“When and Why Do Social Movements Occur”

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Please read through “When and Why Do Social Movements Occur”. 
What are two of the most interesting things you learned from this excerpt? Also, reviewing – the Library of Congress piece from Wednesday, what struck you the most and why?
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< Goodwin and Jasper - Goodwin+and+Jasper+-+When+and+Why+Do+Socia... Introduction The most frequently asked question about social movements is why they emerge when they do. Not only does this process come first in time for a movement, but it is also basic in a logical sense as well. Until a movement takes shape, there is not much else we can ask about it. Where we think a movement comes from will color the way we view its other aspects too: its participants, goals, tactics, and outcomes. in general, theories of movement origins have focused either on the characteristics of participants or on conditions in the broader environment which the movement faces. Only in recent years have cultural approaches tried to link these two questions. Theorists before the 1960s addressed the question of origins to the exclusion of almost all others, for they frequently saw movements as mistakes that were best avoided! For them, the urgent political issue was how to prevent them, and to do this you needed to know why they appeared. Mass society theo rists, for instance, argued that social movements occurred when a society had lost “intermediary" organizations that discontented individuals could join (Kornhauser 1959). These might be trade unions, community groups, churches--or any other organization that could connect the individual to the government or larger society, aggregating individual preferences and providing outlets for letting off steam. These "regular" organizations were thought to be stable, normal, and healthy, unl social movements. Other theorists emphasized the kind of people they thought likely to join movements, which would form when enough people were “alienated" from the world around them, or had infantile psychologi- cal needs that absorption in a movement might satisfy (Hoffer 1951). In general, early theorists saw movements as a function of discontent in a society, and they saw discontent as something unusual. Today, scholars see social movements as a normal part of politics, and so these early theories are no longer taken very seriously, In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of researchers known as the “resource mobilization school noticed that social movements usually consisted of formal organizations (McCarthy and Zald 1977, excerpted in Chapter 16). And one prerequisite for any organization was a certain level of resources, especially money, to sustain it. They argued that there were always enough discontented people in society to fill The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts, Third Edition. Edited by Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1-2 of 4 LL 13 jih Dashboard Calendar To Do Notifications Inbox 6:20 1 Goodwin and Jasper - 11 INTRODUCTION encouraged many movements to form at the same time. So researchers began to ask what caused entire waves or “cycles” of social muvements to emerge, rather than asking about the origins of single movements (Tarrow 1998: ch. 9). In the cultural approach that has arisen in recent years, not all movements are seen as structurally similar. In one version, movements are linked to broad historical developments, especially the shift from an industrial or manufacturing society to a postindustrial or knowledge society, in which fewer people process physical goods and more deal with symbols and other forms of knowledge (Touraine 1977). Social movements are seen as efforts to control the direction of social change largely by control- ling a society's symbols and self-understandings. They do this by shaping or creating their own collective identities as social movements (Melucci 1996). In cultural approaches, the goals and intentions of protestors are not taken for granted but treated as a puzzle. For instance, the origin of the animal protection movement has been linked to broad changes in sensibilities of the last 200 years that have allowed citizens of the industrial world to recognize the suffering of nonhuman species-and to worry about it (Jasper and Nelkin 1992). Such concerns would simply not have been possible in a society where most people worked on farms and used animals both as living tools (horses, dogs, dairy.cows) and as raw materials (food, leather, etc.). The point is to observe or ask protestors themselves about their perceptions and desires and fantasies, without having a theory that predicts in advance what protestors will think and feel. Perceptions are crucial in this view. So are emotions, which Manuel Castells adds to the mix in the excerpt in Chapter 5 from his book Networks of Outrage and Hope, which sums up his definition of social movements. He focuses on the role of the Internet in both stoking outrage and getting people into the streets during the Egyptian uprising of 2011, but he also acknowledges that revolutions are about seizing public space as well. Only by being together in the streets and squares, and especially Tahrir Square, could the movement in Egypt foster the full feelings of excitement and solidarity and collective identity that kept people there. They felt they were making history. Castells also describes the measures the Mubarak government took to shut down the Internet, as well as the clever ways that the Internet community found to keep going. From the very beginning, protest is an ongoing engagement between protestors and the police. Structural and cultural approaches disagree in part because they have examined different kinds of social movements on the conflict between these two views, see Goodwin and Jasper 2004). Most process theorists have focused on movements of groups who have been systematically excluded from political power and legal rights in other words, groups who are demanding the full rights of citizen- ship. Cultural approaches have been more likely to examine movements of those who already have the formal rights of citizens—who can vote, pressure legislators, run for office--but who nonetheless feel they must step outside normal political channels to have a greater impact (such as the so-called new social movements). In a related difference, structural theorists usually assume that groups of people know what they want already, and merely need an opportunity to go after it; culturalists recognize that in many cases people need to figure out what they want, often because organizers persuade them of it (e.g., that animals can suffer as much as humans, that marijuana is a danger to respectable society, that the U.S. government is the tool of Satan). Movements almost always emerge unexpectedly, even though they appear inevitable in hindsight. (Alexis de Tocqueville said this of revolutions in the mid-nineteenth century.) The civil rights sit-ins of 1960 (analyzed by Aldon Morris in Chapter 20) spread rapidly across the South, to the surprise of many. Protest exploded in Egypt in January 2011 after years of relative quiescence. And no one predicted the rapid spread of the Occupy movement in the fall of 2011. As Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis show in Chapter 4, however, Occupy was not a spontaneous eruption but carefully planned by seasoned activists who were inspired by events in Egypt and elsewhere. Occupy attracted supporters with a wide range of concerns--inequality, money in politics, student debt, labor rights, and so on-by purposely refusing to make formal demands on government or elites and by claiming to be open to virtually everyone (“the 99 percent”) except the wealthiest elite ("the 1 percent") in American society. There are a number of factors to look for in explaining why a movement emerges when and where it does, drawn from all these perspectives: political factors such as divisions between elites and lessened 13 = ?? Dashboard Calendar To Do Notifications Inbox 6:204 < Goodwin and Jasper - 12 INTRODUCTION repression from the police and army; economic conditions such as increased discretionary income, especially among those sympathetic to a movement's cause; organizational conditions such as social network ties or formal organizations among aggrieved populations; demographic conditions such as the increased population density that comes with industrialization (if you live a mile from your nearest neighbor, it is hard to organize collectively); and cultural factors such as moral intuitions or sensibili- ties that support the movement's cause. Usually, potential protestors must frame and understand many of these factors as opportunities before they can take advantage of them. Slogans, catchphrases, or demands that resonate with widely held beliefs and concerns are almost always necessary to attract large numbers of people. Culturalists have reasserted the importance of perceptions, ideas, emotions, and grievances, all of which mobilization and process theorists once thought did not matter or could simply be taken for granted. But these are examined today in the context of broader social and political changes, not in isolation from them. It is not as though people develop goals, then decide to go out and form move- ments to pursue them; there is an interaction between ideas, mobilization, and the broader environ- ment. But some people hold ideas that others do not, so that the question of the origins of a social movement begins to overlap with that of who is recruited to it. Discussion Questions 1 What were the two branches of the women's movement of the late 1960s and how do they differ? 2 In what ways did the New Left and the women's movement spur the development of the gay libera- tion movement? 3 How do structural factors like social networks and cultural factors like emotions and meanings work together to create social movements? 4 Who participated in the Occupy movement, and what were their concerns? Why did Occupy occur in 2011 and not earlier? 5 What are the competing sets of factors that might explain popular participation in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011? 6 Why would lots of social movements appear in some periods, and few in others? In other words, why do they cluster together? 13 = Dashboard Calendar To Do Notifications Inbox 6:204 Goodwin and Jasper - 10 INTRODUCTION a protest movement, but what varied over time—and so explained the emergence of movements were the resources available to nourish it. They accordingly, focused on how movement leaders raise funds, sometimes by appealing to elites, sometimes through direct-mail fundraising (or, today, the Internet) from thousands of regular citizens. As a society grows wealthier, citizens have more discretionary money to contribute to social movement organizations, and so there are more movements than ever before. With this point of view, the focus shifted decisively away from the kinds of individuals who might join a movement and toward the infrastructure necessary to sustain a movement. Today, schol- ars still consider resources an important part of any explanation of movement emergence. The paradigm that has concentrated most on movement emergence is the “political process” approach (Jenkins and Perrow 1977; McAdam 1982; Tarrow 1998). In this view, economic and political shifts occur, usually independently of protestors” own efforts, which open up a space for the movement. Because these scholars perceive movements as primarily political, making demands of the state or elites and asking for changes in laws and policies, they see changes in the state as the most important opportunity a movement needs. Most often, this consists of a slackening in the repression that organizers are otherwise assumed to face, perhaps because political elites are divided (the move- ment may have found some allies within the government), or because political and economic elites have divergent interests. There may be a general crisis in the government, perhaps as a result of losing a foreign war, that distracts leaders or saps their own resources or legitimacy (Skocpol 1979). In many versions, the same factors are seen as explaining the rise of the movement and its relative success (Kitschelt 1986). Alongside mobilization and process approaches, a number of scholars have emphasized the social networks through which people are mobilized into social movements. Although networks have been used primarily to explain who is recruited (as we will see in Part III), the very existence of social ties between potential recruits is seen as a prerequisite for the emergence of a social movement. If most process theorists emphasize conditions the external world (especially the state) that allow a-move- ment to emerge, network theorists look at the structural conditions within the community or popula- tion of those who might be recruited. Those with "dense” ties, or pre-existing formal organizations, will find it easier to mobilize supporters, and build a movement. Jo Freeman's article, “The Origins of the Women's Liberation Movement" (excerpted in Chapter 2), was one of the first accounts of a movement to place netwerks front and center. Freeman was arguing against early theorists who saw discontented and unorganized masses as spontaneously appearing in the streets. (Freeman herself was one of the founders of the younger branch of the movement in Chicago.) She asserts that, if spontaneous uprisings exist at all, they remain small and local unless they have pre-existing organizations and social ties. Those networks are important for communication and vital to the spread of a movement. Like most network theorists, however, Freeman does not discuss the emotions that are the lifeblood of networks: people respond to the information they receive through networks because of affective ties to those in the network. She also admits that organizers can set about building a new network suited to their own purposes, an activity that takes longer than mobilizing or coopting an existirg network. John D’Emilio's account in Chapter 3 of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion in New York City and the sub- sequent development of a militant gay and lesbian movement also emphasizes t?e critical importance of social networks. This apparently spontaneous eruption of gay militancy in fact marked the public emergence of a long repressed, covert urban subculture. D'Emilio out that the movement was also able to draw on pre-existing networks of activists in the radical movements then current among American youth. The gay liberation movement recruited from the ranks of both the New Left and the women's movement. It also borrowed its confrontational tactics from these movements. Many lesbians and gay men, D'Emilio notes, had already been radicalized and educated in the arts of protest by the feminist and antiwar movements. These structural approaches redefined somewhat the central question of movement emergence. Scholars began to see movements as closely linked to one another, because leaders and participants shifted from one to the other or shared social networks, or because the same political conditions 13 = DOD Dashboard Calendar To Do Notifications Inbox