My overview of the literature

Key points to keep in mind about social movements

• there is considerable debate about how to define them. it’s not always a problem. where it does become a problem of course is when you are not sure you’ve got ahold of one or not. Verta Taylor’s 1996 claim that women’s post-partum self-help groups are a social movement is at the core of the controversy, and she waded in there quite intentionally.[1] obviously there is a difference between fashion/fad and movement for social change. particularly since we are talking about, er, shopping, this is relevant. and the definition we use may well determine whether we find that consumer activity can be a movement or not. so we need to decide if we want to go with a traditional definition, or perhaps to go with whatever verta comes up with in the end, which i don’t know having assiduously not read the book. but we have a lot of freedom with this; we can choose someone famous and use their definition arbitrarily but safely or we can search about for or meld our own definition. I propose, for reasons that will become clear in a bit, that we use Melucci [1989: 27-8]:
• “solidarity, actors’ mutual recognition as members of the same social unit.” (not just “aggregation” [Alberoni 1977] of “individualistic behaviour which is directed exclusively to its external environment.”)
• “conflict, an opposition between…actors competing for control over resources which they consider valuable.”
• “transgression of the limits of compatibility of the system of social relationships in which action is embedded. these limits of a system are defined by the range of variations which it can tolerate without modifying its own structure.”
• in Europe, social movements theory is hardly separate from social theory, whereas in the US there was a concerted attempt to establish a subdiscipline. this has several problematic results. in terms of European-US conceptual translation, basically the Europeans have adopted much of the US methodology for studying and analyzing social movements. but the US social movements area has failed to intelligently absorb new social theory. it has remained a rather small and rigid discourse. the question is whether to speak to it or to speak instead in the context of social theory in general, which is certainly a more lively (and intense) space.

it is worthy of note that the subdiscipline broke itself away from criminology, not social theory. what this means is that US social movements scholarship came out of the study of deviance, specifically the behavior of crowds (a concept polluted by exceptionalism, of course). after generously determining that collective behavior was, after all, purposive and related to social change, the frontiersmen went back in and rescued the riot from the realm of crime. as pam oliver argues, there are serious problems with those disciplinary definitions, particularly for those locked up for “everyday acts of resistance” to being poor and black and so forth.[2]

in contrast, European social movements theory, such as it is, came from social theory which was, unavoidably, written in acknowledgement of class struggle. current European work on social movements essentially comes from the Frankfurt school. so you begin to get a sense of the differences, how social movements in all of their messiness were taken seriously in Europe, but not in the US.

also, as you noted together in our meeting on 10.16.07, the “lifestyle” politics of the new social movements in Europe went “deeper” and was taken more seriously by the European left than the comparable part of the 1960s movements here, which were dismissed in embarrassment by the left (once its leaders sobered up) and any vestiges of which, taking purportedly political-cultural forms in the 1980s women’s, gay, and people of color movements were attacked as fractive, ill-directed, etc. “identity politics”. in europe “new social movements” is a theory, whereas here they were an event. (Melucci [1989], however, argues that it is incorrect to treat the new social movements as either a “new paradigm” or “new actors” [42-3])

• there is increasing debate about what to study. after years of dull hegemony, the resources-political opportunities-framing triumvirate has been formally challenged and inchoately replaced by US luminaries (James M. Jasper, Marshall Ganz, David S. Meyer) who are abruptly insisting now on the urgent study on what every activist in every social movements class i and anyone else has taught has demanded to learn: strategy. this, er, mudslide occurred at the Collective Behavior and Social Movements mini-conference at Hofstra in advance of the 2007 ASA meetings. i find this to be mixed news. of course, on one hand my activist grumblings and intellectual malaise with this entire field was vindicated. at the same time, with several papers in press using the “outmoded” analytic framework that i never liked anyway, am i now perpetuating the use of a bad approach, that i agree is bad? but what are we to cite? the luminaries’ thrilling presentations included perhaps 40 undifferentiated variables, and no analytic structure with which to go do it right. (At the same time, I want to acknowledge that in some ways this move indicates a growing attitude of respectful humility toward social movements.) 

the much-respected Dick Flacks (my dissertation chair) has always thought it was all hogwash. he urged me not to even bother writing a methods section nor a proposal and just “get out there and study what you want to study; write a proposal later.” his own work emphasizes political consciousness and biography, the most personal dimensions of “making history”. if i had to position him theoretically i would say he could be classified as both the most traditional of collective behaviorists (who probed why people would choose to engage in the bizarre behavior or social agitation) OR a cutting edge Foucaultian investigator of the shaping of resistive subjectivities. does that give you a sense of the muddle?

my timid solution to date has been to use the triumvirate + culture. (Since the movements of the 1960s, students of social movements, along with scholars studying other relevant phenomena (such as attention to issues of ethnicity and anti-racism) have slowly reached consensus around the idea that culture, or cultures of resistance, are all of the above, and yet more. Culture is a resource, certainly, but it is also a vehicle for movement energy and resistive communications before and between times of active mobilization. it hasn’t been formally integrated into the triumvirate, but it’s sort of unavoidable and unassailable.) One can, of course, as I did in the preliminary analysis of the food movement that you read in the “stuff revolution” paper, make lists of resources, frames, etc. i find this activity somewhat useful.

• the most obvious and interesting questions are considered virtually unanswerable, this includes your question: “can X movement be effective?” This question, normally stated as the problem with predicting movement “success”, is unanswerable at both a macro and a micro level. The macro level ambiguity is that social change is a long, slow, multiply-determined process. The micro-level ambiguity is that attempts to assess success have been indeterminate. Gamson’s 1975 book[3], The Strategy of Social Protest used amazing sampling methods and historical research as the basis of a statistical evaluation of various common-sense variables on outcomes. The group’s radicalism, scope of goals, single- or multi-issue focus, “thinking small”/setting less ambitious goals, group size – none are clearly correlated with success nor failure. While Gamson’s work is certainly dated (the data was from pre-1945), he introduced an “industry” of debate in which assumptions about movement necessities are debated with ever-increasing humility and smallness.
• in fact, we know very little. we know that neither absolute nor relative (nor sudden changes in relative) deprivation cause people to take collective action. We know that mobilization, when it occurs, is brief and rather precious. The usefulness of formal organizations has been strongly questioned.[4] One of few conclusive texts in this regard is John Foran’s impressive Boolean analysis of revolutions finds revolutions successful only where with all of the following conditions are met: Exclusionary personalistic leadership, world-systems opening, dependent development, recent increase in relative inequality, and strong cultures of resistance.[5] Impressive as this theory is, how different is it from saying “you need to have a lot going for you in order to win; which happens only in extraordinary circumstances of movement + environment…

The main concepts

What we will call the US approach to social movements, in an effort to make sense of collective behavior (crowds and panics) in the context of American exceptionalism, and predict its impacts, have focused on individual participants’ motivations and on movement mechanics. This theoretical framework accomplished the task of asserting collective behavior as rational, but tends to see the individual as the unit of analysis. Why do people participate in movements? The histories, motivations, and psychology of activists who dare to take part in social movements is understood as the matter of political consciousness. Much interesting and progressive work has been done on this issue outside of the subdiscipline, particularly in ethnic studies, but it has been poorly integrated into social movements theory.[6]

Collective behavior theory was mostly replaced in the late 1970s with “resource mobilization”. How do social movements mobilize resources effectively (or ineffectively) to win their struggles? Resources include bank accounts, meeting rooms, underemployeds’ unfilled hours, abandoned buildings, satellite time, paint, celebrities, organizations[7] with tax-free status or staff and all the usual “organizational dynamics” as well as some peculiar to movements, and so forth.[8]

Social movements operate in a political context pretentiously described as the political opportunity structure which may provide more or less physical, discursive, and social space, symbology, historical irony, compassion or information overload, shifting power relations between elites, or moments when the authorities are looking the other way.[9]

How do social movements communicate with the larger society? How do they conceptualize what they are about, simply and effectively framing a problem or project for public campaigns?[10] Framing has become increasingly central to movement work and analysis in a mass-mediated society.

McAdam, McCarthy, & Zald uphold the triumvirate (resources, opportunities, and framing) as largely adequate to the task of explaining social movements. They have attempted to absorb constestation and expanansion of the triumvirate into it. [1996][11] They, along with Tarrow & Tilly seem to have some kind of stranglehold over the subdiscipline. In Charlotte Ryan, et. al., ed., Rhyming Hope & History, Flacks reveals some of the institutional history of this group.[12]

Some American scholars largely ignored this discourse and used other tools entirely. Probably the most significant independent text is Piven & Cloward’s unrivaled 1977 analysis of all of the major poor people’s movements in the US. (Note, unit of analysis is movement, unlike Gamson’s 1975 groups.) P&C conclude that reforms are won only in response to disruption of elite operations, and only when it becomes in the interests of elites to concede rather than suffer continued disruption. Those concessions are minimal, their nature is often determined by the elites rather than by the movement, and they are withdrawn as soon as protest subsides. Moreover, organizers, obsessed with building permanent organizations and denying the reality that “whatever the people won was a response to their turbulence and not to their organized numbers”, often “attempt again to do what they cannot do, and forfeit the chance to do what they might do”. [xxiii] What they can do is help to “ecalate the momentum of the people’s protests.” [xxii] Instead, they participate in “channeling” into formal organizations, from which they try to establish useless “legitimacy”.

The European approach, forged in a context of ongoing class struggle, sees social movements “as carriers of political projects”.  Thus there is more concern with the content of social movements, their “themes and logics”.[13]

Social movements’ ideologies are their beliefs, including their analyses of social problems and futuristic visions. Ideologies enable participants to have an empowered understanding of the problems they are facing, to envision a different future, and to invest in a vector of struggle. Much more than a frame, ideologies’ “systems of meaning” are “learned” through “social structures and social networks.”^[14] So important in the European context, a movement’s ideology takes a position in a historic struggle and dialogue about society. Unlike in the US, a subset of European social movements scholarship is concerned with critique and praxis with movement ideologies.[15]

A European theory never taken up in the US was “political exchange” theory [Pizzorno 1978] which treats movements as actors “seeking inclusion into a political market.” This is useful in comparison with the relevant US literature of the time, in that it took movements’ politics seriously, rather than interpreting them as an ir/rational agglomeration of individual frustrations.

Buffeted by fascism and deep in studies of the subtle impacts of modernity, European political studies questioned practices often taken-for-granted in the US, like the role of charismatic leadership, professionalization, and bureaucracy. The Frankfurt’s School’s critical theory is used to analyze social movement projects.^[16]

Refracting the impacts of a changing world and increasingly acting on “a non-political terrain: the need for self-realization in everyday life”,[17] social movements may give rise to new social “interests”^[18] – identities^[19] and ideas (“themes and logics”)^[20]. I find quite exciting Eyerman & Jamison’s 1991 assertion that movement’s primary function is to introduce new ideas to their societies (perhaps because that is what my dissertation was about and I had no theory to work with, so I ended up writing about the alterglobalization movement as a political economic claim rather than as a social movement. I just found their book recently.) They use the sociology of knowledge and several historical examples to show this effect of social movements. The long time horizon of such work reminds us of the difficulty in assessing “success” of social movements. (Another note about this book which is significant in the US is that this vision of social movements includes a number of roles for scholars and intellectuals, other than vanguard, participant action research, and class suicide [Freire 1970]. Although it’s not his main point, Melucci begins his book by stating that “without the challenges posed by these movements, complex societies would be incapable of asking questions about meaning; they would entrap themselves in the apparently neutral logic of institutional procedures.” [1989: 11]

Although the movements in the US comparable to the European New Social Movements were not respected or taken seriously by the left at first, they did eventually impact theory of social movements. Eventually the work of activists and scholars of color and queer activists in the US, through the context of ethnic studies, gay studies, and women’s studies, produced an overwhelming mass of scholarship on the experience of oppression and the forging of resistant identities. A significant part of this work made reference to community struggles of various kinds, which were made possible in part by the articulation of new collective identities. Two of the outstanding documents in this regard are Carlos Muñoz history of “chicano” identity and Yen Le Espiritu’s explanation of the strategic development of pan-asian ethnicity.[21] Alongside and completely intertwined with this project was the emergence of “cultural studies”, sharply distinguished from anthropology and the sociology of culture in its theoretical foundations, celebration of native investigators, and insurrectionary intentions.[22] As culture worked its way into serious social theory, students of social movements soon found it unavoidable, and it is included in social movements analysis. although usually in a descriptive and prefatory manner, rather than being positioned centrally in an analysis. It cannot be reduced to resource, but since its dimensions and effects are hard to measure and evaluate, it seems hard for Americans to analyze.

Perhaps encouraged by the hard work of the Frankfurt school, Europeans seem undaunted by culture. Melucci’s 1989 Nomads of the Present argues that movements must be understood as “social constructions” in which people mount symbolic challenges the “codes” that govern their lives in “complex societies”. [12] When I first read this book, I did not yet accept post-ish premises about the new methods by which materiality is distributed and governed. On rereading it now, I recognize that Melucci is not just discussing symbolic issues of identity of concern to more privileged classes, but the terrain of meaning and discourse which legitimizes the material relations in which we are enmeshed and which generate forms of oppression that touch and constrain us systematically in the most personal ways, as Foucault revealed.

In Melucci’s analysis, the source of movements’ power is their “formation of a more or less stable ‘we’. They do this by “rendering common and laboriously negotiating and adjusting…the goals of their action; the means to be utilized, and the environment within which their action takes place.” [26] Habermas [1976] introduced the social dimensions of self-reflexivity [47] the basis of Melucci’s retheorization of the individual. For New Social Movements activists, action has meaning primarily for the individual: ‘if it doesn’t make sense to me, I am not participating; but what I do also benefits others’…marginal countercultures and small sects whose goal is the development of the expressive solidarity of the group, but there is also a deeper commitment to the recognition that personal needs are the path to changing the world and to seeking meaningful alternatives.” [49] The new social movements can no longer be evaluated as “effective action” nor by “outcomes”. Instead their conflicts and challenges “manifests itself by reversing the cultural codes…the very form of antagonistic collective action, with its organization and solidarity, transmits a message to the rest of society…question[ing] the logic of efficiency and effectiveness.” [55-6] Modern democracy no longer makes sense when both the state and civil society have been degraded by globalization; a new form of democracy must create spaces to softly nurture collective identity, must support the right to be different as well as equal, the right to “be” as well as “have”. [172-9]

Much European theory has followed on the heels of this work, including Beck’s “[self]referential modernity” [1992] & Giddens’ “life politics” [1991].^[23]

‘reflexive modernity’ describes a shift from a first order modernity defined by the imperatives of progress, the domestication of nature, increased societal rationalisation and robust wealth generation, to a second order modernity in which previously concealed, unanticipated effects of these primary processes have emerged as urgent concerns in their own right (Beck, 1992)…

For Giddens, reflexive modernity entails the extension of self awareness into the most intimate domains of identity and selfhood. Individuals resolve existential dilemmas imposed by reflexive modernisation through a project of self-actualisation, at the center of which is an increase in self awareness, or ‘reflexive self-monitoring,’ in all areas of life. [Binkley, forthcoming[24]]

Stolle & Michellette’s 2003 casual, uncommitted “subpolitics” enables participation of those who are less welcome or empowered in other settings: women, youth, etc., specifically allows them to demonstrate a sense of responsibility  [Stolle & Michelette 2003] ^[25] Another version of this work examines emotions^[26] as sites of resistance and politics.

A similar approach to social movements emerges from a slightly different trajectory. Judith Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble fused Foucault and feminism to reread gay culture in a way that has generated an unusually intense praxis called “queer theory”. Butler’s focus was the possibility of drag as a “subversive repetition” of gender, which undermines the oppressive construct. The basic idea is that in our very participation in our subjection, we can search for opportunities to move and turn it, becoming subjects. Accepting the Foucaultian point that what I would call colonial hybridity can no longer be separated, that capitalism and patriarchy have made the desires of women, so that there is no outside of oppression, it is in our bones and sinews, how do we use it, flex through it, create something out of it? Drag’s genders are unentangleable. But the undoubtedly agentic performances open all kinds of spaces for new ideas, new alliances, new experiences, and new bodies. When we first read Gender Trouble, my colleague Tony Samara exclaimed “great! ok, now how do we do that to capitalism?” Gibson-Graham’s 2006 A postcapitalist politics aims to apply queer theory to economic development, which is why I consider it to be a social movements book. (Of course I’m also interested in political economy, so it’s doubly exciting.) But before turning to G-G, I want to mention another, very compatible theory, which I think you should read as part of this inquiry. Donna Haraway’s 1991 “cyborg manifesto” argued that good theorists would do well not to deny (as the left has done) the pleasure of technology. Instead of repressing this pleasure, Haraway argues that we must become cyborgs and fuse our spiritual power with our pleasure to take control of technology, and through it, structures of domination.[27] Seemingly coincident with the flowering of queer theory and activism, the alterglobalization movement burst forth in pink tutus, on stilts, in marching bands, clowning. Ben Shepard’s forthcoming book traces the history of pleasure and play of queer activism and its wider influence.[28] Europe’s tactical frivolists and queer activists have shown how what John Holloway calls “rebellious asymmetry” can “stir contradictions”.[29] Such tactics have been one part of the impressive battle for hegemony [Laclau & Mouffe 1985[30]] played out in the streets of world cities, sunshining and delegitimizing the WTO, G8, IMF and World Bank, which have been forced into a very public retreat behind fences and militaries, and even to secluded rural areas, signifying incompatibility with cosmopolitan, democratic space.

Another constant political thread from Europe has been Habermas’ interest in “communicative action” as a site of resistance.[31] J.K. Gibson-Graham’s recent elaboration of the kinds of politics through which people relate to each other as they enact a new idea. “Politics” has not been a topic of social movement theory, which tends to be quite empty of content in general. (For example, social movements theory also does not discuss things like democratic practices, leaving Francesca Polletta’s fabulous book, Freedom is an Endless Meeting, unassimilated.) Although Gibson-Graham’s new book is not presented as a social movements book, they do say that they are elaborating queer politics in a new arena, economic development, and that is clearly a social movements project. Moreover, they are exploring and working out this whole business of subjectivity and its relationship  to creating a new “idea” [E&J], or what G-G call “web of meanings”.

“A politics of the subject”…something that takes into account the sensational and gravitational experience of embodiment, something that recognizes the motor and neural interface between self and world as the site of becoming of both. If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies…As Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus see it, history-making acts involve the emergence of new “disclosive spaces,” that is, “organized set(s) of practices for dealing with oneself, other people, and things that produce a relatively self-contained web of meanings” [Gibson-Graham 127]

I’m undecided about what makes for good social movement analysis these days. One possibility is to take the best theory you can find and go look at some movements you think might be important and host a praxis between them, with hope of mutual benefit. so…