Strategy
James M. Jasper
Derived from the ancient Greek word for a military commander, “strategy” has two common
meanings. In business it is a broad plan, and in military terms, similarly, it is what is done before the
battle begins (in contrast to the tactics that lower officers use to implement the commander’s strategy
during the battle). In contrast, as an adjective, strategic and strategic action refer to interactions among
players who have both ends and means, and who each realize that the others are also acting
strategically to get what they want. In this latter sense, strategy covers almost everything that social
movements do.
The most obvious strategic engagements are between movements and their opponents, but
there is also strategic interaction between movements and their potential allies or recruits, the media,
and various government agencies. As is obvious from this list, strategic interaction is not always conflict.
It is still strategic when protestors endeavor to persuade supporters to send them funds, or judges that
their cause is just. In all these cases, they are trying to get something from others. Players’ ends and
means, as well as the arenas in which they interact, are the core of strategic action.
Goals
The goals of social movements vary enormously. Some want to change society, others to block
changes. Some want rights or material benefits for the groups they represent (such as the labor
movement); others seek protections or advantages for others (the animal rights movement). Some
groups are focused on local issues (NIMBYs), others on global ones (Attac). In addition, every social
movement has multiple goals.
Many theories assume one kind of goal. Political opportunity theories were designed to explain
movements aimed at political inclusion and power for members of a group. Rational-choice models
often assume participants want material rewards. Many approaches define social movements as efforts
by oppressed or excluded groups, or as efforts to influence authorities’ decisions. In older work,
movements were often classified as either expressive or instrumental in their goals. (In fact, most
movements have both expressive and instrumental goals, with one focused on audiences internal to the
movement and the latter on external audiences.) Little attention has been paid to the variety of goals,
and the potential conflict among different goals. These are interesting dynamics, of which I shall
mention several.
First, individuals have goals that imperfectly coincide with the stated goals of a group, so that
they often try to pursue their personal ends at the same time as (or even instead of) group ends. The
more compatible these are, the more work a movement gets out of its participants. But powerful
leaders have considerable ability to use movements to attain their own goals, rather than the other way
around. They can use the fame they derive from leading a movement to advance their own careers, for
example, as happened in the New Left (Gitlin, 1980).
There is also a Survival or Success Dilemma: once a group is formed, its members (and especially
its paid employees) have an interest in its survival, which may sometimes interfere with the goals it was
formed to pursue in the first place (Piven and Cloward, 1977). This is connected to the Today or
Tomorrow Dilemma: short-run goals may interfere with long-run goals. For instance, a movement
victory may inspire countermobilization by its opponents, who may turn out to be more effective in the
long run (Jasper and Poulsen, 1993).
Another pair of strategic dilemmas suggests how movements change over time through
interaction with other players. There is a Dilemma of Shifting Goals (Jasper, 2006:75). Activists may wish
to abandon some goals as unrealistic, or they may add goals that they come to feel are important and
attainable. In other words, it is strategically realistic to adapt goals to available means. But some
supporters may feel betrayed; opponents can accuse you of being duplicitous. This links to the
Articulation Dilemma: the more you specify what your goals are, the more you attract those who share
them, but the more accountable you will be for failing to reach them. Articulation makes it more costly
to shift goals.
Much research remains to be done on the sources of goals and the potential conflicts among
them. Individuals and factions within an organization battle over what the organization’s officially stated
goals will be, through processes that are still poorly documented.
Means
Strategic players have three basic families of means at their disposal: they can use physical
coercion or threat, they can persuade others, or they can pay others to do what they want them to
(Jasper, 2006:chap. 4). Although they may use all three, social movements rely heavily on persuasion to
accomplish their goals. To the extent they rely more on coercion, they become a rebel army or a band of
criminals. To the extent they rely more on paid staff, they shade into the status of interest groups.
The threat of coercion is a way to disrupt economic and political systems, a strategy that Piven
and Cloward (1977) believe is the only path open to those without monetary and other capacities. In a
parallel inqury, Gamson (1975) found that groups using violence were more likely to attain their goals
(which he reduced to benefits for represented groups and recognition for the protest organizations).
These works were an important breakthrough in our understanding of the effects of different strategies,
shattering a complacent pluralist intuition that disruptive protest was somehow bad. Instead we see the
Naughty or Nice Dilemma (Jasper, 2006:106): aggressive tactics can attain some ends, safe choices
obtain others. Aggression runs the risk of arousing repression by authorities and the erosion of public
support, but if it can seize gains that are hard to reverse later, it is often worth it.
Scholars have given greater attention to the means that activists use to persuade rather than
coerce others. Foremost have been the processes by which mobilizers must find the right frames to
appeal to participants and potential participants (Snow et al., 1986), diagnosing a problem and
motivating work toward a solution. Moral shocks (Jasper, 1997), dizzying experiences that challenge a
person’s assumptions about the world, are a similar concept meant to get at the processes by which
recruits are first attracted to a movement. Over time, it has become apparent that framing and moral
shocks are most effective in the context of social networks, motivating those already involved and
sometimes pushing them toward more radical tactics (Ryan and Gamson, 2006). For instance Gould
(2009) demonstrates that lesbian and gay activists moved toward more disruptive tactics in the late
1980s because of the moral shock of the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Bowers v. Hardwick, upholding
anti-sodomy statutes.
In the affluent nations since the late 20th century, protest groups have often paid staff to
conduct many basic activities instead of relying on volunteers, a process famously analyzed by McCarthy
and Zald (1973, 1977). Groups that choose this route come to depend on their financial backers, and
frequently turn into interest groups. In addition, professional activists emerge who can move from one
cause to another, bringing their specialized skills with them – for a price. With paid staff comes
bureaucracy, which often underminedssome of the basic moral goals of the protest groups.
Means and ends conflict in this and other ways. Foremost, in the Dirty Hands Dilemma, there
are certain goals that can only be obtained through means that are morally suspect (Jasper, 2006:70).
For some participants, money and bureaucracy fall in this category, making it hard for them to sustain
organizations. A few movements, notably nonviolent movements, define themselves by the tactics they
reject on moral grounds, although often recognizing that more aggressive tactics might help them get
what they want sooner. A good example is the American animal rights movement, which in its early
years obtained powerful propaganda about the abuse of animals through spies and burglars.
Tactics originate from either invention or borrowing from other movements. Tactical innovation
seems to occur through interaction with opponents, in a kind of strategic game (Ganz, 2009). Diffusion
of tactics is better studied (Soule, 2004). The transmission mechanisms include direct influence through
social networks (Morris, 1981) and indirect inspiration through reportage by the media (Myers, 2000).
Far from simple contagion, diffusion involves varying degrees of active consideration on the part of
either those transmitting or those adopting (and adapting) innovations (Snow and Benford, 1999).
Because strategic innovation always carries risks (Jasper, 2010), protestors try to solve the Innovation
Dilemma by observing what the costs, benefits, and risks have been for others before they do something
new themselves.
Decisions and Dilemmas
Little attention has been given to how activists make decisions about what to do, leaving the
impression that they simply follow the scripts and routines they have learned in or from other
movements, or what Tilly (e.g. 2006) called a repertoire of contention. But it is precisely the ability to
choose among options and to invent new actions and arguments that sometimes allows “David” to
defeat “Goliath” (Ganz, 2009). Good choices are more likely, according to Ganz (2009), in groups with
regular, open, and authoritative deliberation; diverse networks of supporters; knowledge about diverse
tactics to choose among; resources drawn from supporters rather than outsiders; accountability to
supporters; and leaders drawn from inside and outside local groups with personal commitments to the
cause. What is crucial is feedback about what is working, and flexible reactions to that feedback: in a
word, the ability to learn (Krinsky and Barker, 2009).
The most basic strategic choices typically take the form of dilemmas: each option comes with a
long list of potential benefits and risks, some known and some not, as well as various costs. There are
dozens of such dilemmas, such as Naughty or Nice and Dirty Hands. Other common ones include the
Extension Dilemma over whether to build a broad team with more resources or a small and better
focused team; the Organizational Dilemma over whether to devote time to creating a formal
organization supported by a stable flow of resources or to attract supporters to singular, especially
disruptive, events; and the Janus Dilemma of balancing attention to one’s own members or to outsiders
(Jasper, 2004, 2006).
Such basic questions cannot be debated at every group meeting. As Tilly suggests, most are
ignored in favor of familiar routines. But even when not faced as explicit dilemmas, they are still there as
underlying tradeoffs. Much of the strategic creativity of organizers arises when they take on one of
these tradeoffs, realizing that there are other ways to do things. Leaders with experience in other
contexts are especially good at seeing these openings.
Players and Leaders
Attention to decisions and dilemmas highlights who exactly it is who is making the decisions.
Scholars often write loosely about “social movements” as making decisions or undertaking actions, but
none think of movements as coherent entities. They are composed of formal organizations and
individuals who feel as though they share enough goals to call themselves a social movement, a term of
collective identity that suggests purpose and power. The label is largely a hortatory rhetorical tool.
In even the most democratic of groups, some individuals have more influence than others. In
most there is some formal division of labor. As part of their role, formal leaders set agendas, guide
discussions, and make a number of smaller decisions on their own. Alliances of protest groups negotiate
their stated goals and their means through formal mechanisms, although here too the decisions often
come down to a small group of individuals. Factions, too, struggle to set agendas and formulate public
statements. Organizations and movements are as much an arena for internal contention as a player in
external contention. Careful catalogues of all relevant players in a conflict, internal and external, can
help avoid much confusion.
Once we recognize the human beings who make decisions, we can see a range of additional
mechanisms at work. For instance, people attach moral value to their means as well as their goals. They
also know how to do some things and not others. Together these give people a “taste in tactics” (Jasper,
1997:chap. 10) that is partly independent of the perceived efficacy of the tactics; tactics are rarely
neutral means about which protestors do not care. Thus protestors face dilemmas having to do with
clashes between means and ends.
A universal leadership challenge derives from the Janus Dilemma: some leaders are more
effective at reaching external audiences, others at appealing to or managing a group’s own membership.
Given the different expectations and goals of insiders and outsiders, it makes sense that few leaders are
effective at both, perhaps one reason that leadership teams made up of insiders and outsiders often are
more successful (Marx and Useem, 1971; Ganz, 2009). Similarly, individuals who try to act as brokers
between groups frequently find they are not fully trusted by either.
We come now to two topics that scholars have addressed extensively, to see how they are
related to strategies.
Capacities
A group selects means of action to take advantage of the capacities it has or can mobilize. This
simple insight inspired the resource-mobilization theory of social movements (McCarthy and Zald,
1977), which focused on how those without extensive financial resources could appeal to those with
them, but also how paid staff could attract time resources from volunteers. In the first flush of this
paradigm, any advantage came to be called a resource, including cultural meanings and psychological
states. My own preference is to restrict the term to money and the technologies and services it can buy.
There are other useful capacities for a movement to have. Leaders with experience, intelligence,
and know-how tend to make better decisions (Ganz, 2009). This kind of intelligence can often substitute
for resources. Organizations, too, can develop mailing and phone lists, offices, and social networks,
partly independent of the individuals who work in them. One of the most important capacities is
reputation, of both individuals and groups. Considerable work is devoted to reputation-building, such as
the “WUNC displays” that Tilly (2004) described: protests designed to demonstrate the moral worth,
unity, numbers, and commitment of participants. Even here there are dilemmas: portray yourself as a
victim of evil, and you gain sympathy from outsiders but undercut your own team’s confidence in their
strength to act; portray yourself as heroic and your team feels strong, but others may not think you
need their help.
Organizers also try to arouse the right emotions in themselves and their rank-and-file members.
Foremost, perhaps, is confidence: faith in your own abilities and ultimate success. This gives participants
the energy to undertake any number of activities, just as a lack of confidence deflates energy.
Interaction rituals, in which members are brought face to face in emotional arousal to ratify their
group’s basic values, stirs emotional energy that carries over into other activities (Collins, 2004). The
emotions of strategic engagement are still poorly understood, partly because they have a way of
blending ends and means together (accomplishing one goal generates emotional energy that helps
attain the next one). But scholars increasingly recognize that emotions are an essential part of action,
not an irrational undermining of it (Jasper, 1998; Goodwin et al., 2001; Gould, 2009).
Arenas
Strategic action is aimed at capturing the rewards available in specific arenas, which we can
envision as combinations of rules, expectations, material support, and rewards. Players adapt their
actions to those arenas, looking for opportunities to get what they want. In some cases, new arenas
even inspire the creation of new players who are especially suited to the new opportunities. This is the
great insight of Charles Tilly (1964, 1995) and the political-process theory he developed. Protestors
develop repertoires of action that seem appropriate to each arena (and indeed a distinct repertoire to
deal with each player in that arena). This perspective helps us understand changes in tactics over long
periods of history.
Movements that manage to match their strategies to their institutional arenas are more likely to
obtain their goals. For movements oriented toward public policy, as Amenta (2006) found in his study of
the Townsend Movement, assertive strategies work only when elected politicians are uninterested or
opposed and when bureaucrats are weak or opposed to the movement; otherwise, electoral or
legislative arenas are more promising. Working within the system, however, always runs the risk of
cooptation, in which the survival of the protest group or benefits for its leaders begin to crowd out its
original goals. Working within one institutional arena takes attention from others, and many arenas turn
out to be “false arenas” in that they become powerless when newcomers join them (Jasper, 2006:169).
In the end, the question of arenas returns to the issue of the players with whom movement
groups interact. Just as we need to understand the strategic considerations of protestors, we need to
understand the goals, means, dilemmas, and so on of these other actors. Considerable work has been
done on the media and on the police, for instance. The idea of “multi-organizational fields” was coined
to focus on these many interactions (Curtis and Zurcher, 1973), although the term “field” often conflates
the players and the arenas in which they operate. Future research might usefully concentrate on the
interactions among these various players to balance our inherited focus on the arenas in which they
interact.
References/Further Readings
Amenta, Edwin. 2006. When Movements Matter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Collins, Randall. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Curtis, Russell L., and Louis A. Zurcher. 1973. “Stable Resources of Protest Movements: The MultiOrganizational Field.” Social Forces 52:53-61.
Gamson, William A. 1975. The Strategy of Social Protest. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press.
Ganz, Marshall. 2009. Why David Sometimes Wins. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gitlin, Todd. 1980. The Whole World Is Watching. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper, and Frnacesca Polletta, eds. 2001. Passionate Politics. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Gould, Deborah B. 2009. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Jasper, James M. 1997. The Art of Moral Protest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
------. 1998. “The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and around Social
Movements.” Sociological Forum 13:397-424.
------. 2004. “A Strategic Approach to Collective Action: Looking for Agency in Social Movement Choices.”
Mobilization 9:1-16.
------. 2006. Getting Your Way: Strategic Dilemmas in the Real World. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
------. 2010. “The Innovation Dilemma.” In David H. Cropley et al., eds., The Dark Side of Creativity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Jasper, James M. and Jane Poulsen. 1993. “Fighting Back: Vulnerabilities, Blunders, and
Countermobilization by the Targets in Three Animal Rights Campaigns.” Sociological Forum 8:639-657.
Krinsky, John, and Colin Barker. 2009. “Movement Strategizing as Developmental Learning.” In Hank
Johnston, ed., Culture, Social Movements, and Protest (Farnham: Ashgate).
Marx, Gary T., and Michael Useem. 1971. “Majority Involvement in Minority Movements.” Journal of
Social Issues 27: 81-104.
McCarthy, John D., and Mayer N. Zald. 1973. The Trend of Social Movements in America. Morristown, NJ:
General Learning Press.
------. 1977. “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory.” American Journal of
Sociology 82:1212-1241.
Morris, Aldon. 1981. “The Black Southern Sit-In Movement: An Analysis of Internal Organization.”
American Sociological Review 46:744-767.
Myers, Daniel J. 2000. “The Diffusion of Collective Violence: Infectiousness, Susceptibility, and Mass
Media Networks.” American Journal of Sociology 106:173-208.
Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. 1977. Poor People’s Movements. New York: Pantheon.
Ryan, Charlotte, and William A. Gamson. 2006. “The Art of Reframing Political Debates.” Contexts 5:1318.
Snow, David A., and Robert D. Benford. 1999. “Alternative Types of Cross-National Diffusion in the Social
Movement Arena.” In Donatella della Porta, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Dieter Rucht, eds., Social Movements
in a Globalizing World (London: Macmillan).
Snow, David A., E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford. 1986. “Frame
Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.” American Sociological Review
51:464-481.
Soule, Sarah A. 2004. “Diffusion Processes within and across Movements.” In David A. Snow, Sarah A.
Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Malden, MA.:
Blackwell).
Tilly, Charles. 1964. The Vendée. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
------. 1995. Popular Contention in Great Britain 1758-1834. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
------. 2004. Social Movements, 1768-2004. Boulder: Paradigm.
------. 2006. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.