INSTITUTIONALIZING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: The Dual Strategy of the Korean Women's Movement

Since the 1990s, scholars have paid attention to the role of social movements traversing the official terrain of politics by blending a “contention” strategy with an “engagement” strategy. The literature often highlights the contribution of institutionalized social movements to policymaking and sociopolitical change, but rarely addresses why and how specific social movement organizations gain routine access to formal politics. Using the Korean women's movement as a case study, I analyze the conditions for movement institutionalization. As I perceive it as the consequence both of social movements' decision to participate in government and of the state's desire to integrate such movements into its decision‐making process, movement institutionalization appears when the three factors are combined: (1) pressure from international organizations, (2) democratizing political structures, and (3) cognitive shifts by movement activists toward the role of the state.     

Constructing “Social Change” through Philanthropy: Boundary Framing and the Articulation of Vocabularies of Motives for Social Movement Participation*

I embrace Mills's (1940) conception of motives to offer new insight into an old question: why do people join social movements? I draw upon ethnographic research at the Crossroads Fund, a “social change” foundation, to illustrate that actors simultaneously articulate two vocabularies of motives for movement participation: an instrumental vocabulary about dire, yet solvable, problems and an expressive vocabulary about collective identity. This interpretive work is done during boundary framing, which refers to efforts by movements to create in-group/out-group distinctions. I argue that the goal-directed actions movements take to advance social change are shaped by participants' identity claims. Moreover, it is significant that Crossroads constructs its actions and identity as social movement activism, rather than philanthropy. This definitional work suggests that analyzing the category social movements is problematic unless researchers study how activists attempt to situate themselves within this category. Hence, methodologically attending to organizations' constructions of movement status can theoretically inform research which essentially takes social movements as a given, in exploring their structural components.     

Wearing your Politics on your Sleeve: The Role of Political Colours in Social Movements

This article provides evidence of the significance of political colours and associated emblems in the repertoires of social movements and related political parties. It argues that political colours play an important role not only as visual symbols of the cause but also in the emotional life of social movements. Political colours help to create and sustain collective identities and illustrate the role of affect in political life. The article includes a case study of the role of colours in the women's movement, showing how one set of first-wave organizational colours took on much broader symbolic meanings during the second wave of the women's movement. It provides evidence from both the first and second waves of the women's movement of the emotional meaning of the colours for activists. The case study also illustrates the contestation over public memory that occurs in relation to powerful symbols.     

Social Movement Theory and the “Modern Day Tea Party”

The rise of the Tea Party movement took many political observers by surprise, but social movement theory can help us to understand how the Tea Party began. Frustration with the federal government's plans for economic recovery, combined with opposition to President Obama's election, morphed into nationwide protests and a vocal presence in the 2010 midterm elections. This paper uses the Tea Party as an example to illustrate social movement life cycles, explaining relevant theories, their application to the movement in each phase of its development, and areas in which the Tea Party challenges current literature on social movements. Social movement theory is discussed as a tool that is constantly being honed as new research increases our understanding of how movements develop and function.     

Poland's Contentious Elites Enter the Age of Revolution: Extending Social Movement Concepts

Scholars of social movements commonly call for the field to be broadened in various ways because movements are often intertwined with other forms of conflict and because the causes or consequences of movements may operate differently in different contexts. Important change processes that were unfolding in Poland at the time of the French Revolution provide an instructive case. Although the contemporaneous French Revolution, with its enormous quantity and variety of collective mobilizations has been a touchstone for social movement scholars, the work of Poland's reform parliament and the adoption of Poland's 1791 constitution have gotten much less attention. Poland's reform politics not only provides both instructive parallels to and differences from French revolutionary developments, but were also deeply intertwined with them and embedded with those French events in a larger, European field of contention. Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the Polish reform movement is that it was largely driven by elites, something noted in Karl Marx's bemused praise. Although social movements played very much less of a role in Poland than in France, we try to show here that familiar tools of social movement analysis permit an account of those Polish events as well.     

A History of the Black Women's Movement in Brazil: Mobilization,Political Trajectory and Articulations with the State

This study examines the trajectory and consolidation process of the Black Women's Movement (BWM) in the Brazilian public sphere since the 1980s. Our objective is to understand the processes that underlie the constitution of this social movement, as well as its points of convergence and divergence with the black and feminist movements. Furthermore, this study discusses the movement's process of institutionalization/bureaucratization, its articulation with the Brazilian state and the relationship between gender and race in its internal structure and external claims. The study is based on two research projects conducted between 2005 and 2011. The first, carried out between 2005 and 2007, deals specifically with the consolidation of the BWM, while the second, a four-year study completed in 2011, focuses on the relationship between the black movement and the adoption of race-based public policies in Brazil and Colombia. Data for this research were collected from the BWM's internal documents (a compilation of pamphlets, newsletters and proposals), government documents and informal conversations and semi-structured interviews with 12 black women activists from different regions of the country. Throughout the work, we consider the BWM's internal processes of creating an autonomous movement as well as its external processes of bureaucratization and interconnection with the state. Focusing on these parallel processes allows us to better understand the movement's internal conflicts, its articulations with other social movements, its challenges and methods of navigating political/institutional spaces and the ways in which the emergence of black women as political actors has impacted Brazil's public sphere.     

Negation,Refusal and Co‐Optation: The Frankfurt School and Social Movement Theory

This article outlines how the critical theory of the Frankfurt School has influenced some key debates within social movement studies. The impact of Jürgen Habermas's sociology is widely acknowledged, especially with regards to our understanding of ‘new social movements’. There have however also been several lesser‐known attempts to bring the concerns of Theodor W. Adorno's negative dialectics and Herbert Marcuse's critique of one‐dimensional society to bear onto social movement research. For this reason it makes sense to outline the relevance of the ‘first generation’ members of the Frankfurt School – something that is often missing from the most authoritative overviews and textbooks on social movement theory. Presenting a body of literature that often appears as fragmented or only on the periphery of social movement theory in this way reveals a number of common themes, such as negation, refusal and co‐optation. To this end, the article provides a comprehensive theoretical overview of the multiple ways of how critical theory has made sense of social movements and argues that its concerns can be brought into a rewarding dialogue with contemporary social movement studies.     

The Women's Suffrage Movement

ABSTRACT

The women's suffrage movement is explored as a social movement and an argument is made that analysis of the outcomes of social movements is central to those engaged in effecting social change. A set of five factors that influenced the movement's success is explored. These factors are: (1) The framing processes of the Women's Suffrage Movement (WSM) enhanced collective and individual identity, while fueling participants' emotions and actions; (2) A movement community developed that supported the goals of the WSM and held a radical flank effect; (3) External resources were constant; (4) The WSM experienced an infusion of new ideas as a result of cross-national interaction; and (5) The WSM benefited from committed and innovative leaders throughout the movement. These factors are not viewed as exhaustive; rather they are components that were critical to success.     

Unobtrusively Stretching Law: Legal Education,Activism, and Reclaiming Title IX

We often understate the work that activists put into crafting movement tools. This article examines the space between legal texts and movement resources in a study of early activism surrounding Title IX. Though often hailed as a feminist law, the Title IX statute and regulations lay out a narrow set of individual rights and incorporate several conservative principles. In an analysis of early social movement mobilization surrounding Title IX by the Connecticut Women's Educational and Legal Fund (CWEALF), we identify a distinctive legal framing technique tied to the often overlooked practice of lay legal education. In a legal education campaign that targeted schools, CWEALF placed Title IX's actual requirements alongside broader feminist ideas about gender socialization and civic responsibility to imply that the law mandated substantially greater reforms, a tactic we call unobtrusively stretching law. This article contributes to research on social movements and legal mobilization by illustrating how legal education can serve as part of the tool-making kit for social movements as they struggle to transform legislative compromises into movement resources.     

The English Student Movement: An Evaluation of the Literature

This article explores the state of the field of student movement research. I suggest there could be seen to be stagnation within the field of investigation, and resultant under‐researching of some countries student movements, and I will make specific reference to the student movement of England in the late 1960s/early 1970s as a case in point of this. I argue that there has been unsatisfactory sole‐causalities, such as issues of youth, issues seen as ‘triggers’, and political factors, attributed to the English student movement, and that this fails both to understand fully the significance and individuality of the English student movement, but also assumes a fit with New social movement (NSM) theory. I argue that we cannot automatically equate NSM's and student movements without thorough empirical research, and that we need to look to a synthesis of social movement theories in order to understand fully student movements.     

Bourdieu and Social Movements: Considering Identity Movements in Terms of Field,Capital and Habitus

This article examines the explanatory capacity of Pierre Bourdieu's work in relation to social movements and, in particular, identity movements. It aims to provide a theoretical framework drawing on Bourdieu's central concepts of field, capital and habitus. These concepts are viewed as providing a theoretical toolkit that can be applied to convincingly explain aspects of social movements that social movement theories, such as political process theory, resource mobilization theory and framing, acknowledge, but are not able to explain within a single theoretical framework. Identity movements are approached here in a way that relates them to the position agents/movements occupy in social spaces, resources and cultural competence. This enables us to consider identity movements from a new perspective that explains, for instance, the interrelatedness of class and identity movements.     

Subcultural Identity Work in Social Movements: Barriers to Collective Identity Changes and Overcoming Them

Over time, social movements must contend with a vast array of forces that can lead to changes in the movement's collective identity. As such changes may impact the alignment of movements and their membership, this study explores how changes are perceived by members and how they are interactively addressed. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered from two Native American social movement organizations, this study specifically asks why some changes suggested by movement members might be pursued and others are not. While movement members felt that there were a number of barriers to changes in their movements, the study revealed that it was the resonance of collective memories – presented during interactions as narrative commemorations – that encouraged the pursuit of suggested changes or the maintenance of a status quo.     

An Analysis of the U.S. Women's Rights Movements

This paper divides the move for women's rights in the U.S. into three historical phases: (1) the early women's rights movement (1848-1875); (2) the suffrage movement (1890-1920); and, (3) the two branches of contemporary women's rights movements. The authors then set out a hypothesis for the formation of the above women's rights movements. The causes of the three respective phases then are examined and the hypothesis tested. We conclude that the following elements are necessary to the initiation of a U.S. women's protest movement: (1) a sense of collective oppresion; (2) an extant organizational base; (3) a communications network; and, (4) a critical mobilizing event. The success of these movements, however, may be tempered by the simultaneous development of opposition organizations.     

‘Theories are made only to die in the war of time’: Guy Debord and the Situationist International as strategic thinkers

The Situationist International (SI) has been one of the main reference points during the past 40 or more years within social movement organizing, cultural studies, social theory and philosophy. While the SI has been understood in many ways as inheritors and elaborators of an unorthodox Marxist politics drawing heavily from the history of the avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to the specifically strategic dimension of their thought and practice. This is surprising, especially in Debord's case, given how much his work also draws from the history of military strategy. This paper will particularly examine the strategic aspects of Debord and the SI's thought and politics and how they rethink the nature of strategy through collective forms of aesthetic–political practice.     

Understanding Meaning in Movements: A Hermeneutic Approach to Frames and Ideologies

Social movements contain structures of beliefs and values that guide critical action and aid activists' understandings. These are worthy of interrogation, not least because they contain points of articulation with ideational formations found in both mainstream politics and academia. They offer an alternative view of society, economy and polity that is grounded in protagonists' experience and struggle. However, the ideational content of social movements is often obscured by a focus on particular, immediate goals; by their orientation to certain forms of action; and by the mediated, simplified nature of their communication. Additionally, recent social movements display a tendency to coalition action, bringing a diverse set of political understandings in concert on highly specific campaigns. This conceptual article seeks an approach to identifying the messages within social movements that remains sensitive to their complexity, dynamism and heterogeneity. Through a critique of the concept of ‘interpretative frames’ as developed in social movement studies, I describe the novel concept ‘orientational frame’. In contrast to social movement scholars' tendency to focus on instrumental claim-making by movement organizations, I emphasize deeply held, relatively stable sets of ideas that allow activists to justify contentious political action. Through an engagement with Michael Freeden's morphological approach to understanding ideologies I attempt to draw frame analysis away from the positivistic attempt to delineate general processes into a hermeneutic endeavour more suitable to understanding the richly detailed, context dependent ideas of particular social movements.     

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.     

Are They Not Worthy? How Partisan Political Blogs Legitimize the Tea Party Movement and Occupy Wall Street

Social movements struggle to gain acceptance as legitimate actors so that they can raise money, recruit members, and convince politicians to meet their demands. We know little, however, about how this legitimacy is granted by various political authorities, in part because legitimacy is often poorly operationalized. To operationalize legitimacy, I revise Charles Tilly's ( 1999 ) classic concept of WUNC displays (i.e., public presentations of worthiness, unity, numbers, commitment) to assess how political authorities legitimize social movements. I analyze original data on the coverage the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street received from 20 elite political blogs during a critical event early in each movement's development. I find that liberal and conservative blogs both use the same aspects of worthiness (and not unity, numbers, or commitment) to endorse their preferred movement but different aspects of unworthiness to denounce the movement they opposed. Conservative outlets were more partisan on both accounts. This suggests that these blogs' shared status as distinctly partisan political outsiders produces a similar, but not identical, relationship with social movements. While both sets of blogs legitimize and delegitimize a movement based on its specific strengths and weaknesses, conservative blogs act more as a partisan bullhorn and liberal blogs act more as a forum for debate.     

Cultivating Better Food Access? The Role of Farmers' Markets in the U.S. Local Food Movement

The local food movement has grown substantially in the United States in recent years. Proponents have hailed this growth as a shift away from a conventional food system rife with inequality toward one that introduces more just outcomes for society. While the movement's development and popularity have proliferated, little research has examined nationally how successful it is at delivering on its promises. By combining the social movement and food system literatures with quantitative methodology, this article examines the accessibility of the farmers' market across the United States. Using multivariate logistic regression, the analysis focuses on several identifying characteristics of individuals within and characteristics of neighborhoods across the United States to explore what increases (or decreases) the likelihood of a farmers' market being located within their boundaries. The results suggest that several social, economic, and racial differences exist between those living in areas with farmers' markets and those in areas that do not. Additionally, the analysis found that several neighborhood characteristics significantly influence the likelihood of a farmers’ market being present, including a neighborhood's socioeconomic status, the quality of neighborhood infrastructure, participation rates in social support programs, and the prevalence of poverty. In addition to posing questions of accessibility for the local food movement this research contributes to our understanding of grassroots social movements by examining the avenues and potential limitations that they negotiate while ensuring their stated goals are reached.     

The Engaged Academic: Academic Intellectuals and the Psychiatric Survivor Movement

This paper considers some political and ethical issues associated with the ‘academic intellectual’ who researches social movements. It identifies some of the ‘lived contradictions’ such a role encounters and analyses some approaches to addressing these contradictions. In general, it concerns the ‘politico-ethical stance’ of the academic intellectual in relation to social movements and, as such, references the ‘theory of the intellectual’ associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci. More specifically, it considers that role in relation to one political ‘field’ and one type of movement: a field which we refer to, following the work of Peter Sedgwick, as ‘psychopolitics’, and a movement which, since the mid- to late-1980s, has been known as the ‘psychiatric survivor’ movement—psychiatric patients and their allies who campaign for the democratisation of the mental health system. In particular, through a comparison of two texts, Nick Crossley's Contesting Psychiatry and Kathryn Church's Forbidden Narratives, the paper contrasts different depths of engagement between academic intellectuals and the social movements which they research.     

More social movements or fewer? Beyond political opportunity structures to relational fields

If social movements are an attempt by “outsiders” to gain leverage within politics, then one might expect the global spread of democracy to reduce social movement activity. This article argues the reverse. Granted, many past social movements, such as women's rights and civil rights, were efforts to empower the disenfranchised. However, this is not typical. Rather, social movements and protest tactics are more often part of a portfolio of efforts by politically active leaders and groups to influence politics. Indeed, as representative governance spreads, with the conviction by all parties that governments should respond to popular choice, then social movements and protest will also spread, as a normal element of democratic politics. Social movements should therefore not be seen as simply a matter of repressed forces fighting states; instead they need to be situated in a dynamic relational field in which the ongoing actions and interests of state actors, allied and counter-movement groups, and the public at large all influence social movement emergence, activity, and outcomes.