Social Movements and Protest introduces social science students to the shifting terrain of ‘social movement studies’, providing them with a chronology of the field and bringing them up to date with conceptual developments. The book is first and foremost for students studying at the undergraduate level. It aims to encourage them to critically engage with the different ways in which social movements have been conceptualized and researched, and to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. The book argues that critical developments in the field have moved in the direction of a ‘relational approach’ to social movements, which it draws out and supports across the various chapters. It also argues that by engaging with ‘new cases and new contexts’ – ranging from lifestyle movements and terrorism, to globalization, new media, and protest in authoritarian regimes – we can stretch and problematize existing conceptualizations of social movements in ways that force us to rethink ‘what social movements are’. In this respect, the book raises four main issues: the necessity of strains, resources, and organization; the centrality of the state; the desirability of collective identity; and the distinction between ‘unorganized, individual action’ and ‘organized, collective action’.

In this chapter, we will consider the challenges to conceptualizations of social movements and protest that come from three interlinked sources: globalization, the growing trend in ‘transnational activism’ (Tarrow, 2006), and the rise of ‘new media’ (by which I mean ICTs, including mobile communications and social media). Globalization has involved the spread of ‘people, capital, goods, and ideas’ (Adamson, 2005, 31) across national borders in ways that have provided social movements with a growing infrastructure to ‘go global’. This trend – like globalization itself – is not, historically speaking, ‘new’. Since 1989 (and the collapse of communism), however, globalization of a particular kind has stepped up its pace, extending a capitalist economic model and Western consumer culture across the globe, which is driven by multinational corporations and international political and economic institutions (Waters, 1995; Smith and Johnston, 2002; Cohen and Kennedy, 2013). This ‘dominant mode’ of globalization has been seen to provide a new issue environment for social movements, and new targets of activism (Sklair, 1998).

The ‘unknowable’ path of history creates challenges for how we think about and understand social movements. Social movements are, by their very nature, ‘unpredictable’ phenomena. The essence of collective efforts orientated towards social change is, as Herbert Blumer pointed out, cultural innovation. Although we have seen that innovation in social movements should not be overstated (with lots of borrowing of tactics and ideas from other movements, such that recurring ‘repertoires of protest’ form), we have also seen that cases of social movements, and the contexts in which they operate, undergo substantial change and alter the very activity, organizational form, and protest tactics of movements themselves. Globalization and the rise of new technological contexts associated with new media, for example, have, for some, altered our very idea of ‘what social movements are’, the mobilization conditions on which they depend, and the potential that they have for social transformation (Chesters and Welsh, 2006).

In this chapter, we will consider variations of new social movement (NSM) theory, which developed through the work of three European thinkers from the 1970s onwards: Jürgen Habermas (German), Alain Touraine (French), and Alberto Melucci (Italian). Each of these thinkers is involved in challenging the conceptualization of social movements as manifestations of ‘class conflict’ offered by Karl Marx, which had been extremely influential in European thinking. Instead, they pointed to fundamental changes in industrial society from the 1960s that had caused a decline in class-based mobilizations and the emergence of NSMs concerning identity, cultural values, and ways of living. They suggest to us that the battleground of social movements has fundamentally shifted from the workplace to culture, and our understanding of ‘what social movements are’, has to shift along with it.

NSM theory is also interesting because it provides a challenge to the rationalist approaches of the last two chapters. In contrast to them, it suggests that contemporary social movements cannot be viewed empirically as the organized, rational pursuit of shared interests. Nor do they involve making claims on the state and political institutions. Instead, they suggest that we should view social movements analytically as the construction of collective identities that express society's key conflicts, which are cultural in nature. As a consequence, conceptualizations of social movements as ‘political struggle’, give way to conceptualizations of social movements as ‘cultural struggle’. This approach has several merits, not least the ability to refresh our very notion of what ‘political protest’ is, and looks like. Nevertheless, it generates its insights at a cost, leaving behind, for good, ideas on class struggle that, if contemporary Marxist scholars are anything to go by, can actually aid an understanding of the political significance of action taken to reinvent everyday life.

This chapter is concerned with the ‘political process’ approach to social movements which concentrates explicitly on the ‘external environment’ in which social movements operate, and gives this environment explanatory weight when it comes to accounting for why social movements emerge in certain places at certain times, and whether or not they have successful outcomes.

The approach is labelled ‘political’ process because the main writers have suggested that the most important aspects of the environment that movements face are political ones. In fact, the state and political institutions play a central role, it is argued, in the emergence and fortunes of social movements; a claim that we will critically evaluate in later chapters. In looking at how political process theory has studied the external environment of movements, we will encounter some central debates – not least the debate surrounding how to relate political structures and culture to social movement mobilization – that will require us to put our ‘relational’ thinking to work once again.

We began the book with a consideration of ‘collective behaviour’ (CB), and in this penultimate chapter, we embark upon a consideration of ‘misbehaviour’. ‘Misbehaviour’ literally means not behaving in the way in which you are required to behave. ‘Good behaviour’ (compliant behaviour) is the basis of the social order. We learnt from Blumerin Chapter 2 that behaviour that subverts the ‘cultural pattern’ (society's rules, norms, and expectations) rather than conforming to it, is the secret to changing the social order. In this chapter, we employ the concept of ‘misbehaviour’, taken from organizational studies, to consider not only organized forms of resistance, but ‘every impulse to dissent’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999, 39).

We have come across a number of indications in the book as to why looking at protest outside social movement organizations (SMOs) could be important. Sometimes, social movements do not engage in direct confrontations with the state, but focus upon symbolic struggles instead (see Chapter 5). This means that, excepting for a few visible moments of public protest, social movement activity can be ‘submerged’ (Melucci, 1980, 1989), and can involve individuals in constructing cultural alternatives, which, while not divorced from collective efforts at change, can involve them in carrying out collective action ‘on their own’.

This chapter is concerned with ‘collective behaviour’ (CB), a subfield of American Sociology which claimed social movements and protest as its subject matter in the first half of the twentieth century and reflected, in particular, on the rise of anti-democratic movements like fascism. CB should not be thought of as one united approach, but instead a field of research interest that attracted sociologists of very different theoretical persuasions. The two sociologists that we will look at here are Herbert Blumer (a symbolic interactionist) and Neil Smelser (a structural functionalist). We will delve into what these theoretical labels mean in the course of the chapter, but only cursory sociological knowledge is needed to know that symbolic interactionism is heavily critical of structural functionalism (and vice versa), meaning that the leading figures of CB in no way propose the same approach to social movements and protest. Blumer and Smelser are united in their desire to understand ‘collective behaviour’, not in their perspective on it.

Having said this, the tendency of critics has been to lump together the different strands of CB in order to highlight the common thread in their thinking. CB theorists of whatever persuasion, argues Doug McAdam (1982), share the assumption that social problems are the root-cause of protest, that social problems ignite psychological grievances and strong emotions, and that these emotions push individuals over the edge and out on to the streets. This common thread leads to a conceptualization of CB as ‘irrational group behaviour’ caused by ‘strains’ in society, and the ‘grievances’ they create for people. Like a bottle of pop once shaken, society is just waiting for those ‘moments of madness’ when frustrated individuals duly explode.

If social movements cannot be thought of as the irrational expression of shared grievances, then how can they be conceptualized? In this chapter, we consider the answer given by resource mobilization theory (RMT), which emerged in the 1970s in the US in response to widespread dissatisfaction with collective behaviour (CB) theory. RMT remains a dominant and diverse approach to social movements. Here, we focus on one version first offered by J. D. McCarthy and Mayer Zald (1977), whilst in the next chapter we pursue the more structural and political version of mobilization theory known as the ‘political process’/‘contentious politics’ approach. It is fair to say, however, that they both grow out of the same set of core assumptions offered by ‘rational action theory’ (RAT), and both share the same set of problems because of it.

First, we will engage with RMT’s alternative to CB, including tracing their main concerns to RAT and Mancur Olson's (1965) ‘collective action problem’. We will look at the conceptual tools offered by McCarthy and Zald for understanding the process of resource mobilization, and consider what kind of resources are important to social movements. We will see that the idea of movements as ‘multi-organizational fields’ has led to a contemporary conceptualization of social movements as ‘networks’ rather than discrete ‘organizations’. We end by considering the implications of this shift, which, I suggest, requires us to adopt a ‘relational’ rather than ‘rational’ logic of collective action.

Erving Goffman's opening statement is his assessment of the field of sociological theory in the 1960s. This book is concerned with a subfield of sociology called ‘social movement studies’, which is multi-disciplinary, involving political scientists, economists, social psychologists, and human geographers. Modern social movement studies – which supplies the predominant conceptual framework for studying social movements and protest today – can be dated back to the early 1970s with theoretical developments in the US and Europe. Modern social movement studies however has an important predecessor in the shape of the field of collective behaviour (CB), a subfield of US sociology which claimed social movements and protest as its subject matter in the first part of the twentieth century, alongside the study of crowds, mobs, crazes, panics, fads, and fashions. CB reflected upon non-democratic movements, like fascism, and as such formed an understanding of social movements as the irrational expression of shared grievances, arising from deprivation or the alienating conditions of ‘mass society’.

CB theorists, like the sociologist Herbert Blumer (1951 [1946]), made it clear that while much of the time social science concentrates upon questions of social order and reproduction, questions of social change are equally as important to study. Indeed, social movements have fascinated sociologists for decades because they open up the possibility of exploring the relationship between human action and social structures. Social movements are those collective efforts orientated towards social change that point to circumstances in which creative human action actually shapes and alters social structures, rather than being shaped by them. The study of social movements therefore brings to our attention those moments when, as Karl Marx put it, ‘people make history’.

This chapter explores the challenge to conceptualizations of social movements that comes from a consideration of terrorism. We will look at theories of political violence, but focus especially upon the kind of violence that targets ‘non-combatants’, like civilians, and therefore attracts the label of ‘terrorism’ (Goodwin, 2004). World events have placed terrorism on the agenda for many social science disciplines. The September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC by Al-Qaeda raised questions about why ‘ugly’ social movements (Tarrow, 1998, 6), like terrorist movements had not been on the list of cases studied by social movement scholars. Is it because terrorism is a ‘special case’ of collective action, best left to ‘terrorism studies’? Or can social movement studies help us to understand terrorism?

This chapter will make three points about the value of social movement theory for the study of terrorism: first, social movement theorists from different persuasions are adept at explaining political violence as one of the possible repertiores employed by social movements, viewing its adoption largely as the result of an interaction between the movement and its political context (Della Porta, 1995; Tilly, 2003; Smelser, 2007). On its own however, this analysis does not explain the political violence particular to terrorism. As Jeff Goodwin (2004) argues, terrorism requires us to explain how activists come to employ violence against civilians as a political strategy. This, he suggests, necessitates the kind of cultural constructionist approach which we looked at in Chapter 4.