Notes on Social Movements: Social Change Through Contention

Social Movements: Social Change Through Contention

• Social movements involve people acting in unexpected ways to bring attention to issues.
• Participants often share a strong sense of camaraderie, expressing adamant views on how things should be. Examples include chants and slogans related to war, gun violence, and political unity.
• Crowd behavior can sometimes turn violent, as seen in protests against rising college tuition in London where demonstrators clashed with police.
• Such behavior, while extreme, might be compared to the passionate displays of sports fans.
• The potential volatility of emotions in crowds makes them unpredictable, with leaders or authorities able to сильно ignite or confront them.
• Social movements are a part of everyday life, especially with increased democratic participation and digital communication.
• Various groups, from veterans to LGBT activists, seek to make their voices heard and advance their interests.

Politics by Other Means

• Numerous groups advocate for social change on almost every important issue.
• Even authoritarian states are not immune to demands that can mobilize people and influence elites.
• Public outcry and demonstrations can potentially topple entrenched regimes, as seen in Tunisia, Ukraine, and Egypt.
• Civil society is the social space where movements operate outside formal politics, engaging in "politics by other means."
• Charles Tilly describes social movement actions as "repertoires of contention," challenging authority to achieve alternatives.
• Making social change requires persistence and courage.

How Social Movements Matter

• Much focus is given to why groups mobilize, how they form, and how they operate.
• Attention is given to what makes a social movement successful.
• Success is often defined by how well a movement frames issues, the effectiveness of leaders, resource management, and public opinion.
• Attributing causality to a social movement's actions can be challenging in complex societies.
• Social movements may be episodic or short-lived, or they may last long without reaching their target due to internal issues or opposition.
• Events can outpace a social movement, leaving it on the sidelines.
• A social movement's perspective on a social problem can gain public attention and focus discussion.
• Participation can have a profound lifelong impact on participants' views, efficacy, and commitment.
• Personal change resulting from social movement participation is itself a social change process.
• The US civil rights movement required decades of collective effort to change race relations, dismantle racist laws and norms, and address cultural prejudices.
• The movement shifted strategies, enlisted allies, and changed public opinion to rectify the history of slavery and Jim Crow.

What Is a Social Movement?

• Social movements have been viewed negatively but are now being understood better.
• David Snow and Sarah Soule define social movements as collectivities acting with organization and continuity outside institutional channels to challenge authority or resist change.
• Movements become more organized as participants express grievances and coalesce around an agenda.
• Participants seek to draw attention, change public opinion, and force authorities to address grievances.
• "Transgressive contention" describes movements outside institutional channels, which may eventually seek to work within them.
• Access to decision-making bodies marks the end of a social movement's engagement in politics by other means.
• Social movements often challenge governments and corporations, which exercise power over people's lives.
• Movements target the state and corporations as they are directly responsible for grievances.

Voicing and Pursuing Shared Grievances

• Personal grievances can drive social movement formation.
• "Quotidian disruption" describes the interruption of everyday life that becomes a driving force.
• Grievances expose threats to livelihood, safety, values, and well-being.
• Albert Hirschman describes exit, loyalty, and voice as possible responses to a sense of something wrong.
• Voice involves contention and resistance.
• Recognition that a grievance is shared and can be changed distinguishes social movement grievances from personal problems.
• Robert Merton analyzes crime as deviance or reaction to anomie.
• Ted Gurr accounts for movements in terms of the disparity between expectations and reality.
• Social contradictions generate contentious activism to align things with how they should be.

The Shared Benefits of Movement Success

• Social movements often pursue collective goods shared by a group regardless of participation.
• Many movements focus on government policies, including rights and benefits.
• The US pension movement led to the creation of Social Security, a collective good.
• Securing rights is seen as a collective good shared by all.
• Martin Luther King: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
• Environmental movements secure collective benefits, such as the Montreal Protocol banning chlorofluorocarbons.

COMMON GOODS AND FREE RIDERS

• The lighthouse story illustrates how everyone benefits from collective goods, even those who don't contribute.
• Mancur Olson calls this the free rider problem, requiring taxes or policies to overcome.
• Social movements also confer collective benefits but don't always confine benefits to members.
• "Right to work" laws exemplify the free-rider problem in labor unions.
• Activists may gain benefits through participation, such as camaraderie, identity change, and self-worth improvement.
• They may act based on convictions or religious beliefs and desire a better community and world.

Social Movement Participants

• Most people don't actively participate in social movements.
• Three predictive conditions: social networks, political engagement, and ecological factors.
• People interacting with active individuals are more likely to participate.
• Organizations may encourage participation as an extension of group affiliation.
• Social networks in cyberspace provide opportunities for various forms of participation.
• Politically engaged individuals and those with activist parents are more likely to participate.
• Ecological factors like work, family obligations, and proximity to activities contribute to participation.
• College students are often in a position of ecological proximity to social movements.

Resource Mobilization

• Vital to a social movement's effectiveness is resource mobilization, acquiring necessary things to function.
• This includes financing, material support, free space, venues, and communication methods.
• Resource mobilization includes human capability, such as speaking, drafting, organizing, and leadership skills.
• Some resources are cultural: songs, logos, slogans, distinctive dress.
• Moral resources include good opinions of admired people and favorable public opinion.
• The credibility or morality of disruptors is critically important.

Social Movement Framing

• Social movements question existing circumstances, practices, and legitimacy.
• They insist that participants and audiences see things in a new way, a new "definition of the situation."
• Participants reject routines and assumptions, fashioning new world views by framing situations compellingly.
• An example is framing same-sex marriage as a matter of equal rights for ordinary couples.
• Rosa Parks challenged racial segregation by refusing to give up her seat on a bus, framing the denial of civil rights in a way that struck the sensibilities of many.

DIAGNOSTIC, PROGNOSTIC, AND MOTIVATION FRAMES

• Robert Benford describes three types of frames:
  • Diagnostic framing: Explains how a situation is problematic and provides reasons for change.
  • Prognostic framing: Puts forth what is needed to change a situation, such as strategies and tactics.
  • Motivational framing: Enhances participants' involvement and commitment, appealing to motives like justice or sacredness.
• These frames help participants identify reasons for commitment and the importance of making efforts.

Social Movement Tactics

• Social movements operate outside established organizations, activating a "tactical repertoire."
• Examples include mass street protests, writing slogans on banknotes, blockades, sit-ins, strikes, flash mobs, and praying outside clinics.
• Tactics are often "self-consciously per formative."
• Dramatic staging is used to get public attention, such as street performances and guerrilla theater.
• The environmental movement effectively uses lawsuits and litigation.
• Courts can be venues for dramatic demonstrations.
• Tactical repertoires having an economic impact are especially effective, such as boycotts.
• Disruptive activities and violence have sometimes benefited movements.

The Often Violent Movement To Win Collective Bargaining

• Iris Summers had no experience with labor unions.
• The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Wobblies organized workers and were frequently involved in violent confrontations.
• After World War I, suppression of industrial unions was fierce.
• The Wagner Act in 1935 made it easier for workers to form unions and collectively bargain.
• The Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike of 1936–1937 was a protracted conflict leading to violence.
• Photographs of workers being beaten and tear-gassed evoked widespread sympathy.
• GM agreed to collective bargaining, followed by Ford and Chrysler.
• Union membership grew, and conditions and pay for nonunion workers improved.
• The US workforce became the best paid in the world, and income inequality was at its lowest point.

Political Opportunity for Social Movements

• Political opportunities, including forming voting blocks and gaining a sympathetic ear, are important for success.
• Demonstrating in public spaces, contesting elections, advertising, and organizing referendums influence party platforms and candidates.
• Democratic societies tolerate and protect dissenting views.
• States that control media, monitor the Internet, and suppress opposition make sustaining movements difficult.
• Doug McAdam observes that shifts in political opportunity structure respond to broader social change.

Elite Competition as Political Opportunity for Environmentalists

• Elites do not always agree, providing political opportunities for movements.
• The contest for state support of synthetic fuels illustrates this.
• Corporate agriculture (Big Farm) advocates for biofuel made from corn to keep prices high.
• Fossil fuel energy corporations (Big Oil) oppose renewable energy expenditures.
• Large corporations involved in animal feeding, food processing, and groceries (Big Food) oppose ethanol production.
• When corporate elites are split, environmental activists find political opportunities.

Digital Technology and Social Movements

• Social movements are supported through social networking, Internet sites, crowd sourcing, and smart mobs.
• States often unplug or imprison online journalists and activists challenging authority.
• The Internet challenges authoritarian and democratic states alike.
• China's crackdown on dissidents includes controlling the Internet.
• Political and social activists hack into government and corporate sites and leak documents.
• Internet activists test the borders of what is legal in a democracy.

Linking Social Movements to Social Change

• The ultimate end of movements is to bring about change.
• The impact of social movements cannot be assumed, as many forces influence change.
• Edwin Amenta: "The empirical challenge comes down to demonstrating that important changes would not have occurred…in the absence of the challenger."
• Charles Tilly distinguishes between social movement claims, effects attributable to movements, and effects from other events.
• Social movements drive change by:
  • Changing public opinion.
  • Creating or altering policy.
  • Influencing culture.
  • Having a lasting impact on participants.

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 be effective when the target is a corporation.
• The Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT) organized a boycott of Nestlé's products, leading to changes in practices.
• Public opinion was a powerful force in the civil rights movement.
• Nonviolent protests elicited powerful scenes of racism and injustice.
• Attacks on marchers and the murder of civil rights workers led to federal intervention and landmark legislation.

Abortion and the Battle for Public Opinion

• Social movements for and against abortion seek to determine restrictions imposed on women.
• In the 1960s, public opinion was not particularly favorable toward abortion.
• Approval varied greatly with the reasons for terminating a pregnancy.
• In 1973, Roe v. Wade decided that any law creating a barrier preventing access to abortion in the first three months of pregnancy was unconstitutional.
• The pro-choice and pro-life movements began.
• Opinions have changed surprisingly little in recent decades, despite the ongoing public relations war.
• Abortion is legal and available, but restrictions and reduced access exist for some populations.
• The major parties and candidates continue to stake out their positions, and policy is likely to remain much as it is today.

Political Process and Policy Change

• Gamson's concepts of acceptance and advantage describe access to and benefits from political action by the state.
• Kolb's five ways to affect political institutions and governmental power: disruption, changing public preference, gaining political access, acquiring judicial favor, and using international politics.
• Disruption mechanisms slow down or halt state activity, gaining attention.
• Access mechanisms involve conventional politics: voters, committees, organizations.
• Judicial mechanisms such as legal suits seek redress and create legal precedent.
• International relations move nations to take action as participants in treaties.

Cultural Impacts of Social Movements

• Social movements promote changes in outlooks, institutional practices, and ways of living.
• Religious movements change beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, and values.
• Some movements develop cultural markers such as music, dialect, dress, leisure, literature, art, and living space to express group identity.
• Commercial interests may co-opt culture items, losing their original meaning.
• For example, the "beat culture" of the 1950s was oppositional, rejecting mainstream lifestyles.
• The cultural products of the food movement aim to change culture by promoting sustainable agriculture, healthy food choices, and community.

Personal Change as a Consequence of Social Movement Participation

• Insular social movements focus on participants, promoting "personal transformation as the key to societal transformation."
• Personal changes are the limit of what some movements seek.
• Most movements have wider goals of changing institutional and organizational practices.
• However, participants undergo changes, called identity framing, which may become socially significant.
• Participation is a formative event that continues to have salience for their lives and identities.
• Social movement participation influences people in ways not directly related to movement grievances.

Social Movements and Resistance to Social Change

• Social movements can be mobilized in opposition to social change, called reactive or reactionary movements.
• These efforts try to reverse course or channel social change away from what is seen as threatening.
• The antiglobalization movement opposes the increasingly open global economy.
• Organizations oppose the reduction in trade tariffs and protective regulations.
• They see this as driving down wages in affluent countries and fostering low-paid work in poor countries.

Resistance to Social Movements

• The Iranian presidential election of 2009 sparked protests against the government's repressive practices.
• Thousands of people marched in Tehran and other cities.
• The police and Republican Guards escalated their use of force.
• The government-controlled media condemned the demonstrations and blamed foreign entities.
• Pro-democracy activists continued to protest, but the movement lost momentum by 2010.