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.     

Revolution in the making? Social media effects across the globe

Social networking sites are popular tools to engage citizens in political campaigns, social movements, and civic life. However, are the effects of social media on civic and political participation revolutionary? How do these effects differ across political contexts? Using 133 cross-sectional studies with 631 estimated coefficients, I examine the relationship between social media use and engagement in civic and political life. The effects of social media use on participation are larger for political expression and smaller for informational uses, but the magnitude of these effects depends on political context. The effects of informational uses of social media on participation are smaller in countries like the United States, with a free and independent press. If there is a social media revolution, it relates to the expression of political views on social networking sites, where the average effect size is comparable to the effects of education on participation.     

Social Movement Audiences1

Audiences are important to social movements, but the relationships between social movements and their audiences are not well understood. This article uses scholarship from performance studies, especially ideas of audiences as constructed, meaningful, and influenced/influential, to explore two issues. First, how do social movements define their audiences? Second, how are social movement actions toward their audiences shaped by these definitions? Analysis of longitudinal data on two social movement groups in Pittsburgh from 2003 to 2007 shows that social movements variously interpret the nature and role of their audiences and that these interpretations affect their strategies and goals, sometimes quite radically. The conclusion explores how attention to audiences can augment scholarship on the relational, iterative, interpretive, and reflexive aspects of social movements.     

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.     

Ethnographic Cartographies: Social Movements,Alternative Media and the Spaces of Networks

Research on social movement networks has been defined by an emphasis on structural determinism and quantitative methodologies, and has often overlooked the spatial dimension of networking practices. This article argues that scholars have much to gain if (1) they move beyond the understanding of networks as organisational and communication structures, and analyse them as everyday social processes of human negotiation and construction, and (2) they pay attention to how networks between different organisations create multiple and overlapping spaces of action and meaning that define the everyday contexts of social movements. Drawing on ethnographic research within the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, this article explores the everyday dimension of political and communication networks. It shows that everyday networking practices are embedded in processes of identification and meaning construction, and are defined by a politics of inclusion and exclusion; introducing the concept of ethnographic cartography, it demonstrates that social movement networks are incorporated into everyday practices and narratives of place-making.     

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.     

埃及社会运动中的机会结构、水平网络与架构共鸣

本文源于一个令人困惑的问题:埃及2005年与2011年发生的两次致力于推翻穆巴拉克政府的大规模社会运动——受够了运动与一二五运动——为什么会带来不同的政治效应?本文以社会运动理论视角的分析发现,这两次社会运动在面临的政治机会结构、动员的水平网络方面没有明显区别,它们之间的差异主要体现在运动架构产生的共鸣程度不同。这种差异进而影响到动员能力,最终产生了不同的政治后果。     

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.     

Collective Identity in Social Movements: Central Concepts and Debates

The concept of collective identity has been used extensively by social movement scholars seeking to explain how social movements generate and sustain commitment and cohesion between actors over time. Despite its wide application, collective identity is a notoriously abstract concept. This article focuses on the use of the concept in the literature on contemporary social movements and offers a comprehensive theoretical overview. The central elements of collective identity in the social movement literature are developed, and some key differences in interpretations are highlighted. Finally, some contemporary debates around the continuing usefulness and limitations of the concept of collective identity are explored, with a special emphasis on the challenges of applying the concept to movements that define themselves in terms of heterogeneity, diversity and inclusiveness.     

The Rise and Fall of the Reds: The Reiterated Dilemma-Solving Process and the Life Course of Social Movements

This article explores the diachronic relationship between strategy choice and the life course of social movements. By proposing a model of reiterated strategy-making, the article articulates a path-dependent logic of dilemma-solving in social movements: Earlier strategic choices shape future strategic choices. Moreover, I distinguish contingent dilemmas from recurring dilemmas. Contingent dilemmas are those that only exist at particular points in time and recurring dilemmas are those that entangle the movement across time. In this model, I argue that a strategic choice not only produces future contingent dilemmas but also brings the recurring dilemma back to revisit the social movement. Using the Reds movement – an anticorruption movement in Taiwan – as the case, I illustrate the intertwined relationship between contingent and recurring dilemmas and how this relationship accounts for the life course of social movements.     

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.     

Politics, Social Movements, and the Body

This paper outlines a conceptual idea of the 'body' in social movement research that captures how the body is both the materialization of civic culture and empowering agent of change. After critically reviewing the three main debates on the body literature –'biopolitics', 'embodiment' and 'feminism'– I explain why each fails to provide an adequate account of the embodied self in social movements. I suggest combining the concepts of 'performativity. and 'performance' to capture how social movements use, challenge, and reproduce civic norms to construct 'embodied performances' as forms of symbolic communication for the purposes of stimulating cultural and political change. By combining the two concepts, I will put forth an theory of the body in social movements that addresses: 1) the constraints of normative civic ethics that limit possible forms of struggle as well as foreshadow political consequences 2) how embodied performances create community and solidarity within a heterogeneous population to make mobilization possible and 3) the stratification and sometimes fracturing of social groups during the social movement process.     

Using Social Network Analysis to Explore Social Movements: A Relational Approach

This paper uses a ‘relational’ approach to network analysis to demonstrate the linkages between different types of environmental organizations in London. A ‘relational’ approach was used to avoid problems associated with ‘positional’ approaches such as structural determinism, subjectively defined and misleadingly labelled blocks of ‘approximately’ equivalent actors, and reification of the action/issue basis of networks. The paper also explores definitions of social/environmental movements. Whilst broadly agreeing with Diani's consensual definition of a social movement, it argues that we need to be much more precise about the type and intensity of networking required; it must be more than informal or cursory, and should bind individuals and organizations into collaborative networks. Evidence from a survey of 149 environmental organizations and qualitative interviews with key campaigners suggests that whilst many organizations might share information, it is often stockpiled or ignored, hardly creating the kinds of network links that might lead to shared movement identity. The kinds of links that do bind movements are collaborative. In practice, in the environmental movement in London, conservationists tend neither to share information nor to engage in the collective action events of reformist or radical organizations, suggesting that conservationists should perhaps not be considered part of the movement.     

Social Movement Rhetoric and the Social Psychology of Collective Action: A Case Study of Anti-Abortion Mobilization

This paper seeks to contribute toward anintegrated approach to social movement mobilization. Itdoes so through considering how a social psychologicalaccount of the determination of collective behavior (self-categorization theory) may be applied tothe mobilization rhetoric of social movements. Morespecifically it argues that as people may definethemselves and act in terms of social categy usefully conceive of social movement rhetoricas being organized so as to construct social categorydefinitions which allow the activists preferred courseof action to be taken on by others. Our theoretical argument is illustrated throughthe detailed analysis of category construction incontemporary U.K. anti-abortion argumentation.     

Historical meaning of post-Fukushima social movements: Crisis in hegemony in postwar Japan and prefigurative politics in the 2010s

Since the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 and the nuclear power plant accident, a number of movements have emerged in Japanese society, including the anti-nuclear power movement and others with a variety of agendas. The social movements of the 2010s in Japan have expanded along with the spread of social networking services and have brought together a new class of people who are different from those of the established movements. This article will compare and examine the social movements of the 2010s with those of the past, as well as the function they played in the social structure. In the early 2020s, a structural crisis in the political and economic foundations of postwar Japan has become apparent. The Japanese social movements of the 2010s were movements that pressed for the transformation of the old social system as well as the transformation of the old anti-system movements. Thus, this movement had the distinction of prefiguring a fundamental shift in the confrontational frame of reference between conservatism and progressivism that had shaped postwar Japan. This article will discuss the historical significance of the Japanese social movements of the 2010s in light of the structural factors behind the decline of the social base of both conservative and progressive forces.     

Notes on Psychoanalysis and Technology,the Psyche and the Social

Whatever difficulty might arise in discussing the relationship of psychoanalysis and technology, the discussion inevitably will touch on another relationship that is difficult to discuss: that between the psyche and the social. There will be no easy way to simply establish the distinctiveness of or the relationship between the terms. They are so profoundly interimplicated in each other that some approach other than “establishing a relationship” is needed. This essay pursues this relationship via a discussion of psychic mechanism with attention to historical shifts in media and social technologies of control.     

Social Movement Rhetoric and the Social Psychology of Collective Action: A Case Study of Anti-Abortion Mobilization

This paper seeks to contribute toward anintegrated approach to social movement mobilization. Itdoes so through considering how a social psychologicalaccount of the determination of collective behavior (selfcategorization theory) may be applied tothe mobilization rhetoric of social movements. Morespecifically it argues that as people may definethemselves and act in terms of social categories, we may usefully conceive of social movement rhetoricas being organized so as to construct social categorydefinitions which allow the activists preferred courseof action to be taken on by others as their own. Our theoretical argument is illustrated throughthe detailed analysis of category construction incontemporary U.K. anti-abortion argumentation.     

Art in Social Movements: Shantytown Women's Protest in Pinochet's Chile

How social movements use art is an understudied question in the social movements literature. Ethnographic research on the use of art by the prodemocracy movement in Pinochet's Chile suggests that art plays a very important role in social movements, which use it for framing, to attract resources, to communicate information about themselves, to foster useful emotions, and as a symbol (for communicating a coherent identity, marking membership, and cementing commitment to the movement).     

The rise and fall of collective identity in networked movements: communication protocols,Facebook, and the anti-Berlusconi protest

This paper explores the impact of communication protocols on the development of collective identity in networked movements. It focuses primarily on how communication protocols change patterns of interactions and power relationships among the constituents of social movements. The paper suggests that the communication protocols of commercial social networking media lead to organizational centralization and fragmentation in social movements by eroding one of the preconditions of collective identity, namely solidarity. The empirical material presented is part of a PhD dissertation on a political protest movement and their use of Facebook as a core communication and organizational platform. The data gathering is multi-methodological and relies on both qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques in the form of a historical analysis of interaction patterns, and a content analysis of online conversations among activists.