Political Elites and the Culture of Social Movements

While sociologists have paid a great deal of attention to how political elites matter for the emergence and development of social movements, they have focused less explicitly on how political elites matter for the culture of social movements. This essay reviews work that directly and indirectly addresses this relationship, showing how political elites matter for various aspects of movement culture, like collective identity and framing. It also reviews literature that suggests how movement culture comes to impact political elites. The essay concludes by drawing from very recent scholarship to argue that to best understand political elites and the culture of social movements, we need to think about culture and structure as intertwined and to understand how relations matters in the construction of meaning.     

Ideology and Social Movements: The Contributions of Habermas*

Theorists of social movements have not developed a sufficiently complex perspective of the role that ideology has in the dynamics of social movements. This essay demonstrates that Habermas’theory of the autonomy of normative structures is useful to explain the independent role of ideology in determining the direction taken by social movements. Habermas’emphasis on the interrelationship between cultural traditions, consensus formation, epistemologies, and differentiated rationalization processes furnishes an alternative to the instrumentalist and ahistorical assumptions that often characterize theorists’treatment of ideology in social movements. Empirical examples from studies of social movements are utilized to demonstrate the usefulness of Habermas’approach.     

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.     

Cultural Analysis of Religious Change and Movements*

In this article I review a cultural perspective on religion and suggest that cultural analysis resolves current debates over the nature of religion as either collectivist or individualist. I use one type of cultural analysis, institutionalism, to present an interpretive overview of religious change and movements in historical contexts of global instrumental rationality, in particular the expansion of state authority. The usefulness of this approach is revealed in interpreting Protestantism in the United States, Islamic fundamentalism, and movements and trends in global Roman Catholicism. While not reflecting precisely the views of the authors of this collection, this article introduces the studies of the recent restructuring of religion in the United States (Robert Wuthnow), Islamic fundamentalisms in Iran and Syria (Mansoor Moaddel). and global Roman Catholicism (Jose Casanova).     

地方精英与农村社会重建——定县实验中的士绅与平教会冲突

民国时期地方社会精英进入了多元化时代,士绅和专业知识分子是两个重要群体。1933年河北定县成为县政建设实验县,当地士绅与主持实验县工作的中华平民教育促进会之间的激烈冲突随之爆发。该类型社会冲突以士绅阶层的抱怨、污蔑、制造负面社会舆论为重要特征,反映了士绅阶层在农村社会和乡村建设中权力地位的边缘化。士绅阶层地位的没落,表面看来是平教会在乡村建设中刻意通过组织创新扶植农村青年参与乡村建设,致使士绅在农村社会权力结构中大权旁落,其结构性原因则包括两个方面,一是士绅阶层在农村经济破产的情况下,经营高利贷活动,大量占有农村土地,与农民发生严重的经济利益冲突,致使社会负面评价增加;二是国家在县域单位推进现代化的意志受到士绅阶层的阻碍,平教会冷落士绅实际上代表了国家与地方社会在现代化问题上的角力。     

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.     

Master Frames and Counter-Hegemony: Political Sensibilities in Contemporary Social Movements*

En se fondant sur l'analyse de données recueillies lors d'une série d'entrevues de 212 militants issus de divers groupes d'activistes, les auteurs examinent comment les nouveaux mouvements sociaux abordent les problèmes politiques de notre époque. Après avoir énuméré les principales façons de définir l'injustice et d'exprimer l'idéal social chez les personnes interrogées, ils tentent de déceler une pensée commune a tous les groupes, pensée fondée sur le partage d'une même idée de la justice sociale. À la lumière de cette analyse, on mesure ensuite la viabilité des mouvements luttant contre l'ordre établi; une théorie génerate sur leur influence dans la société contemporaine est ensuite esquissée. Based on an analysis of in-depth interview data from 212 activists in a variety of social movements, this paper considers the ways in which diverse movements' discourses frame political issues. After identifying primary injustice frames and social visions articulated by sample respondents, the authors assess the plausibility of a cross-movement unity based on shared “master frames,” i.e., common understandings of injustice and a common social vision. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of their analysis for the viability of counter-hegemonic politics and for theorizations of contemporary social movements. “I would suggest… (i) that power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of the network; (ii) that relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations … for which they play at once a conditioning and a conditioned role; (iii) that these relations don't take the sole form of prohibition and punishment, but are of multiple forms; (iv) that their interconnections delineate general conditions of domination, and … one should not assume a massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with ‘dominators’ on one side and ‘dominated’ on the other, but rather a multiform production of relations of domination which are partially susceptible of integration into overall strategies; (v) that power relations do indeed ‘serve’, but not at all because they are “in the service of an economic interest taken as primary, rather because they are capable of being utilised in strategies; (vi) that there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised.” —Michel Foucault, “Power and strategies”(1980)     

Elites and Collective Protest*

Efforts to explain collective protest have increasingly stressed the causal significance of elite structure and behavior. This trend is an unexamined manifestation of the broader and widely discussed trend away from “pluralistic” theories and toward “political” theories. But thus far, applications of the elite concept have been largely ad hoc, with little attention paid to its theoretical status or to developing it as an analytical tool. This problem can be rectified by turning to the neoelitist paradigm on which a number of scholars have been working in recent years. In particular, the neoelitist paradigm provides a conceptualization of unified and disunified elites which is theoretically and empirically grounded, capable of operationalization, generally applicable, and which plausibly helps account for variations in political conflict. It therefore complements and carries forward recent developments in the collective protest literature. This implies that the neoelitist paradigm merits serious attention alongside pluralist and Marxist paradigms as a guiding framework for macro social and political analysis.     

Political,Biographical, and Cultural Consequences of Social Movements

This essay reviews recent and less recent literature on the consequences of social movements and protest activities. It focuses on three types of consequences: political, personal and biographical, and cultural. Political consequences and, in particular, policy outcomes receive most attention, as they are those which have been addresses most often by students of social movements. The review of existing work shows that the field is full of valuable works dealing with this crucial issue and is rapidly growing thanks in particular to a new wave of scholars interested in this topic. Further work should pay more attention to the unintended consequences of social movements, look also at other types of impacts, and carry more comparative analyses.     

Fields,Logics, and Social Movements: Prison Abolition and the Social Justice Field*

This essay argues that field analyses of social movements can be improved by incorporating more insights from Pierre Bourdieu. In particular, Bourdieu’s concepts of logic, symbolic capital, illusio, and doxa can enrich social movement scholarship by enabling scholars to identify new objects of study, connect organizational‐ and individual‐level effects, and shed new light on a variety of familiar features of social movements. I demonstrate this claim by delineating the contours of one such field, the “social justice field” (SJF). I argue that the SJF is a delimited, trans‐movement arena of contentious politics united by the logic of the pursuit of radical social justice. Drawing upon existing scholarship, as well as my own research on the prison abolition movement, I argue that the competitive demands of the field produce characteristic effects on organizations and individual activists within the field. I conclude by considering how a Bourdieuian approach can provide fresh insights into familiar problematics within the social movements literature.     

Mobilization and Meaning: Toward an Integration of Social Psychological and Resource Perspectives on Social Movements*

This paper presents a model of the mobilization of people into movements that is compatible with a resource mobilization perspective on social movement organizations as the unit of analysis, but substitutes a cognitive social psychology based on attribution theory and the sociology of knowledge for the incentive model typically used in this perspective. We focus on the problem, neglected by resource mobilization theorists, of explaining the translation of objective social relationships into subjectively experienced, collectively defined grievances. On a macro level, our model gives independent causal weight to ideology without discounting the role that resources also play in defining group goals. On a social psychological level, we identify three distinct organizational strategies–conversion, coalition, and direct action–for mobilizing persons as participants and examine some cognitive and organizational consequences of each strategy. We conclude that incorporation of a more adequate social psychology of individual participation is not only compatible with the organizational focus and emphasis on rationality of the resource mobilization perspective, but can provide important insights into problems both social movement theorists and social movement organizers see as significant.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Vertical Mosaic among the Elites: The New Imagery Revisited*

La parution de Vertical Mosaic (1965) par J. Porter, Canadian Corporate Elite (1975) par W, Clement et State Elite (1980) par D. Olsen a provoqué dans les milieux universitaires un vif débat sur la surreprésentation des ethnies britanniques et la sous-représentation des ethnies française et “autres” au sein des élites canadiennes. Cependant, dans une série d'articles récemment parus, R. Ogmundson et J. McLaughlin ont mis en doute la thèse très répandue selon laquelle il existe dans la société canadienne un lien étroit entre l'origine ethnique et 1'appartenance à une élite. L'auteur de cet article examine les données avancées par Ogmundson et McLaughlin (1992) et démontre, en faisant une corrélation avec la composition ethnique de la population canadienne, que leur nouvelle interpretation peut induire en erreur. L'analyse fait valoir en effet une predominance stable des ethnies britanniques de 1935 à 1987 et ce, pour chaque catégorie des élites. Elle met aussi en évidence le fait que, conformément aux théses de Porter, Clement et Olsen, les ethnies française et “autres” ont augmenté leur représentation au sein des elites, mais n'ont pas atteint un niveau de representation proportionnel à leur nombre. The over-representation of British and the under-representation of French and “other” ethnic groups amongst the Canadian elites has been a part of the Canadian academic consciousness since the publication of Porter's Vertical Mosaic (1965), Clement's Canadian Corporate Elite (1975) and Olsen's State Elite (1980). Recently, a series of articles by Ogmundson and Ogmundson/McLaughlin has raised doubts about the vertical ethnic distribution of power among elites, suggesting that conventional wisdom should be abandoned. This paper uses the data provided by Ogmundson and McLaughlin (1992), standardizes them to the ethnic composition of the Canadian population, and shows that the new imagery provided by these authors is misleading. The analysis demonstrates a stable pattern of British dominance from 1935 to 1987 for each category of elites. It also reveals that, consistent with Porter, Clement and Olsen, the French and “other” ethnic groups have improved their participation at the elite levels but remain under-represented in relation to their populations.