
Social movement impact theory
Social-constructivist approaches
New social movements
This European-influenced group of theories argue that movements today are categorically different from the ones in the past. Instead of labor movements engaged in class conflict, present-day movements are engaged in social and political conflict. The motivations for movement participation 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.1990s social-movement studies
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 provide participants with 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: Strategic Dilemmas in Real Life, 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.