Social Movement Theory-The Basics

Social Movement Theory: The Basics

Life Cycle of a Social Movement

• Preliminary Stage: people become aware of issue, leaders emerge.

• Coalescence Stage: people join together and mobilize to raise public awareness and seek change.

• Institutional Stage: movement no long requires grassroots volunteerism--professionalization, staff, resources and access.

• Decline Stage: movement brings about change it sought, or people are no longer concerned about issue.

What We'll Cover This Week

Three Overarching Perspectives on Social Movements

For Next Week...

Levels of Social Movements

• Social movements operate at the level in which they can impact the problem/issue that drove their formation.
• LOCAL
• REGIONAL
• NATIONAL
• GLOBAL

• Movements may adapt and change over time. What begins as a localized protest may grow into national, even global.

1. What concepts and theories can we utilize to make sense of social movements and political activism?

2. What theories exist to explain how movements form, the work they do, and whether they succeed?

3. What is the life cycle of a movement?

• Functionalist: asks what function social movements serve in relation to a larger whole--social movements emerge out of dysfunction in the social system.

• Critical: sees social movements emerging out conflict, and the creation and reproduction of inequalities (not simply economic, but often the case).

• Symbolic interactionist: interested in the symbolic level of movements.
• how people perceive their actions within movement, how movements perceive themselves.
• norms, patterns of behavior that govern actions of movement.

Read: Gladwell 2010 (Monday), Beauchamp 2015, and Williams 2015 (Wednesday) . In Week 6 Folder on Coursesites.

Think about:

• How does internet and social media technology alter the playing field for social movements and activists globally?

• How does one's culture impact the type of protest that one engages in, or how frequent that protest will be?

• What are the opportunities/dangers of media exposure for a movement?

Social Movement Theory-Resource Mobilization Theory

• Draws heavily from economics.
• social movement organizations (SMOs) compete for finite resources.
• time.
• energy.
• money.

• SMOs working on the same issue comprise a social movement "industry," all SMOs make up the social movement "sector."

• SMOs must innovate and be dynamic to succeed, degree of competition within one's "industry" impacts likelihood of success.

What does social movement theory do?

Types of Social Movements

Social Movement Theory-Political Opportunity Structure

• Similar to RMT but is more concerned about the political arenas in which social movements operate.

• Crucial political variables:
• open/democratic institutions or closed/autocratic?
• division within political elites or unified front?
• institutional division of powers or centralization?
• government reluctant or enthusiastic to use force?
• media that will present cause fairly/sympathetically or an organ of state power?

• With these variables, the former rather than the latter creates space for activists and movement adherents to create change.

Applying Social Movement Theory-Occupy Wall Street

• Reform--seek to change something specific in the current social and political structure.

• Revolutionary--seek to completely change nearly every aspect of society and political system.

• Redemptive--"meaning seeking"...participants are drawn to the movement seeking some individual self-transformation or spiritual change.

• Alternative--focused on small changes to individual behavior and belief.

• Reactionary--seek to undo social change and return to some prior state.

Social Movement Theory-Framing

• Frame: way of organizing experience conceptually.

• Movements work to align framing of events with ideas, interests, values, and goals of potential members at all stages of action.
• diagnostic framing: What is the problem?
• prognostic framing: What needs to be done?
• motivational framing: What concrete steps/actions do we take?

• Frame alignment: the encapsulation of different movements, groups, individuals under a single frame.
• Ex. "social justice"--labor, human rights, women's rights, environmental movement, student groups, etc.

• Gives us a sense of who and what information matters as we try to understand collective attempts at change.

• Gives us language to engage in analysis across cases--enables us to compare features of movements and activism comparatively.

• Offers us hypotheses and assertions about the nature of collective behavior which we can observe and test.

Social Movement Theory-New Social Movement Theory

• Emerges in 1960s and 1970s as we grapple with "post-materialist" societies in the West.

• Prior to this period, many movements focused on material concerns (labor, economic disparity, etc.).

• Now we see movements focused on autonomy, quality of life, identity, self-realization.
• women's movement, peace movement, animal rights.

• Implications...
• movements are more fluid, flexible, and ideologically diverse.
• movements push challenging issues into public sphere.
• family roles, sexual identity, our treatment of animals, how we produce our food, etc.

Rob Glover

USAC-Santiago, Chile

Globalization & Political Change

February 6-8, 2017