Social Media and Social Movements

What role does social media play in social movements and political unrest? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google have all been cited as important components in social revolutions, including those in Tunisia, Egypt, Iceland, Spain, and the global Occupy movement. This essay explores social science claims about the relationship between social networking and social movements. It examines research done on the relationship between social networking, the promotion of activism, and the offline participation in the streets. Can the technology of social networking help activists to achieve their goals? If so, is it just one of many tools they may use, or is the technology so powerful that the right use will actually tip the scales in favor of the social movement? This scholarship divides into optimistic, pessimistic, and ambivalent approaches, turning on an oft‐repeated question: will the revolution be tweeted?     

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.     

Humor and Social Movements

At first glance, humor and politics may appear oppositional. Politics is often understood as serious, important, and grave, while humor is perceived as lighthearted and frivolous. Beneath the surface, however, it is evident that humor and politics are actually inextricably linked and have been throughout political history. This paper interrogates the tensions between humor and seriousness, importance and frivolity, and legitimate and dismissible to examine the manifestations of humor in social movement protest. I discuss how humor is used as a communicative and emotional strategy for social movement activists and organizations and focus on two constellations of movement humor: humor directed outside the group in the forms of tactics and frames, which I term external humor, and the role of humor in leadership, collective identity, and emotional labor, termed internal humor. To illustrate the role of humor in protest, I integrate examples from scholarly research, media depictions, and participant observation data to provide examples of how humor is manifest as an external tactic, social movement frame, and its potential role in strengthening ties to leadership and collective identity. The essay concludes by highlighting some potential paths for future study about the relationship between humor, ideology, identity, and power.     

Social Movements and Social Networks: Introduction

In this Introduction we provide a brief literature review of work on social networks and social movements, a brief introduction to certain key concepts and debates in social network analysis, and a brief introduction to the articles which follow in the special issue.     

Social Movements and New Media

This article explores the contention that social movements are a significant social force transforming societies through their engagement with new media, such as the Internet, Web 2.0, and digital communications, which are seen as capable of facilitating new power structures. Utilizing della Porta and Diani's framework, it considers how new media technologies may be shaping the structure, identity, opportunity, and protest dimensions of social movements. It concludes by suggesting that new media does offer important opportunities for cost‐effective networking, interpretive framing, mobilization, and repertoires of protest action. However, their adoption does not represent the creation of entirely new virtual social movements but rather a new means of providing existing social movement organisations, local activist networks, and street‐level protest with a trans‐national capacity to collaborate, share information, and communicate with a wider audience. Such new media‐enabled social action is both more congruent with a politics of identity but may also increasingly be competing within a media environment saturated by user‐generated content.     

Social Movements and Tactical Choice

For much of the past 40 years, the study of social movement tactics has viewed organizers' choices as driven by a desire to maximize efficacy and efficiency within a context of scarce resources and structural constraints. As sociologists increasingly turned toward culture, a new orientation emerged to view tactical choice as a process of gathering, interpreting, and evaluating information within dynamic, uncertain, and often‐contradictory contexts. The importance of the cultural turn has been amply demonstrated in studies of such things as identities, emotions, and collective action frames, but the full implications of its insights continue to be discovered. Four insights in particular warrant greater attention: many core concepts in the study of social movements have an interpretive, subjective, and contingent nature; tactics are a means of communication; social structures are imbued with culture, and culture is thoroughly structured; and social movements sometimes behave irrationally, and what appears to be irrational behavior often is in fact rational. I briefly discuss three areas of scholarship – collective identities, diffusion, and institutional fields – that demonstrate innovative ways that sociologists continue to combine and incorporate these insights and point the way toward a more sophisticated understanding of social movements and tactical choice.     

Social Movements and Collective Memory

This article summarizes key findings and provides suggestions for further research in the literature that combines social movements and collective memory. Existing reviews of the collective memory literature highlight the macro and micro levels of analysis; studying movements and memory adds a meso level of analysis. This review covers all three levels and for each level discusses research methods, the social consequences of memory activism, recurring patterns, and explanations. Suggestions for future research emphasize the concept of repertoire and its relation to memory. Tactical repertoires and cultural repertoires provide the resources needed to construct collective memories, and repertoires empower memory activists to engage the political sphere, create change, and nurture solidarity within movement organizations. Because the idea of a repertoire uncovers a process of remembering and is already a widely used term in social movement studies, it provides a resonant tool for future movement and memory research.     

Toward a Class-Cultural Theory of Social Movements: Reinterpreting New Social Movements

This paper examines the relationship between social class and social mobilization through reviewing the case of new social movements. The middle-class membership of new social movements is well documented but poorly explained by current New Class, New Social Movement, and Cultural Shift theories. These theories fail to recognize the interdependence between interests, values, and expressed ideas. Class culture provides an alternative framework for interpreting the complex relationships between class interests and consciousness in these movements. Through a comparison of working- and middle-class cultures, it is proposed that social class orders consciousness and shapes the interpretation of interests. Class cultures produce distinct class forms of political and organizational behavior while not defining any particular content of movement issues or politics. In particular, the middle-class membership of new social movements is explained by the cultural form of these movements which is distinctly middle class.     

Funding for Social Movements

Funding is critical for social movements. Our understanding of the relationship between social movements and funders has been shaped by broader theories used to understand movement dynamics. This review examines our changing understanding of the role of funding for movements, paying particular attention to the relative costs and benefits of funding from different groups of actors, such as constituents, foundations, governments, and corporations. While these groups provide critical resources to movements, they can also potentially alter movements by channeling them into less contentious actions and more bureaucratized forms. I explore three current debates in the area of social movement funding. First, current work assesses the relationships of funding, particularly how the interactions between funders and funded groups shape the types of actions in which social movements can engage. Second, social movement funding is embedded within a larger context, and current work is attempting to better understand the role of this context by engaging in comparative research. Finally, debates surrounding the rising importance of corporate funding for movements focus on how these new streams of revenue could help (or hinder) social movement activities.     

After New Social Movements

This article combines an historical and a sociological approach. Historically, it distinguishes three main moments in the history of social movements since the 1960s. After working-class movements, which corresponded to industrial societies, came the so-called new social movements, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and these were followed by a third generation of actors deserving a new denomination as alter-globalization activists. Sociologically, this articles analyses the differences between these three figures from the point of view of the identity of the actors, of their relationship to culture, to their adversary, to their subjectivity, or to their framework for action (national or otherwise). The article introduces the concept of anti-movement, which is illustrated with the contemporary cases of ‘global’ anti-movements such as global terrorism or global anti-Semitism.     

Social Movements in Organizations

This article reviews the literature on social movements within organizations such as colleges and universities, corporations, religious orders, and governmental agencies. It brings together work from disparate fields to advance an understanding of how movements happen within organizations to introduce students and scholars to the promise of such research.     

Engaging New Social Movements

Organizations involved in the development ofinnovative social programs are coming under increasingpressure to establish structures through which theusers, targets, or beneficiaries of program activities can be involved in program planning andimplementation. The dynamic that this sets up betweenthe program and its wider environment, particularly inareas in which new social movements areoperating, can be quite challenging. This article seeks toexamine these dynamics, particularly in the context ofprogram evaluation. It is argued that an engagedevaluation approach (drawing on an action research orientation) has particular strengths in sucha situation, although the limitations and challenges ofsuch an approach are also outlined. It may, for example,require careful management in terms of the dynamics of the evaluation team. The discussionis illustrated by examples drawn from the evaluation ofa European program for disabled people in which theauthor as member of a research team from The Tavistock Institute was involved.     

Nonviolent Civil Resistance and Social Movements

Research on non‐violent civil resistance has burgeoned in recent years. This field has much in common with the study of social movements, and yet there has been little cross‐fertilization between these literatures. In this article, I review the historical development of non‐violence studies from its Gandhian roots, through an emphasis on strategic non‐violence, to current empirical research that has generated new insights into the strategic interactions between non‐violent movements and their opponents, the effects of repression, the factors shaping movement outcomes, and cross‐national tactical diffusion. I summarize key findings and implications for the field of social movements. I conclude by charting out new areas of inquiry that future researchers ought to explore.     

The Importance of Social Movements

This discussion was conducted with Professor Alain Touraine by Tim Jordan on 20 September in Paris. The discussion has been divided into headings that correspond to the areas of questions that were asked. The social context for the discussion is important in understanding Professor Touraine's comments because the discussion occurred 9 days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks but before the bombing of Afghanistan began and with no chance of knowing what would follow.     

Fundamentalisms as Global Social Movements

The proliferation of digital technology—both as hardware and software—provides opportunities for activist groups around the world to connect with one another more rapidly and efficiently than ever before. And as mobile Internet technology (including smartphones, personal digital assistants, and laptops) becomes cheaper and more readily available, the number of services offered to individuals has increased dramatically, including voice communication, Internet browsing, and data transfer. At the same time, the rise in transnational advocacy networks means that non-state actors are garnering new voices and challenging both old and new sites of authority, from local governments and state agencies to regional and international organizations. Based on fieldwork and with a focus on the process of interaction within transnational groups in Southeast Asia, this article adopts a communities of practice (COP) approach and applies it to the impact of digital networking in order to test some of the questions posed about the nature of the so-called technological revolution and to assess the ways in which technological advancement has affected these groups. It hypothesizes that even new and potentially levelling forms of communication can only respond to and reshape the pre-existing social conditions and organizational structures within which network participants function.

La proliferación de la tecnología digital—tanto hardware como software—provee oportunidades a los grupos activistas alrededor del mundo, para conectarse entre sí más rápida y eficientemente que nunca antes. Y así como la tecnología de Internet móvil (que incluye teléfonos inteligentes, asistentes digitales personales y portátiles) se vuelve cada vez más barata y disponible, el número de servicios ofrecidos a los individuos se ha incrementado dramáticamente, incluyendo la comunicación de voz, la navegación de Internet, y la transferencia de datos. Al mismo tiempo, el aumento de las redes trasnacionales de apoyo, es una señal que los actores no estatales están recabando nuevas voces y retando tanto a los viejos como a los nuevos sitios de autoridad, desde los gobiernos locales y agencias estatales, a las organizaciones regionales e internacionales. Este artículo, basado en el trabajo de campo y con un enfoque en el proceso de interacción dentro de los grupos trasnacionales en Asia sudoriental, adopta una visión de comunidades de práctica (COP, por sus siglas en inglés) y la aplica al impacto de las redes digitales para probar algunas de las preguntas planteadas sobre la naturaleza de la así llamada revolución tecnológica, y para evaluar las formas en las que el avance tecnológico ha afectado a estos grupos. Hace hipótesis de que incluso las nuevas y potenciales formas de nivelación de la comunicación tan solo pueden responder y reestructurar las condiciones sociales preexistentes y organizacionales dentro de la red en que los participantes funcionan.

作为同是硬件和软件的数字技术的扩散为世界各地的活动家集团相互之间迅捷联系提供了前所未有的机会。由于移动互联网技术（包括智能手机、个人数字助理和笔记本）变得更加廉价和更易获取,个人获得的服务的数量也在急剧增长,包括语音通讯、互联网浏览以及数据传输。同时,跨国游说网络的兴起意味着非国家行为体正在发出新的声音,挑战包括从地方政府、国家机构到区域与国际组织的老的和新的权威。

基于田野研究和聚焦在东南亚的跨国集团的互动过程,本文采取事件社区（COP）的研究方法,研究数字网络的影响,以便检验有关所谓技术革命的特性等引起的问题的一些,并评估技术升级影响这些集团的方式。本文假定,甚至新的和潜在的通讯升级形式就能够回应和重新塑造已经存在的社会条件和网络参加者赖以行动的组织结构。 ????? ???????? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???? ???? ? ??? ? ????? ??? ????? ??? ??? ????. ??? ??? ??? ??(????, ???? ??? ???? ??)? ? ????? ? ?? ???? ?? ???, ?? ??, ??? ????? ??? ??? ??? ????? ???? ??? ??? ???? ???? ??. ???, ??? ?????? ??? ??? ???? ??? ??? ?? ????? ????? ???????? ???? ????? ????? ??? ??? ??? ???? ?? ????. ? ?? ?? ??? ???? ??????? ??? ?? ?? ???? ??? ??? ??? ?? ????(communities of practice, COP) ??? ???? ??? ??? ?? ??? ??? ???? ??? ??? ???? ??? ??? ????? ??? ???? ??? ??? ??? ?? ??? ??? ??? ??? ????. ? ?? ??? ????? ???? ?? ?????? ???? ???? ????? ???? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???? ?????? ??? ????.

Распространение цифровых технологий - аппаратного и программного обеспечения, дает группам активистов по всему миру возможность общаться друг с другом быстрее и эффективнее чем когда-либо прежде. И поскольку мобильные интернет-технологии (смартфоны, КПК, ноутбуки) становятся более дешевыми и доступными, число услуг, предложенных людям, резко увеличилось, включая голосовые сообщения, интернет-просмотр и передачу данных. В то же самое время рост транснациональных пропагандистских сетей означает, что негосударственные субъекты собирают новые голоса и бросают вызов старым и новым участкам власти, местным органам управления и государственным агентствам, региональным и международным организациям. На основании полевых работ и с акцентом на процесс взаимодействия в рамках транснациональных групп в Юго-Восточной Азии, эта статья перенимает опыт практикующих сообществ (CоP) и применяет его к создаваемым цифровым сетям для того, чтобы ответить на некоторые вопросы о природе так называемой технологической революции и оценить каким образом технический прогресс повлиял на эти группы. Строится гипотеза, что даже новые и потенциально выравнивающие формы общения могут реагировать и изменять только уже существующие социальные условия и организационные структуры, в рамках которых функционируют участники сети.     

Leadership in Social Movements*

Two types of leadership styles in social movements are constructed on the basis of closed or open access to the source of legitimacy. Several predictions about structural consequences of the open or closed access are then made. The types are applied to four cases: the Nazis, the Manson Family, the Millerites and Women's Liberation. The hypotheses are confirmed.     

Research on Social Movements and Political Violence

Attention to extreme forms of political violence in the social sciences has been episodic, and studies of different forms of political violence have followed different approaches, with “breakdown” theories mostly used for the analysis of right-wing radicalism, social movement theories sometimes adapted to research on left-wing radical groups, and area study specialists focusing on ethnic and religious forms. Some of the studies on extreme forms of political violence that have emerged within the social movement tradition have nevertheless been able to trace processes of conflict escalation through the detailed examination of historical cases. This article assesses some of the knowledge acquired in previous research approaching issues of political violence from the social movement perspective, as well as the challenges coming from new waves of debate on terrorist and counterterrorist action and discourses. In doing this, the article reviews contributions coming from research looking at violence as escalation of action repertoires within protest cycles; political opportunity and the state in escalation processes; resource mobilization and violent organizations; narratives of violence; and militant constructions of external reality.

Occupation, Biography and New Social Movements

Membership of 'new social movements' is generally associated with employment in the educated service class, particularly in the state sector. The nature of the employment experience is often said to be generative, in some way, of radical activism, even if only, in much modified versions of such theorising, through the reinforcement provided from the presence of networks of like-minded colleagues. On the basis of intensive biographical study of both environmentalist and feminist activists in a large industrial city, it is argued that though they are indeed located in the occupations referred to in the literature, their membership of NSMs cannot in general be attributed either to their experience of employment or of higher education. The propensity to radical activism is clearly established at an earlier date. It emerges from the intersection of socialisation within the family and personal life experience.     

Social Movements,Protest and Mainstream Media

This article provides a broad, cross‐disciplinary overview of scholarship which has explored the dynamics between social movements, protests and their coverage by mainstream media across sociology, social movement studies, political science and media and communications. Two general approaches are identified ‘representational’ and ‘relational’ research. ‘Representational’ scholarship is that which has concerned itself with how social movements are portrayed or ‘framed’ in the media, how the media production process facilitates this, and the consequences thereof. ‘Relational’ scholarship concentrates on the asymmetrical ‘relationship’ between social movements, the contestation of media representation and the media strategies of social movements. Within these two broad approaches different perspectives and areas of emphasis are highlighted along with their strengths and weaknesses. The conclusion reflects on current developments in this area of study and offers avenues for future research.