EUROSPHERE
Research Notes
Research Note No.16, 2008
Reflections on Social Movement Actors
Ahmet Öncü
Reflections on Social Movement Actors
Ahmet Öncü
In his highly abstract yet compelling portrayal of the last 200 years of politics Craig Calhoun
(2000:147) suggests that “under one label or another, the public has been opposed to the
private; the economic to the aesthetic; the rationalist to the romantic; secularization to revival;
and institutionalization to nascent movements intent on breaking free”. I would like to offer
Calhoun’s reminder as a point of departure for our inquiry into social movement actors. We
may approach social movement actors -in distinction with other social and political actors
included in our research framework- by seeing them as “nascent” mobilizations “intent of
breaking free” from the constraints of a political regime perceived as ignorant of certain forms
of “life” in its abstraction of “sociation”, to use a concept introduced to sociology by Simmel.
The notions of “being nascent” and “having the intention of breaking free” from the
limitations of established social and political life are not only central for framing various
types of collective action as social movement but also critical for locating them in the politics
of diversity. Needless to say, it is the latter that is most relevant and interesting for our
purposes.
Let me begin with a disclaimer. The following discussion does not aim at coming up
with a well-written scholarly paper. It does not offer a comprehensive synopsis of the stock of
knowledge and its discontents in what is known as “the social movement literature”. It rather
aims to initiate a dialogue within our team in regard to the conceptualization of social
movement actors. This brief document has four parts. First, I suggest a provisional working
definition of social movement. Second, I use a particular categorization of contentious politics
in order to be able to differentiate forms of social movement. Then I hint at how we may try
to conceptualize organizational features of social movements. Finally, I offer a list of
questions that partners may find useful in selecting as well as examining the selected social
movements before they go out to do the interviews.
1- A Provisional Working Definition
The definition of social movement is always a controversial issue because of the multiparadigmatic nature of the field. In his succinct overview of the state of the art in the
literature, Diani (2000: 157) identifies four main paradigms: 1) “Collective Behavior”
perspective developed by Turner and Killian; 2) “Resource Mobilization Theory” formulated
by Zald and McCarthy; 3) “Political Process” perspective represented primarily by Tilly; and
4) “The New Social Movements” approach introduced by Touraine and Melucci.
Diani draws the following conclusion from his overview: “Different approaches to the
field share, in their definitions of ‘social movement’, the emphasis on some specific
dynamics. In particular, three basic components of social movements have been identified:
networks of relations between a plurality of actors; collective identity; conflictual issues.”
Diani goes onto tell us that “anti-institutional styles of political participation” and “antisystemic attitudes” are not conceived as distinctive characteristics of the concept of social
movements. Agreeing strongly with the first part of Diani’s reading, I would like to
emphasize one of the practical implications of it for our purposes: If we want to designate “a
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social and political actor” “social movement” we must be able to show that this “actor” is
constituted as a “network of relations” among a set of collective as well as individual actors
who share an identity constructed for taking a position on a conflictual issue.
The second part of Diani’s conclusion is more exigent than the first one, and
unfortunately a far cry from offering us an apparent rule of thumb because it is not clear at all
what “anti-institutional style of participation” means and how it differs from “an institutional
style of participation”. The conceptual fuzziness here derives from the difficulty in
distinguishing non-institutional acts from anti-institutional acts. An act can be noninstitutional yet at the same time be lacking the feature of being anti-institutional. This is
simply because the realm of politics is always dynamic and political acts are constantly being
transformed as a result of ongoing political and social interactions. In other words, noninstitutional political acts can be taken within the framework of institutional politics without
changing the core of this framework, and thus go unnoticed, ignored or permitted by the
powerful actors occupying the commanding positions of the establishment. I can give a funny
yet hopefully an illuminating example: can anybody argue against the fact that drinking a
bottle of fine French wine in a Turkish kebap restaurant is a non-institutional act? I guess
nobody with a sober mind can do this because one habitually drinks raki at a kebap
restaurant. Nevertheless, does this show us that this very non-institutional act is also an antiinstitutional act? Unlike the first question, there seems to be no clear cut answer here. The
best we can say is this: “It all depends on the intention of the “contender”, how this noninstitutional act is perceived by the “defender” as well as how the intention of the contender
interacts with the perception of the defender. In other words, a non-institutional act can
become an anti-institutional act if the “conflictual issue” between the non-institutional actor
and the authority in charge of securing the status quo moves them –either actually or
perceptually- beyond the limits of acceptable political forms of contention. What if the kebap
restaurant owner bans drinking French wine in his/her premises! Will the drinker keep silent
and order raki now or make claims that may shake the very foundations of kebap restaurant?
What if the wine drinker, after obtaining the opportunity to drink wine first, now says: “Vous
nous aveza apporte la mauvaise commande. J’avais voulu un le plateau de fromages”. The
moral of the story is this: There must be a threshold up to which non-institutional acts can be
accommodated within the boundaries of institutional politics. But once this threshold,
however it is defined, is left behind, all non-institutional political acts can be potentially
framed as anti-institutional. That means that we are in an ambivalent field of politics when it
comes to social movements.
After this clarification we can now move on to one of the most up-to-date attempts that
aims at providing an all-inclusive definition of social movement – (please note the emphasis
on the notion of institution and compare it with Diani’s suggestion). The Blackwell
Companion on Social Movements gives us the following definition:
Social movements can be thought of as collectivities acting with some degree of organization and
continuity outside institutional or organizational channels for the purpose of challenging or
defending extant authority, whether it is institutionally or culturally based, in the group,
organization, society, culture or world order of which they are a part. (Snow, et.al., 2004:11)
Given the definition, it is evident that we are interested in a collective actor somewhat
excluded from “institutional” channels and hence acts unconventionally. The institutional
channels are under the control of an “authority” appearing to be based not only institutionally
but also culturally, i.e. as a life world. The contending actor is factually non-existent in the
regular politics. Yet the same actor all of a sudden shows up “with the purpose of challenging
or defending extant authority”. It is the notion of challenge that is central in the identification
of a collective actor as a social movement. Whether the challenge takes on an offensive or
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defensive mode seems not to be the crucial question. Another point to emphasize is that our
collective actor challenges the authority together with the ones who share in that authority
even if they are not directly participating in the actions of that authority (i.e., the authority is
also culturally based). So, to conceive our collective actor “with some degree of organization”
as a “social movement” or “a citizen initiative”, we must be in a position to show that the
contending actor is a contestant in the realm of routine institutional and routine cultural
politics for it collides with the establishment in one way or another. This form of political acts
raises issues that challenge directly or indirectly the limits of the authority. Therefore in order
to differentiate social movements from other social and political actors we need to specify the
relation of the collective actors to the authority with respect to the issue of the legitimacy of
that authority (I will return to this point below). So I continue with the following hypothesis:
Social movements make controversial claims that cannot be easily resolved by the authority
because they are outside the routine political functions and political traditions of that
authority. Because of this, such political claims are almost always linked to ideological
cleavages as well as clashes of moral values – which are often related to the foundations of
the state. In this sense it is not off-the-wall to say that “social movements” are critical actors
because they are critiquing actors. They are present in the absence or rather the glossed over
regions of public politics.
Here comes the troubling question. If social movements are not part of the politics of
establishment but they are implicated in it, how will we be sure about the “social movementness” of a political mobilization? Indeed this a question Tilly (1999:257) poses to us and then
he answers:
How, then, will we recognize a social movement when we see one? It consists of a
sustained challenge to power holders in the name of a population living under the jurisdiction
of those power holders by means of repeated public displays of that population’s worthiness,
unity, numbers, and commitment.
It is not too difficult to see that Tilly conceptualizes social movements as “contentious
displays”. Thus, for him (Tilly, 1999:261), worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (as
performances displayed by the multiple actors involved in the mobilization) make up the
sources of strength of social movements and keep them effective and salient in the public
sphere. He suggests the following formula:
“Strength = worthiness x unity x numbers x commitment
If any of these values falls to zero, strength likewise falls to zero; the challenge loses
credibility”.
Through contentious performances social movements involve continuous interaction between
challengers and power holders.
To see why social movements are not only continuous interactions but also contentious
performances, we may make use of “the simple static model of polity” that consists of the
following elements (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001: 11-12):
•
•
•
•
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Agents of government
Polity members (constituted political actors enjoying routine access to government
agents and resources)
Challengers (constituted political actors lacking that routine access)
Subjects (persons and groups not currently organized into constituted political actors
Outside political actors, including other governments
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According to this model, social movements act as constellations of collective as well as
individual actors from within the set of challengers who come to assume an identity that may
help to turn an episodic contention into a continuous contention. Given that social movements
are not the only sites of contentious performances in the public sphere, the question becomes
what differentiates them, say, from political parties, “think tanks”, and media. The answer
must lie in the phrase: “the lack of routine access to public politics”. Social movements come
to fill the lack of formal political channels that allow dealing with actual or perceived
contentions, either because these channels are not instituted yet or even if they are,
technically speaking, available not used by some challengers yet.
Having said all this, in terms of the practicalities of our research, we finally need to
differentiate social movements from other similar collective actors. There are two such
collective actors: advocacy networks and coalitions of actors (Khagram, Riker and Sikkink,
2002: 3-24) . Briefly defined, advocacy networks are actors linked within the boundaries of a
given social and political space, bound together by shared values, dense exchanges of
information and services, and common discourses. Coalitions of actors involve a greater level
of coordination than present in advocacy networks. Coalitions coordinate shared strategies or
sets of tactics to publicly influence social and political change. These mostly take on the form
of “campaigns”. Unlike these two forms of collective action, social movements are sets of
actors with claims to solidarity and common purposes and have the capacity to generate
coordinated and sustained social mobilization that involves the use of protest or disruptive
action in order for bringing social and political change. So the differentia specifica of social
movements is the “disruptive action” that threatens a social-political establishment.
2- Forms of contention and different forms of social movements
McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001) have recently elaborated on the meaning of “contentious
politics”, a concept that has been at the center of their research orientation for some time.
Tilly (2004) summarizes the essence of their approach by saying that the objective is not the
explanation of social movements per se but rather the definition of the problem as the
explanation of contentious politics, “including both a) differences in the operation of
contrasting forms of contentious politics within the same regimes, and b) differences in the
operation of contentious politics within contrasting regimes” (Tilly, 2004: 36). It is critical
here to note first that the notion of “political regime” occupies a central place in the
explanation of emergence of different forms of “disruptive actions” (such as institutionally
acceptable actions or upfront anti-institutional actions; actions tolerable in terms of the
ideological pillars of the routine politics or actions appearing to be instigated by “antisystemic attitudes” or irrefutably antagonistic, etc.). Secondly, it is crucial to stress that all
political regimes have various mechanisms to deal with both “permissible” and “nonpermissible” contentions and hence disruptive actions. The activation of the use of these
mechanisms depends on the form of actions that collective actors take.
McAdams, Tarrow, and Tilly’s (2001:7-8)) suggestion of the two forms of contention as
“contained” and “transgressive” contentions may help us to differentiate forms of social
movements and how these might be perceived from the point of view of a political regime.
1. Contained contention: parties are previously established actors employing well
established means of claim making. It consists of episodic, public, collective
interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government
is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims, (b) the claims, if realized,
affect the interests of at least one of the claimants, and (c) all parties to the conflict
were previously established as constituted actors.
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2. Transgressive contention: consists of episodic, public, collective interaction among
makers of claims and their objects when at least one government is claimant, and
object of claims, or a party to claims, (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the
interests of at least one of the claimants, (c) at least some parties to the conflict are
newly self-identified political actors, and/or (d) at least some parties employ
innovative collective action. (Action qualifies as innovative if it incorporates claims,
selects objects of claims, includes collective self-representations, and/or adopts means
that are either unprecedented or forbidden within the regime in question.”
Based on these categories and principles, I would suggest that in our research we must be
specific in regard to the forms of contention with which our selected social movements are
involved. In other words, each partner team after selecting the social movements from their
national political “regime” context should make an assessment of the forms of contentious
politics that these movements are a part. Thus the question is not only spelling out the
“network of relations” among a set of actors who share a common identity constructed for
expressing a contention but also specifying the contention as either contained or
transgrassive. Needless to say, there are many possibilities. We may have a national context
or contexts where “transgrassive” contentions do not exist at all (a Disneyland type of
democracy!) or rarely emerge either because the regime has been too flexible to accommodate
all forms of contentions so that actors could express their contentions via well-established
identities within the boundaries of routine politics, or because collective actors are less prone
to challenge the status quo for the authority has been very much unwilling to be receptive to
new identities. From this viewpoint, social movements are historically formed “collective and
mutual claim making” with the purpose of bringing a novelty to the configurations of routine
public politics. That is why social movement research is inherently linked to “processes of
democratization” and theories of democracy because independently from their outcomes
social movements are performances by a section of demos whose voices are yet to be heard
politically (Burnstein, 1999). Whether this voice would be uttered in the routine politics or
outside the scope of the routine politics is contingent on the “political opportunity structure”.
3- How to conceive organizational features of social movements
At this point, before moving any further, we must recall Tilly’s (1999:256) warning regarding
the two most common mistaken views about social movements conceived as “collective and
mutual claim making” inherently linked to “processes of democratization”. The first
erroneous assumption is that social movements are coherent groups rather than clusters of
performances. The second fallacy is that social movements have continuous, self contained
life histories reminiscent of individuals and formal organizations. Suffice to say, social
movements are neither individuals who are supposed to exist as coherent entities (i.e. cogito
ergo sum) nor formal organizations with official objectives as well as rule making capacities
constraining the actions of their members by forcing them to stay within the boundaries
established for separating them from the outside. Social movements, although they are
somewhat bounded, involve “contingent, interactive performances by multiple and changing
actors”. In other words, life histories of social movements do not look like linear paths but
rather non-linear, multi-directional ebbs and flows.
To proceed in this direction leads us to focus on the dynamic and changing nature of
actors, identities, and actions associated with social movements. Thus, at any particular stage
in the history of movements we must stop and ask questions again and again regarding actors,
identities and actions. As to the actors, the key question becomes the “who” of the claim
making, as well as the “why” of “their” claim making. As to the identities, the question turns
out to be what the claim makers and others say who the claim makers are and why they say
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so. Finally, as to the actions, the begging issue is to investigate forms of claim making that
challengers take and what reasons they provide for their choice of particular forms of claim
making (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001: 126).
As a general rule the identities that actors take on consist of social relations and their
representations. They are not stable or all-inclusive characteristics of individual or collective
actors. Most of them function as social categories regulating social relations within and
between categories. Thus, they do not exist only as boundaries separating one group of actors
from another but also function as bases of social dynamics in a particular polity. Social
movements are those actors who make claims on the bases of such categories, and hence
provide social relations with a political twist. This they do through challenging “the
authority” on the basis of a collective identity. According to Tilly (1999:262), “construction
of shared identities often does attract and commit individuals to social movements”. But the
successful construction of a shared identity does not suffice for the persistence of social
movements. What is needed, as already emphasized, is to give a contentious political meaning
to that identity by challenging the authority and the “members” of the routine politics of the
regime where this movement erupts. Thus, we arrive at another significant conceptualization
of social movements that we can use in operationalizing social movement actors in our
research: “Social movements couple the making of public claims with the creation, assertion,
and political deployment of collective identities”. (Tilly, 1999: 262).
Tilly talks about two sorts of identities utilized by movement organizers in “patching
together provisional coalitions, suppressing risky tactics, negotiating which of the multiple
agendas that participants bring with them will find public voice in their collective action, and,
above all, hiding backstage struggle from public view”. (Tilly, 1999: 263). The first of these
identities is called embedded identities, which refer to those that inform about what governs
everyday life of individuals – race, gender, class, ethnicity, locality, kinship and so on. The
second set of identities is called detached identities and refers to the ones that rarely or never
govern everyday social relations. These include associational membership and legal
categories such as “minority”, “party member”, “union representative” or “handicapped
persons”. According to Tilly, the collective identity “citizen” falls somewhere in between
embedded and detached identities.
The interesting point for us is that as we move in the continuum away from embedded to
detached identities, collective identities “resemble linguistic genres in entailing coherent
interpersonal collaboration but varying contingently in content, form, and applicability from
setting to setting”. It seems that, putting the issue of forms of contention aside, differentiation
of one social movement from another rests almost always on the type collective identity
picked up or constructed and utilized for mobilization. The ones that utilize detached
identities involve universalistic (as opposed to particularistic) forms of claim-making, large
scale coordination, and reliance on specialized representatives or political entrepreneurs
(McAdams, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001:141). Thus, specification of the kind of collective
identity utilized by the movement is especially crucial for understanding the organizational
logic of the movement, and hence its choice of structures for mobilization.
4- A tentative list of questions for guiding the selection/examination of SMOs
In the literature we come across six broad social movement types. These are:
1. Labor movement
2. Women’s movement
3. Ecological movement
4. Antiwar/peace movement
5. Ethnic/nationalist movement
6. Religious movement
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Given these broadly defined social movement types and what has been said above, I would
like to suggest the following list of questions in regard to the social movement actors to be
considered by the partners.
1. What are the broad social movement types that the particular movements selected are
associated with (i.e., labor movement, women’s movement, etc.)?
2. What are the specific political demands and challenges that the movements pose to the
authority? (Say we take an ethnic movement; what are the stated demands and
political goals of the movement? Example: Legislation of new codes or
transformations in the existing policies regulating the rights extended to the ethnic
community, such rights as education in the native language, freedom of forming
political and cultural associations on the basis of ethnic identity, freely and openly
electing political representatives whose mandate is to speak for the interests of the
ethnic community, etc.)
3. Who are the collective as well as individual actors that constitute the movements? In
other words, who are involved in the networks of relations of the movements, i.e., the
leading social movement organizations (SMOs) and prominent individuals? (We need
to come up with a list of organizational titles and names of prominent individuals such
as professors, artists, lawyers, politicians, etc. for each movement we intend to
examine).
4. Who are the leaders of the networks? To is to say, who own “the sustained challenges”
of the movements both as organizations and individuals?
5. What are the framing strategies and protest tactics that these leaders use in mobilizing
the participants of the movements? (Example: Do the leaders frame the movement
participants as “concerned citizens” or “heroes” and “heroines”? Do they ask
participants to go out and “strike”, “block roads”, “occupy public buildings”, “hunger
strike” or make some procedural complaints to the authorities, or both depending on
the particular contention around and for which they mobilize the participants?
6. Does each and every political demand and goal publicized by the movements in order
to set an agenda in the public sphere gain the backing of each and every participant of
the networks of the movements? In other words, is there any ideological and/or
political division within the networks? Do you find any such confrontation in the
history of the movements? If yes, what appears to be the dividing political and
ideological lines or cracks within the internal (backstage) politics of the movements?
7. What are the main resources of the movements such as physical premises (buildings,
offices), other available facilities and technological infrastructures such as web sites,
journals, newsletters etc. that can be used for the political causes of the movements,
the number of participants and supporters, the range of the reach of the movements in
the wider society i.e., whether there is a large population of sympathizers not directly
involved in the movements yet show solidarity of some sort with the movements, e.g.,
extending support through donations, protecting the participants from the authorities’
oppressions, cheering up when they meet or come across with the participants in the
protest environments etc., or acting very hostile towards the participants in various
forms, e.g. is there intimidating representations of the movements in the nongovernmental print, visual and electronic media?
8. Which channels and ways of influence are made possible for the movements by the
general political opportunity structure?
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9. Does the general political opportunity structure involve freedom of organization for
all, or only for some social movements? Which ones?
10. Which strategies and methods does the authority use to keep some movements
outside the facilities that the general opportunity structure makes available for others?
11. What sort of international/EU and national norms, discourses, conditionalities and
support exist that the movements can deploy to legitimize/back up their claims?
12. What are the mechanisms, processes and identities that the movements construct for
mobilization at the local, national and transnational/EU levels?
13. Do the movements take an active part in any kind of transnational network? Can any
of these networks be characterized as a transnational social movement? If so, how are
the interactions within this network organized and managed?
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References
Burstein, P. 1999. “Social Movements and Public Policy”. In How Social Movements Matter,
edited by Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly. Minneapolis, London:
University of Minnesota.
Calhoun, C. 2000. “‘New Soocial Movements’ of the Early Nineteenth Century”. In Political
Sociology, edited by Kate Nash. Oxford: Blackwell.
Diani, M. 2000. “The Concept of Social Movement”. In Political Sociology, edited by Kate
Nash. Oxford: Blackwell.
Khagram, S., Riker, V. J., and Sikkink, K. 2002. Restructuring World Politics: Transnational
Social Movements, Networks and Norms. Minneapolis, London: University of
Minnesota.
McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., and Tilly, C. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversity Press.
Tilly, C. 1999. “From Interactions to Outcomes in Social Movements”. In How Social
Movements Matter, edited by Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly.
Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota.
Tilly, C. 2004. “Wise Quacks”. In Rethinking Social Movements, edited by Jeff Goodwinand
James M. Jasper. New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield.
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