Social Movements
Examples
• Suffrage Movement: mid-1800s to 1920
• Civil Rights Movement: 1950s-1960s
(alternatively, the “long civil rights
movement,” began in early 1920s)
• Gay Liberation Movement: 1964 in Canada for
creating a positive gay identity and
employment rights
• Movement for Global Justice: 1999: Battle in
Seattle
Definitions
• “collective challenges, based on common
purposes and social solidarities, in sustained
interaction with elites, opponents, and
authorities” (Straggenborg 2011: 5, emphasis
in original).
• Social movements are one form of
“contentious politics,” that is, participants are
typically “outsiders with regard to the
established power structure” (6, emphasis in
original).
Types of Social Movements
Harper & Leicht (2002)
Instrumental
Expressive
Reform:
Permutations of existing
social arrangements and
culture
1. REFORMATIVE: labor
movement, NAACP (org),
ERA (legislation), tax
reform (legislation),
antiabortion and abortion
rights (legislation and org)
3. ALTERNATIVE: Christian
evangelicalism, various
“enthusiasms” (Trekkies,
joggers)
Radical:
Significant departure from
existing social
arrangements
2. TRANSFORMATIVE:
Bolsheviks, religious
fundamentalism (e.g.,
Christian and Islamic)
4. REDEMPTIVE: cults and
other isolated
environments (e.g., Jim
Jones and the People’s
Temple)
Social Movement Organizations
• “’a complex, or formal, organization which
identifies its goals with the preferences of a
social movement or a countermovement
[opposed to a social movement] and attempts
to implement those goals’” (Straggenborg, p.
6, quoting McCarthy and Zald)
• United Mine Workers: www.umwa.org
• Greenpeace: www.greenpeace.org
Theories of Social Movements
1.
2.
3.
4.
Collective Behavior
Resource Mobilization
Political Process
New Social Movement
Collective Behavior
• Known as “strain” or “breakdown” theories.
• “They typically posit that collective behavior
comes about during a period of social
disruption, when grievances are deeply felt,
rather than being a standard part of the
political process” (Staggenborg: 12-13).
• Also known as the classical approach.
Resource Mobilization
• Social movements “seen as a continuation of
the political process, albeit by disorderly
means” (Staggenborg: 17).
• Social movements emerge when resources are
present such as:
--1. moral (e.g., legitimacy)
--2. cultural (e.g., tactical repertoires and
strategic know-how)
Resource Mobilization, cont’d
• --3. social-organizational (e.g., networks)
• --4. human (e.g., labor and experience of
activists
• --5. material (e.g., money and office space)
Political Process
• “social movements are most likely to emerge when
potential collective actors perceive that conditions are
favorable” (Staggenborg: 19).
• Focus on the existence of “favorable ‘structures of
political opportunity’” (Harper & Leicht: 144).
• May take several forms:
• “decline in the effectiveness of repression”
• “effective power of political elites is undermined by
internal fragmentation and disunity”
• “broadening of access to institutional participation in
the political process”
Collective Action Frames
Part of the approach of both RM and PO
• Refers to the narrative structure of the
movement.
• CAFs are ways of “capturing the importance of
meanings and ideas in stimulating protest”
(Staggenborg: 20, citing Benford and Snow).
• For example, We are a movement in support
of local food systems to decrease our reliance
on a fossil-fuel dependent industrial food
chain that destroys the environment.
New Social Movement
• Movements seen as “reactions to the
modernizing process in advanced industrial
capitalist societies” (Harper & Leicht: 147).
• Support for this type of movement activity “is
associated with ‘postmaterialist’ values, which
focus on quality of life and self-expression,
rather than ‘materialist’ values, which
emphasize economic and physical security”
(Staggenborg, p. 104 citing Inglehart 1995).
• Emphasizes “collective identity, which refers to
the sense of shared experiences and values
that connects individuals to movements and
gives participants a sense of ‘collective
agency’ or feeling that they can effect change
through collective action” (Staggenborg: 22).
Major Theories of Social Movements
Staggenborg (2011)
THEORETICAL
PERSPECTIVE
ORIGINS OF
MOVEMENTS
IMPORTANT
FEATURES AND
FOCUSES
Collective Behavior
Social disruptions
Psychology of
New meanings and
strains, grievances; protest; emergent
forms of
precipitating events organization and
organization
norms; protest
outside institutional
structures
Resource
Mobilization and
Political Process
Pre-existing
organization;
resources; political
opportunities and
threats; master
frames
Connections
between social
movements and
political process;
mobilizing
structures; framing
strategies;
institutional and
non-institutional
KEY OUTCOMES OF
MOVEMENTS
New resources,
organizations and
frames; cultural and
political changes
Environmental Movement
Off-shoot: Modern Food Movements
• Environmental: modern movement in North
America began largely as a result of the
publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in
1962.
• “Environmental activists who came out of the
protest movements of the 1960s adopted
many of the direct-action tactics used by the
civil rights, antiwar, and women’s movements”
(e.g., protest, boycotts) (Staggenborg 2011:
102)
Modern Food Movements
•
•
•
•
Organic
Back-to-land
Slow Food
Local (defined): www.attra.ncat.org