Introduction to Social Movements

Introduction to Social Movements

• Social movements are collective efforts by people to change aspects of their society, using extra-institutional means. They shape global landscapes through actions like worker strikes, climate protests, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
• Key examples include labor movements (eight-hour workday), women's suffrage campaigns, US civil rights movements, and LGBT movements (marriage equality).
• US Civil Rights movements are an example of a social movement focused on racial equality in the 1950s-1960s, with key events like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, and the Selma to Montgomery marches, highlighting the struggles for racial equality and the importance of collective action.
• Key features of social movements: deliberate, sustained efforts by ordinary people to change societal aspects through extra-institutional means.

Early Theories of Social Movements

• Collective Behavior Theory (1920s-1970s) examined how people act outside established institutions, focusing on social breakdown and shared beliefs in understanding movements. Important figures in this theory include Robert Park and Ernest Burgess.
• Smelser's Value-Added Model provided a 6-step framework for understanding movements, including structural conduciveness, structural strain, shared belief, precipitating events, leadership emergence and authority response.
• Alternative explanations include Mass Society Theory, focusing on social isolation and potentially lacking meaningful social connections. Relative Deprivation Theory explains why people feel they are unjustly treated, compared to others and how that might prompt them.
• These theories have limitations, with a focus on abnormal vs. normal social events.

Resource Mobilization Theory

• This shifted the focus from grievances to resources in understanding social movements. It highlighted the role of movement actors and organizations in strategies.
• Emphasized the importance of material resources (money, property, equipment), human resources (skills, expertise), social resources (networks, coalitions), and cultural resources. Several strategies for mobilizing these include self-production, aggregation, co-optation, and patronage and various critiques of the theory.

Political Process Theory

• Emphasizes the interaction between social movements and political systems by highlighting how political structures and opportunities influence social movements’ emergence and outcomes, as well as how social movements can shape the environment
• Three key elements identified include favourable political opportunity (changes in the system that make change easier), indigenous organizational capacity, and cognitive liberation (belief that change is possible amongst stakeholders).
• Insights from political process theory include the importance of understanding state responses to movements.
• Critics argue it sometimes ignores grievances and emotions, and focuses too narrowly on state actors.

New Social Movement Theory and Connective Action

• In contrast to earlier theories, New Social Movement Theory focuses on issues like identity, culture, and emotions in driving collective action.
• Connective Action focuses on the role of digital and social media technologies in facilitating social movements, including self-organizing methods and connective action networks, with a focus on coordinating collective action over diverse spaces, rather than just on a specific group in one area.
• Key criticism includes that it might neglect feelings, and emotional responses of individuals when analyzing social movements.

Authoritarianism and Social Movements

• Traditional theory typically views social protests as impossible in authoritarian systems where state control are heavily involved but recent changes show that this is not always the case.
• Some social movements in authoritarian regimes have involved, at times, an important interplay between state strategies and social group activities, seeking greater access to resources, information, and political expression.
• Variation in Authoritarianism, Repression, and Institutional Access: These elements vary greatly between countries and regimes; this explains how different social movements form due to different levels of freedoms.
• Decentralized power structures in authoritarian regimes provide opportunities to contest and promote social change in diverse ways, highlighting the impact of local factors.

Tactics and Impacts of Social Movements

• Methods of protest, including petitioning, marches, and boycotts, along with varying degrees of organization and spontaneity.
• How social movements shape public opinion, policies, and even broader cultural shifts. Factors that contribute to success often include a favourable political environment, well-organized movements, strategically framed demands, effective political action, and sustained public support.
• Potential impacts may include policy changes, shifts in public opinion, and long-term cultural shifts. Specific examples could illustrate how a protest event creates positive and negative outcomes.
• Demonstrated tactics include boycotts, civil disobedience, and acts of creative expression influencing culture and public discussion.