SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS COLLECTIVE ACTION
Social movements SM organizations are
collective actors
Social Movement - Collective actions by
relatively powerless challenger groups using
extra-institutional means to promote or resist
social change (political, cultural, economic,
ethnic, sexual) Civil Rights Movement Pro-life
Pro-choice SMs Handgun control Social Movement
Organization (SMO) - A named formal organization
engaged in actions to advance a movements goals
Movements often have many SMOs pursuing change
agendas Greenpeace Sierra Club Friends of
Earth Audubon Society Earth Now!
Is Islamic fundamentalism an international
religious/social movement? Are Hamas, Muslim
Brotherhood, Al-Qaida Islamic Jihad all SMOs?
Should social movement definition include both
ends (revolution, reform) means (lobbying,
terrorism)?
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Old New Social Movements
Major 19th 20th c. social movements were
national struggles for independence from colonial
rule (Norway, India, Algeria) and working-class
movements for union collective bargaining rights.
U.S. Civil Rights Movement of 1950-60s was a new
type of movement based on social-group
identities. Deprived minorities sought rights of
political inclusion Latinos, Native Americans,
women, gays lesbians, aged, disabled, ...
With post-industrialization, many New Social
Movements emerged around cultural values,
lifestyles middle-class interests human
rights, environmental, peace/anti-war, social
justice, consumer protection, animal liberation,
Some new social movements draw
international participants and rely on
transnational networks to achieve goals
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Penetrating the Polity
When SMs gain recognition, legitimacy, and access
to the polity, they cease to be outside
challengers. Transformed into institutionalized
interest groups, they now compete to influence
state/govtl policies, using conventional
political tactics such as campaign donations and
lobbying.
Social Mvt 1
Government
SM 2
SM 3
Interest Group 1
IG 2
IG 3
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Movement Recruitment Mobilization
Dense networks provide pre-existing channels for
recruiting participants and micro-mobilization
for collective action. Movement activists target
friends, family, coworkers whose shared social
identities attitudinal affinities for movement
values and goals may predispose them to
participate.
High-risk/cost activism raises barriers to
mobilizing SM supporters Rational decision is
not to participate when perceived low success
outweighed by potentially great cost e.g., state
violence, loss of job (König 1999)
But, networks can offset negative rational
calculations, if ego values preserving or forging
strong social ties to SM adherents. To assure
compliant control, religious cults often recruit
weakly tied persons force members to cut links
to family and friends.
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Mississippi Freedom Summer
Doug McAdams SM recruitment model emphasized
strong identification with values, prior
activism, and integration in supportive networks.
Evidence for this model came from 961 applicants
to SNCCs 1964 MS Freedom Summer black-voter
registration drive.
Compared to 241 who withdrew, the 720 who went to
Mississippi had more orgl affiliations, higher
levels of past civil rights activity, more
extensive stronger prior ties to other Freedom
Summer participants.
The differences are especially pronounced in the
two strong tie categories, with participants
listing more than twice the number of volunteers
and nearly three times the number of activists as
the withdrawals (McAdam 1986 see also McAdam
1988 Fernandez McAdam 1988 McAdam Fernandez
1990 McAdam and Paulsen 1993).
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Collective Behavior
Social movement action is an example of diverse
forms of collective behavior, including fads,
rumors, strikes, panics, rubber-necking, football
riots, lynch mobs, herd stampedes
Gabriel Tarde and Gustav Le Bon tried to
understand collective behaviors as mass social
psychology. The Laws of Imitation and the
dynamics of a group mind could explain the
apparently irrational aspects of collective
actions.
Contemporary collective action models seek to
explain how behaviors diffuse among actors in a
collective context, while emphasizing how
decisions to participate involve the rational
choices of interdependent decision-makers. The
eruption and spread of collective behaviors
depends on social relations within a group and on
the imitators identification with the
instigators.
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Threshold Models
The decision whether to join a collective action
can be analyzed as a threshold process. Derived
from percolation theory, a critical threshold
(tipping point) generates an aggregated critical
mass below the threshold, a collective action
will fail but if mass exceeds the threshold,
collective action can grow exponentially.
In a crowd, egos decision to riot depends on
others actions. Although instigators start to
riot before anyone else does, others join only if
each perceives a specific critical N (or X) of
troublemakers. Small shifts in personal
thresholds can yield diverse group outcomes.
Mark Granovetters (1978) threshold model linked
individuals behaviors to their perceptions of
the aggregate level of action. The probability
distribution of everyones thresholds determines
whether an entire crowd reaches the critical mass
required for rapidly escalating and widespread
collective action.
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Individual assumed to be rational, subjective
expected utility maximizers. The threshold is
simply that point where the perceived benefits to
an individual of doing the thing in question
(here joining the riot) exceed the perceived
costs (p. 1422). Formal model seeks to predict,
from the set of individual thresholds, the
ultimate numbers of rioters and nonrioters. For
example, if the large majority of on-lookers must
observe more than half the crowd rioting before
they would join, then the riot will fizzle.
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Precipitating Urban Riots
The major predictor of size severity of 1960s
urban riots was the absolute size of a citys
black population (Spilerman 1976).
Can thresholds explain this city-size
differential? ..a city has, each time a crowd
gathers, the same probability of reaching this
particular equilibrium number of rioters. If
this probability is, say, .10, then we may
think of each incident as a Bernoulli trial with
probability of success (of a large riot) of .10.
In a small city with only one incident, no riot
occurs 90 of time but in a larger city with 10
incidents, the chance of no riot falls to (.90)10
.35, even though the distribution of thresholds
is the same (Granovetter 1978).
How to incorporate networks into threshold
models? Lower-threshold persons mobilized by a
few key alters, higher-threshold persons by large
aggregate participation. Strong links mobilize
participation if low thresholds, weak links
mobilize if high thresholds (Chwe 1999)
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References
Fernandez Roberto M. and Doug McAdam. 1988.
Social Networks and Social Movements
Multiorganizational Fields and Recruitment to
Mississippi Freedom Summer. Sociological Forum
3357-382. Granovetter, Mark. 1978. Threshold
Models of Collective Behavior. American Journal
of Sociology 831420-1443. König, Thomas. 1999.
Patterns of Movement Recruitment. Paper
presented to American Sociological Association
meeting. Le Bon, Gustav. 1895. La psychologie des
foules (The Crowd). Paris Félix Alcan. McAdam,
Doug. 1988. Recruitment to High-Risk Activism
The Case of Freedom Summer. American Journal of
Sociology 9264-90. McAdam, Doug and Roberto M.
Fernandez. 1990. Microstructural Bases of
Recruitment to Social Movements. Research in
Social Movements, Conflicts and Change
121-33. McAdam, Doug and Ronnelle Paulsen.
1993. Specifying the Relationship between Social
Ties and Activism. American Journal of Sociology
99640-667. Spilerman, Seymour. 1976.
Structural Characteristics of Cities and
Severity of Racial Disorders. American
Sociological Review 41771-793. Tarde, Gabriel.
1890. Les lois de limitation (The Laws of
Imitation). Paris Félix Alcan.