Social Movement Strategy,Tactics, and Collective Identity1

Tactical choices and their execution are closely related to the construction of collective identities in social movements. Studying collective identity has helped scholars understand why people participate in collective action, but the array of tactics that constitute action has not been fully explored. An emerging interest in culture and strategy that situates social movement actors in a field of contention with opponents, allies, and bystanding publics raises questions about the tactics that are used and the construction of collective identity, which is formed in interaction with others. Strategies and tactics reflect collective identities but also provide opportunities for reaffirming or challenging them. Innovative methods can create tension as activists work to resolve what they do with who they feel they are. Conflict studies, nonviolent action studies, and sociological research using concepts such as framing, discourse, protest events, and tactical repertoires offer tools with which to bridge tactics and collective identity.     

Music in Movement: Cultural Politics and Old and New Social Movements

After a period of interdisciplinary openness, contemporary sociology has only recently rediscovered culture. This is especially true of political sociology, where institutional and network analyses, as well as rational choice models, have dominated. This article will offer another approach by focusing on the role of music and the visual arts in relation to the formation of collective identity, collective memory and collective action. Drawing on my own research on the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the memory of slavery in the formation of African-American identity, and its opposite, the place of white power music in contemporary neo-fascist movements, I will outline a model of culture as more than a mobilization resource and of the arts as political mediators.     

Democratizing Rural Economy: Institutional Friction,Sustainable Struggle and the Cooperative Movement*

Abstract Sustainable development demands institutions manage the conflicts and struggles that inevitably arise over material and ideal interests. While current cooperative theory privileges the economic element, a political economy of cooperation emphasizes cooperatives' tentative bridging of economic and political spheres with a democratic ethos. The cooperatives' democratic political structure exists in tension with a capitalist economic structure and other sites of friction. These contradictions are: in the realm of social relations, between production and consumption; in the realm of spatial relations, between the local and the global; and in the realm of collective action, between cooperatives as both traditional as well as new social movements. Where neo‐classical economic models seek to eliminate or reduce these tensions, political economy views these tensions as functional to sustainability by creating an “institutional friction” that facilitates innovation, flexibility and long‐term adaptability. This political economy of cooperation is intended as a step toward the development of a multidimensional sociology of cooperation.     

"Are You an African?" The Politics of Self-Construction in Status-Based Social Movements

Current debates over identity politics hinge on the question of whether status-based social movements encourage parochialism and self-interest or create possibilities for mutual recognition across lines of difference. Our article explores this question through comparative, ethnographic study of two racially progressive social movements, "pro-black" abolitionism and "conscious" hip hop. We argue that status-based social movements not only enable collective identity, but also the personal identities or selves of their participants. Beliefs about the self create openings and obstacles to mutual recognition and progressive social action. Our analysis centers on the challenges that an influx of progressive, anti-racist whites posed to each movement. We examine first how each movement configured movement participation and racial identity and then how whites crafted strategic narratives of the self to account for their participation in a status-based movement they were not directly implicated in. We conclude with an analysis of the implications of these narratives for a critical politics of recognition. Keywords: identity politics, social movements, race, self, hip hop.     

COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN THE STRAIGHT EDGE MOVEMENT:

Although social movement scholars generally study movement organizations, a great deal of significant collective action occurs in diffuse, noninstitutional contexts. This article uses the straight edge movement to explore the less structured aspects of movement activity and discuss the roles collective identity plays in diffuse movements. The straight edge collective identity promotes individual action within the context of a commitment to a strong identity. This paper shows how a strong collective identity is the foundation of diffuse movements, providing "structure," a basis for commitment, and guidelines for individualized participation. Finally, the article demonstrates that organizational conceptualizations of social movements fail to capture important avenues of cultural protest.     

Populism as a Collective Action Master Frame for Transnational Mobilization

Occupy Wall Street, the Greek and Spanish indignados , and other important movements swept across the Western world from 2011 onward, redefining political and social conflict during the global economic meltdown of the Great Recession. These movements have earned well‐deserved academic attention, but the resulting scholarship is lacking a crucial pillar: a comparative analysis of the collective action frames employed by movement entrepreneurs. To identify the master frame at work and uncover shared processes of strategic meaning making and collective identity construction during this transnational cycle of contention, I analyze primary data, exploring diagnostic, prognostic, and adversarial framing elements as found in the movements’ widely circulated manifestos. The populist frame emerges as the master frame of the cycle, encapsulating the adversarial discourse of the dominant dichotomy of a noble “people” and a corrupt “elite” that resonated strongly with mobilized individuals and allowed movement entrepreneurs to construct a transnationally shared collective identity across populations of widely diverging social, political, and economic backgrounds.     

Music and Social Movements

Music is a key component of social movements. This article addresses the relationship between music and social movements through four foci: collective identity, free space, emotions, and social movement culture. Collective identity is developed and nurtured within free spaces through the use of music. These spaces are often rife with emotions that are instrumental in development of collective identity. A social movement culture may develop as these processes unfold. Music is part of this culture and serves as an important mechanism for solidarity when participants move beyond free spaces to more contested ones. Examples of song lyrics demonstrate these processes. Research on music and social movements, it is argued here, can be enhanced by addressing technology and popular culture.     

Creating Cohesion from Diversity: The Challenge of Collective Identity Formation in the Global Justice Movement*

Collective identity formation is important because it plays a crucial role in sustaining movements over time. Studying collective identity formation in autonomous groups in the Global Justice Movement poses a challenge because they encompass a multiplicity of identities, ideologies, issues, frames, collective action repertoires, and organizational forms. This article analyzes the process of collective identity formation in three anti‐capitalist globalization groups in Madrid, Spain, based on 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork. The author argues that for new groups practicing participatory democracy the regular face‐to‐face assemblies are the crucial arena in which collective identity can form and must be both effective and participatory in order to foster a sense of commitment and belonging. The article raises the possibility that scholars should consider what seems to be an oxymoron: the possible benefits of “failure” for social movements.     

The Football Lads Alliance and Democratic Football Lad’s Alliance: an insight into the dynamism and diversification of Britain’s counter-jihad movement

ABSTRACT

In response to 2017’s terror attacks in Britain, the Football Lads Alliance (FLA) and latterly, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA) were formed. Self-described as street-protest movements that encourage rival ‘football firms’ to reject acrimonious hostilities to unite against the Islamist extremism and extremists it believes are threatening Britain, its culture, values and way of life. As new incarnations of the British counter-jihad movement, this article affords new insights into how the movement and constituent parts are dynamically identifying and mobilising behind an increasingly diverse range of identities and socio-political issues. Contributing new knowledge about the FLA and DFLA, neither of which have been subjected to scholarly inquiry, this article makes a timely contribution to an embryonic scholarly canon. Contextualising the counter-jihad movement, this article explores how ‘football’ afforded the FLA and DFLA with a shared identity around which to mobilise. Highlighting how this is different to other far-right and counter-jihadi groups, their ideologies and activities are explored in relation to their establishment, support base and function. In conclusion, this article positions both groups within an ‘identity-oriented’ paradigm of new social movements as a means of offering new understanding and explanation.     

Social media teams as digital vanguards: the question of leadership in the management of key Facebook and Twitter accounts of Occupy Wall Street,Indignados and UK Uncut

Recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the US, the indignados/15M movement in Spain, and UK Uncut have witnessed the rise of social media teams, small activist groups responsible for managing high-visibility and collective activist social media accounts. Going against dominant assertions about the leaderless character of contemporary digital movements, the article conceptualises social media teams as ‘digital vanguards’, collective and informal leadership structures that perform a role of direction of collective action through the use of digital communication. Various aspects of the internal functioning of vanguards are discussed: (a) their formation and composition; (b) processes of internal coordination; (c) struggles over the control of social media accounts. The article reveals the profound contradiction between the leadership role exercised by social media teams and the adherence of digital activists to techno-libertarian values of openness, horizontality, and leaderlessness. The espousal of these principles has run against the persistence of power and leadership dynamics leading to bitter conflicts within these teams that have hastened the decline of the movements they served. These problems call for a new conceptual framework to better render the nature of leadership in digital movements and for new political practices to better regulate the management of social media assets.     

Social Movement Endurance: Collective Identity and the Rastafari

In this paper we argue that a movement's longevity depends on its ability to develop and sustain a strong sense of collective identity. We investigate social movement endurance by examining the Rastafari, whose membership is comprised primarily of disadvantaged Jamaicans of African descent. While many social movements fade after a short-lived peak, the Rastafari not only has persisted, but it also has become globally important. Despite its radical posture and its perceived threat to the Jamaican established order, the movement has prevailed for more than six decades. On the basis of a number of concepts derived from different theoretical traditions in social movement theory, we examine the dynamic processes involved in the construction of collective identity among the Rastafari. We are particularly interested in the concepts of "cognitive liberation,""movement culture/boundary structure," and "the politics of signification." These concepts allow us to describe and analyze the key dimensions of the Rastafarian collective identity. This framework, we argue, enhances our understanding of collective identity as well as the processes contributing to social movement longevity.     

Culture Within Sites,Culture as Resources,and Culture as Wider Contexts: A Typology of How Culture Works in Social Movement Theory

Sociologists of social movements agree that culture matters for studying collective action, and have proposed a variety of theoretical concepts to understand culture and mobilization, including framing, free spaces, and collective identity. Despite this, what we mean when we say “culture matters” remains unclear. In this paper, I draw on 30 years of social movement theory and research to construct a typology of three ways that culture is seen as shaping social movement activity: (i) culture renders particular sites fruitful for social movements to mobilize out of; (ii) culture serves as a resource that assists in movement action; and (iii) culture provides wider contexts that shape movement activity. This typology represents the analytic building blocks of theories about culture and social movements, and is presented towards the end of clarifying and sharpening our theoretical concepts. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research that draw on, refine, and extend these three building blocks.     

‘Not that kind of atheist’: scepticism as a lifestyle movement

This article examines atheist activists from a lifestyle movement perspective. I focus on how atheist activists adopt the term ‘sceptic’ as a distinct identity marker to represent their growing interest in other types of activism beyond atheist community building and criticism of religious beliefs. My data come from thirty-five interviews with Canadian atheist activists and participant observation in the province of Alberta. In contrast to previous social movement approaches to atheist activism, I deemphasize the importance of collective identity and instead attend to personal identity as the site of social change. My findings show that being a sceptic is a personally meaningful identity in the context of a relatively weak secularist collective identity. Moreover, atheist activists who also identify as sceptics wish to expand the boundaries of the atheist movement to include individualistic projects of personal affirmation based on science and critical thinking. This work contributes to our understanding of the everyday activities of activists who engage in individual action in the absence of a strong collective identity. In particular, this article expands our understanding of lifestyle movements beyond the current focus on socially conscious consumption. Instead, I return to the roots of lifestyle movement theory, that is, how one’s everyday choices serve as a form of protest. Finally, this work contributes to atheism scholarship, which has neglected the diversity of individual identities within atheist organisations and among atheist activists.     

Multitudinous identities: a qualitative and network analysis of the 15M collective identity

The emergence of network-movements since 2011 has opened the debate around the way in which social media and networked practices make possible innovative forms of collective identity. We briefly review the literature on social movements and ‘collective identity’, and show the tension between different positions stressing either organization or culture, the personal or the collective, aggregative or networking logics. We argue that the 15M (indignados) network-movement in Spain demands conceptual and methodological innovations. Its rapid emergence, endurance, diversity, multifaceted development and adaptive capacity, posit numerous theoretical and methodological challenges. We show how the use of structural and dynamic analysis of interaction networks (in combination with qualitative data) is a valuable tool to track the shape and change of what we term the ‘systemic dimension’ of collective identities in network-movements. In particular, we introduce a novel method for synchrony detection in Facebook activity to identify the distributed, yet integrated, coordinated activity behind collective identities. Applying this analytical strategy to the 15M movement, we show how it displays a specific form of systemic collective identity we call ‘multitudinous identity’, characterized by social transversality and internal heterogeneity, as well as a transient and distributed leadership driven by action initiatives. Our approach attends to the role of distributed interaction and transient leadership at a mesoscale level of organizational dynamics, which may contribute to contemporary discussions of collective identity in network-movements.     

Masses,Crowds, Communities,Movements: Collective Action in the Internet Age

This article investigates two questions: One, how might the very differently structured social collectives on the Internet – masses, crowds, communities and movements – be classified and distinguished? And two, what influence do the technological infrastructures in which they operate have on their formation, structure, and activities? For this, we differentiate between two main types of social collectives: non-organized collectives, which exhibit loosely coupled collective behavior, and collective actors with a separate identity and strategic capability. Further, we examine the newness, or distinctive traits, of online-based collectives, which we identify as being the strong and hitherto non-existent interplay between the technological infrastructures that these collectives are embedded in and the social processes of coordination and institutionalization they must engage in, in order to maintain their viability over time. Conventional patterns of social dynamics in the development and stabilization of collective action are now systematically intertwined with technology-induced processes of structuration.     

The role of emotions during the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in light of repertoires

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role of emotions during the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in the context of collective level emotions in mobilizations. Emotions are understood as a catalyst whose mechanism of action is performed through repertories. This article seeks to answer how emotions, having a triggering role, are performed through repertoires while accelerating mobilization against authoritarian orders, creating the intersection of individual and collective level emotions in public spheres of Tunisia and Egypt, and thus affecting the transnational diffusion of emotions. The significant reason to address emotions is to explain what stimulated the Arab Spring and how it spread over the region starting from Tunisia and Egypt. This article synthesizes two literatures: International Relations (IR) and social movements studies in light of emotions and components of repertoires which are as follows: collective action, collective identity, symbolic politics, network society and information politics.     

Immigrant rights and social movements

The disciplinary fields of immigration and social movements have largely developed as two distinct subareas of sociology. Scholars contend that immigrant rights, compared to other movements, have been given less attention in social movement research. Studies of immigrant‐based movements in recent decades have reached a stage whereby we can now assess how immigrant movement scholarship informs the general social movement literature in several areas. In this article, we show the contributions of empirical studies of immigrant movements in four primary arenas of social movement scholarship: (a) emergence; (b) participation; (c) framing; and (d) outcomes. Contemporary immigrant struggles offer social movement scholarship opportunities to incorporate these campaigns and enhance current theories and concepts as earlier protest waves advanced studies of collective action.     

Toward a Social Theory of Resilience: Social Systems,Cultural Systems,and Collective Action in Transitioning Forest‐Based Communities

Impacts from post‐Fordist and poststaples economic transition in the Canadian natural resource sector have resulted in dramatic challenges to the livelihoods of many rural residents and the viability of many rural communities. This study seeks to understand community response to economic transition through a lens of social ecological resilience. This article puts forward Archer's theory of cultural morphogenesis as an analogous model of social ecological change that focuses attention on cultural systems, cultural elaboration, and collective action within an adaptive cycle of resilience. With case material from focused ethnographies of two forest‐dependent communities, we identify distinctive interactions between culture and agency over time that condition community response to change, and we make an analytical distinction between the social system and cultural system. These insights point to catalysts for collective action and adaptation within a resilient cultural realm that extend beyond institutional factors such as economic dependency or political opportunity. By integrating culture, we also deepen the social theory contribution to social‐ecological resilience.     

Is there a European social work identity?

The aim of this paper is to examine whether at this point in time the notion of a ‘European social work identity’ can be sustained. The paper commences with some brief consideration of theories of identity, and particularly draws attention to social constructionist identity theory, highlighting its focus on identity as a process. Ideas about what constitutes ‘collective identity’ are then examined. From this, two particular models of collective identity are presented which are helpful for understanding cultural identities. These are the more ‘traditional’ notion of collective culture being evidenced by the presence of shared histories and traditions, and the more social constructionist view of collective processes and action to form identities – whether imposed by the state or generated by the people – as constitutive of identities in themselves. ‘European identity’, and then ‘European social work identity’, will then be examined using these models of collective identity. The paper concludes that using social constructionist versions of identity (identity as a process of collectivisation), European social work identity can certainly be established.     

Paperwork,rotas, words and posters: an anthropological account of some inner London childminders' encounters with professionalisation

An association with mothering is viewed as the greatest stumbling block in the path to raising the quality and status of childminding. As a broadly conceived rite de passage, this article suggests, professionalisation offers childminders a symbolic route out. It is a ritual process which demands the production of ‘fabrications’; particular artefacts, special words and appropriate modes of behaviour which are produced specifically to meet the regulatory gaze. When childminders engage in performative professionalism, it is proposed, they gain recognition as bona fide members of the children's workforce, but their work is changed in ways which make it less meaningful for them. Presenting a phenomenology of their encounter with a widely diffused ‘technology of quality’, the paper reveals how childminders' collective identity is both endangered and engendered in struggles over particular cultural forms. Interpreting data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork with childminders in inner London, the article draws on and extends work focused on audit culture and performativity in secondary schools by synthesising it with feminist work on women's knowledge and the ethics of care.