Social Movements: Comprehensive Notes

Social Movements: Social Change Through Contention

• Social movements involve unexpected behaviors like shouting, waving placards, and singing, creating camaraderie among participants.
• Demonstrations often involve adamant voices insisting on change, using chants and slogans such as:
  • "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?"
  • "Hands up. Don’t Shoot."
  • "The people, united, will never be defeated."
  • "Life-Yes. Abortion- No."
  • "No blood for oil!"
• Crowds can sometimes turn violent, as seen in the London protest against rising college tuition where protesters attacked Prince Charles' car.
• The behavior in protests can be compared to that of enthusiastic sports fans but can appear outlandish and threatening to outsiders.
• A charismatic leader or sudden threat can quickly escalate a nonviolent demonstration into confrontation.
• Social movements are attempts to voice a desire for change, whether conventional or disruptive, seeking minor or major transformations.
• Digital communication links and more open democratic participation help mobilize large numbers of people quickly.
• Various groups, including veterans, students, peasants, religious assemblies, LGBT activists, gun owners, and others, seek to make their voices heard to advance their interests and bring about social change.

Politics by Other Means

• Numerous groups advocate for social change, attempting to influence its direction.
• Democratic governments vary in their openness to public opinion and group efforts to affect legislation, while even authoritarian states face demands for change.
• Public outcry and mass demonstrations can potentially topple entrenched regimes, as seen in Tunisia, Ukraine, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Thailand, Libya, and Yemen.
• Civil society is the social space where social movements operate outside formal politics, engaging in "politics by other means."
• Charles Tilly described social movement actions as "repertoires of contention," challenging authority to achieve an alternative.
• Making social change requires courage and determination.

How Social Movements Matter

• Much study concentrates on why groups mobilize, how they form, and how they operate as organizations.
• Social movements are often evaluated based on the organization's framing of issues, leader effectiveness, resource management, and public acceptance.
• Attributing causality is challenging, but a social movement's actions must be shown as the reason for a change to deem the movement successful.
• Social movements can be episodic or long-lasting but may fail to reach their target.
• Internal organizational needs can distract from the movement's goals, or opposition can neutralize them.
• Events can outpace a social movement, leaving it on the sidelines with an irrelevant message.
• A social movement's articulation of a social problem can focus public discussion on issues and solutions.
• Social movements may generate countermovements, be suppressed, discredited, or forced to shift tactics.
• Participating in a social movement can profoundly impact participants' worldview, personal efficacy, and commitment to public involvement.
• Involvement can be frustrating or exhilarating, leading to personal change that becomes a social change process.

Dismantling Jim Crow: A Case Study

• Before modern civil rights laws, racial segregation and discrimination were pervasive in the US, with racist laws, practices, and norms referred to as Jim Crow.
• Overcoming this required decades of collective efforts to change race relations.
• (Jim Crow = racist laws, practices, and norms)
• The civil rights movement mobilized support across civic organizations, churches, schools, and individuals to force the end of Jim Crow through sustained and costly contention.
• Over decades, the movement shifted strategies, enlisted allies, and changed public opinion to rectify the tragic history of slavery and Jim Crow.
• Thousands braved insults and attacks, shared a vision, and pushed their agenda into the public consciousness and political system.

What Is a Social Movement?

• Social movements have been viewed negatively as troublesome behavior by the lower class, but recent decades have seen social scientists making headway in understanding their origins and dynamics.
• Increased participation in social movements by sociologists and political scientists may drive better understanding.

Social Movement as Challenges to Authority

• Social movements are collectivities acting with some organization and continuity, partly outside institutional channels, to challenge existing systems of authority or resist change in such systems.
• Social movements involve groups with distinguishable identities, becoming more organized as participants articulate grievances and coalesce around an agenda.
• Participants aim to draw attention to their cause, change public opinion, and force authorities to address grievances.
• Social movements engage in "transgressive contention," contrasting with the "contained contention" of formal institutions.
• While initially outside institutional channels, movements may seek to work within them, but insider status marks the end of the movement's engagement in politics by other means.
• transgressive contention \neq contained contention
• Social movements often challenge governments and corporations as systems of authority, targeting the state for being responsible for grievances or best suited to address them.
• Corporations, wielding significant power, are increasingly being challenged by social movements.
• The vast majority of social movements make modest but significant challenges to authority; only rarely do they challenge the core idea that authority should be vested in the state and large corporations.

Voicing and Pursuing Shared Grievances

• Personal grievances can become fertile ground for social movement formation.
• "Quotidian disruption" describes the interruption and unsettling of everyday life, driving social movements.
• Grievances, expressed in terms of fairness, expose threats to livelihood, safety, values, and well-being.
• Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty describes three responses to a sense of wrong: exit (leaving), loyalty (accepting), and voice (contention).
• Exit + Voice + Loyalty = possible responses
• Critical to "giving voice" is recognizing the grievance is shared and its source is subject to change.
• A sense of possibility for change distinguishes social movement grievances from personal problems and fears.

Reactions to Anomie

• Robert Merton’s Social Structure and Anomie analyzes crime as deviance from a misalignment of desired outcomes and means.
• Ted Gurr accounts for social movements in terms of the disparity between expectations and the actual situation.
• Social contradictions between values like equality and realities of discrimination generate contentious activism.
• equality \neq realities of discrimination

The Shared Benefits of Movement Success

• Social movements typically pursue collective goods shared regardless of individual participation.
• Focus is often on government policies, including rights guarantees and benefit provisions.
• The US pension movement succeeded in 1935 with the Social Security Administration, providing old-age pensions as a collective good.
• Movements also emphasize rights as collective goods, benefiting all.
• Environmental movements secured collective benefits with the Montreal Protocol, banning chlorofluorocarbon discharge into the atmosphere.
• Example: if privacy rights prevent the state from trawling through someone’s email messages without a court order, everyone’s email communications are legally protected.

Common Goods and Free Riders

• Collective benefits that cannot be denied to non-contributors create the free rider problem.
• Taxes, levies, laws, or policies are needed to overcome this problem.
• Social movements confer collective benefits and do not necessarily confine benefits to members only.
• Whites involved in the civil rights movement sought equal opportunities for those suffering injustice, despite already having these benefits.
• Activists benefit from participation, camaraderie, identity change, improved self-worth, and giving greater meaning to their beliefs.
• Social movement participants have a clearer idea of the community, society, and world they want to live in.

Social Movement Participants

• Most people do not actively participate in social movements, even in democratic societies.
• Three predictive conditions for joining a social movement:
  • Social Networks: interacting with active people or organizations supporting involvement.
  • Political Engagement: individuals already politically engaged are more likely to participate, and activism can be intergenerationally transmitted.
  • Ecological Factors: location in social time and space, including work, family obligations, proximity to activities, and involvement of others.
  • College students are often in a position of "ecological proximity" to social movements due to exposure to grievances in classes and flexibility in their schedules.

Resource Mobilization

• Vital for a social movement's effectiveness is resource mobilization, acquiring the necessary things to function as an organization and carry out activities.
• Resources include financing, material support, free space, venues, and communication methods.
• Human capability is also essential, including public speaking, drafting documents, organizing contacts, and leadership.
• Cultural resources include songs, logos, slogans, and distinctive dress that give the movement a unique image.
  • moral resources include the good opinions of widely recognized and admired people who visibly support the social movement.

Social Movement Framing

• Social movements question existing circumstances and challenge their legitimacy by redefining situations.
• Movements insist that participants and audiences see things in a new way, maximizing mobilization.
• Framing involves rejecting institutionalized routines and fashioning new world views.
• Example: The same-sex marriage movement frames the issue through images of middle-class couples to emphasize their normalcy and equality.
• Rosa Parks challenged racial segregation by refusing to give up her seat, framing the denial of civil rights to resonate with others.

Diagnostic, Prognostic, and Motivation Frames

• Diagnostic Framing: explains how a situation is problematic, assigning reasons and calling for change.
  • Example: The American Indian movement uses a poster of fictitious team pennants with names like Kansas City Jews and Pittsburgh Negroes to highlight the inappropriateness of Indian mascots.
• Prognostic Framing: puts forth what is needed to change a situation, including strategies and tactics.
  • Example: Disputes within the antinuclear movement involve different strategies, such as direct action versus public awareness campaigns.
• Motivational Framing: enhances participants' involvement and commitment, appealing to shared values and beliefs.
  • Example: Motivational frames include "Our cause is just," "History is on our side," and "Time is running out."

Identity Frames

• Identity frames are adopted roles and self-presentations that become part of one's identity, including movement participation.

Social Movement Tactics

• Social movements operate outside established organizations, using tactics such as protests, petitions, and letter-writing campaigns.
• Following the contested reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, protesters wrote slogans on Iranian banknotes in response to state repression.
• Tactics include blockades, sit-ins, strikes, die-ins, divestment, flash mobs, and actions that draw public attention and make life difficult for the targeted organization, and are often "self-consciously per formative."
• Dramatic staging and flamboyant actions are used to cut through the clutter of news.
• The environmental movement files lawsuits to delay and block permits needed by corporations.
• Tactical repertoires with economic impact are effective when grievances focus on profit-making organizations, such as university divestment campaigns and anti-sweatshop movements involving boycotts that threaten material loss to a corporation.
• Rarely, movements have benefited from highly disruptive activities and sparked violence, such as rioting.
  *

The Often Violent Movement to Win Collective Bargaining

• American workers belonged to craft unions in the twentieth century, but legal obstacles hindered establishing unions that could engage in collective bargaining.
• In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Wobblies organized miners and textile, steel, and migratory workers, often involved in violent confrontations.
• After World War I, industrial unions were suppressed, and the IWW declined.
• In 1935, the Wagner Act made it easier for workers to form unions and collectively bargain, leading to protracted conflicts.
• The Flint sit-down strike of 1936–1937 involved autoworkers locking themselves in a plant, leading to police and National Guard intervention.
• Photographs of workers being beaten made front-page news and evoked widespread sympathy.
• In February 1937, GM agreed to collective bargaining, followed by Ford and Chrysler Corporations.
• By 1956, nearly two out of five workers in the United States belonged to a union, and conditions and pay for nonunion workers improved.
• In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act outlawed “closed shops” and gave states the option of enacting legislation that exempts non- union workers from paying the cost of collective bargaining.
• Large corporations fought back, and many heavy industrial and manufacturing jobs went overseas.
• By 2009, less than one worker in eight belonged to a union.

Political Opportunity for Social Movements

• Political opportunities, including the ability to form voting blocks and gain a sympathetic ear, are important for social movement success.
• Opportunities include demonstrating in public spaces, contesting elections, running advertisements, and organizing voter referendums.
• In democratic societies, the rule of law is intended to protect unpopular opinions.
• Societies that do not tolerate challenges to elites face difficulty in sustaining social movement activity through coercive actions.
• Shifts in the political opportunity structure respond to broader social change, opening and closing doors for social movements.

Elite Competition as Political Opportunity for Environmentalists

• Fissures among dominant elites provide political opportunities for social movements to find advocates.
• Contests for state support, for example, for synthetic fuels provides opportunities.
• Conflicts between corporate agriculture (Big Farm) and fossil fuel energy corporations (Big Oil) create openings for environmental movements.
• Environmental activists can seek to advance their cause by exploiting corporate elite cleavages, though this is a tenuous political opportunity.
• Splits among elites and political opportunities can exist even in authoritarian societies.

Digital Technology and Social Movements

• Digital technology, including social networking and the Internet, supports social movements through evidence, expertise, action plans, crowd sourcing, and smart mobs.
• A state response is to unplug or imprison online journalists and activists whose writings challenge authority, and is one of the greatest challenges to authoritarian and democratic states alike.
• Political and social activists hack into government and corporate sites and leak secret documents.
• Internet activists test the borders of what is legal in a democracy by working in an "information commons" and insisting on net neutrality.

Linking Social Movements to Social Change

• The ultimate end of movements is to bring about change.
• The impact of social movements on social change cannot be assumed or taken for granted.
• Empirically demonstrating that important changes would not have occurred without the challenger is essential to show its effect.

Knowing When Social Movements Matter

• It seems certain that the end of military conscription (the draft) in the US was the result of antiwar activity, though it is much less clear if the antiwar movement hastened the end of the war.
• The anti–nuclear power movement is thought to have had significant success after the Chernobyl catastrophe, though Denmark, Luxembourg, and Norway had already dropped nuclear energy.
• Understanding how social movements create social change means sorting out movement goals, actions, and claims of success from other causal factors.

How Social Movements Drive Social Change

• Social movements drive social change in at least four ways:
  • They change public opinion by inserting diagnostic and prognostic frames into popular discourse.
  • They help create or alter policy.
  • They influence culture, including music, dress, language, and values.
  • They have a lasting impact on participants' identity, life choices, and level of public involvement.
• It is difficult to fully separate these effects.

Social Movement Frames and Public Opinion

• A "conventional politics" model sees public opinion as important in deciding what elected representatives do.
• Mobilizing public opinion can also be effective when the target is a corporation.
• In 1977, the Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT) brought to the public’s attention the downside of feeding infants baby formula rather than breastfeeding, and singling out Nestlé, organizing a worldwide boycott of its products.
• Public opinion was a powerful force in the civil rights movement, eliciting powerful scenes of racism and injustice (McAdam 1988; 1999a; see also Lee 2002).
• Attacks on marchers by police and the murder of civil rights workers engaged in voter registration brought federal government intervention, leading to landmark legislation: civil rights gained increased awareness in public opinion.

Abortion and the Battle for Public Opinion

• Social movements for and against abortion have sought to advance their goals through legislation and the courts, but public opinion stands out as a very significant part of efforts to determine restrictions imposed on women who seek to terminate their pregnancy.
• In 1973, the US Supreme Court heard Roe v. Wade and decided that any law creating a barrier preventing access to abortion in the first three months of pregnancy was unconstitutional.
• Opinion has changed surprisingly little in recent decades, despite ongoing public relations war.
• Abortion is legal and available, though state and national legislation and legal opinions have created restrictions for some procedures and reduced access to abortion.
• Policy on this issue seems strongly driven by public opinion.

Political Process and Policy Change

• Gamson’s (1975) concepts of acceptance and advantage describes access to and benefits from political action by the state.
• Kolb’s (2007) five ways to affect political institutions and governmental power: disruption, changing public preference, gaining political access, acquiring judicial favor, and using international politics.
• Access mechanisms usually involve conventional politics: energizing voters, gaining seats on committees, and creating organizations to raise money, lobby, and offer ideas.
• Judicial mechanisms such as legal suits against individuals, corporations, and public officials seek redress for a wrongdoing.
• Largely confined to the causal dynamics of social movements for political change, when states alter budgets, change modes of administration, adopt policies, grant legal statuses, and shift public resources at least partially in response to social movement efforts, the movements have been successful change agents.

Cultural Impacts of Social Movements

• Social movements promote changes in outlooks, institutional practices, and ways of living.
• Religious social movements have the expressed purpose of changing beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, and values.
• Some social movements develop cultural markers such as music, dialect, dress, literature, and art to express group identity, designating a subculture.
• Commercial interests may co-opt culture items, profiting from their sales, though their original meaning may be lost.
• Cultural styles become popular but are separated from their countercultural origins.

Personal Change as a Consequence of Social Movement Participation

• Insular social movements promote “personal transformation as the key to societal transformation."
• Personal changes are the limit of what the movement seeks to accomplish, relying at most on personal example as the route to social change.
• Social movement participation influences people in ways not directly related to movement grievances.
• George Mayes was made homeless in the Great Recession of 2007–2010 and participated in the January 20, 2010, rally in San Francisco for housing and support for the homeless, and had a cathartic experience. Participation changed and pumped him up, changing him and turning him into an advocate.
• There is “a powerful and enduring effect of participation on the later lives of activists” (Doug McAdam 1999b; see also Giugni 2004).
• In the formative young adult years, social movement participation establishes, for a portion of an age cohort, an orientation of activism that has a residual effect or staying power.

Social Movements and Resistance to Social Change

• Social movements can be mobilized in opposition to social change, resisting specific changes.
• Sometimes called reactive or reactionary social movements, such efforts try to reverse course or channel social change away from what is seen as confusing, immoral, threatening, or in conflict with material interests or core values and beliefs.
• The antiglobalization movement opposes the increasingly open global economy, arguing that the playing field is not level and therefore poor countries are increasingly vulnerable to the predations of richer, more powerful countries.

Resistance to Social Movements as Agents of Change

• The Iran presidential elections of 2009 showed efforts to resist change.
• Mass demonstrations in Tehran and other cities were violently stopped.
• Mass arrests, interrogations, and killings occurred.
• The protests had the effect of unifying and polarizing the state against those who were pro-democracy.
• The protests began by claiming fraudulent voting to broader claims for democracy, resisted by state power.