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.     

Introduction: Mobilities and Enclosures at Borders

Our central agenda is to rethink the concept of movement in anthropology and other social sciences. We do this through two themes-mobilities and enclosures-both of which draw our attention to power and its diverse outcomes, especially at borders. Enclosure addresses processes that delimit and restrict the movement of specific goods, people, and ideas, while mobilities concern processes that enable and induce such movements. Consideration of these themes breaks with theoretical tendencies that celebrate unbounded movement, and instead focuses us on the political-economic processes by which people, nature, commodities, and knowledge are bounded, emplaced, and allowed or forced to move. Mobilities and enclosures are plural, favoring close-grained ethnographic studies. They involve unequal rights and powers, demanding precision about the political implications of movements of various sorts. This introduction situates these themes in recent border studies and social theory more generally and summarizes how the authors in this special issue advance scholarship on these matters.     

The new information frontier: toward a more nuanced view of social movement communication

Abstract

The information environment that social movements face is increasingly complex, making traditional assumptions about media, messaging, and communication used in social movement studies less relevant. Building on work begun within the study of digital protest, we argue that a greater integration of political communication research within social movement studies could offer substantial research contributions. We illustrate this claim by discussing how a greater focus on audiences and message reception, as well as message context, could advance the study of social movements. Specifically, we discuss a range of topics as applied to movement research, including information overload, selective attention, perceptions of bias, the possibilities that entertainment-related communications open up, and priming, among other topics. We suggest the risks of not adapting to this changing information environment, and incorporating insights from political communication, affect both the study of contemporary (including digital) protest, as well as potentially historical protest. The possibilities opened up by this move are immense including entirely new research programs and questions.     

Repression,resistance and lifestyle: charting (dis)connection and activism in times of accelerated capitalism

ABSTRACT

Studying the nexus of media and social movements is a growing subfield in both media and social movement studies. Although there is an increasing number of studies that criticize the overemphasis of the importance of media technologies for social movements, questions of non-use, technology push-back and media refusal as explicit political practice have received comparatively little attention. The article charts a typology of digital disconnection as political practice and site of struggle bringing emerging literatures on disconnection, i.e. forms of media technology non-use to the field of social movement studies and studies of civic engagement. Based on a theoretical matrix combining questions of power, collectivity and temporality, we distinguish between digital disconnection as repression, digital disconnection as resistance and digital disconnection as performance and life-style politics. The article discusses the three types of digital disconnection using current examples of protest and social movements that engage with practices of disconnection.

Abbreviations: AFA: Anti-Fascist Action; CHRI: Center for Human Rights in Iran; DDoS: Distributed Denial of Service     

Dimensions of Involvement in Social Movements

Abstract

Commitment to social movements is sometimes treated as a homogeneous, uni-dimensional phenomenon. Yet there are good theoretical reasons to expect that there are alternative, empirically distinct behavioral sources of commitment. Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) of questionnaire data on participation in Catholic Pentecostalism confirms the empirical distinctness of several modes of behavioral involvement in this contemporary movement. The SSA solution ordered the indicators of involvement along three dimensions. An interpretation of these dimensions is suggested, which appears to have applicability to a wide variety of social movements. Each dimension seems to reflect a dimension of variation in the behavioral sources of commitment to social movements. Should these dimensions indeed prove to be applicable to other movements, they would be useful for comparative analyses of social movement inuolvement.     

Network structures in cross-movement talk: Democracy Now!, 2003-2013

ABSTRACT

As organizers often remind us, we need to work across movements if we are to make substantive social change. Such talk is central to how we understand what social movements are and how we can work together. But how is that talk structured, and how might we theorize structural change over time as movements emerge and subside? This paper outlines several key considerations in the social construction of cross-movement relations between 2003 and 2013 on a daily independent broadcast news magazine program in the United States. Drawing on relational sociology and network studies, I offer a framework for understanding the changing structure of cross-movement talk as an interplay of a) the narrative clustering of movement labels, and b) the bridging of cross-cluster narrative divisions. Using positional network analysis, I first chart the movement canon – those movement labels that were used year after year for structuring the cross-movement field – and trace how key labels were used as bridging leaders during two periods of mass-mobilization. I then compare the narrative environment over time as it moved between more segmented and pluralistic structural characteristics, culminated in periods of narrative convergence in 2008 and 2011 around the Obama presidential election and the Occupy movement. By examining the overall structure of cross-movement talk in broadcast news programming, I illustrate how movement labels themselves are used by hosts and guests to facilitate the social construction of emergent movement clusters, and point to strategies for future application and analysis in cross-movement organizing.     

The Mobilization Against the 2005 Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe: A French Mobilization for Another Europe

ABSTRACT

Offering a contribution to cultural approaches to studying social movements, this paper explores how people incorporate social change efforts into broader self-projects. I use the contemporary abstinence pledge movement as an archetypal example of a lifestyle movement, a movement that advocates for lifestyle change as its primary challenge to perceived cultural problems. To capture the public face crafted by this movement, I coded complete website content for ten pledge organizations, as well as their print and social media presence. The data demonstrate: how pledge organizations explicitly target culture, rather than pressuring the state to enact policy change; how participants employ individualized tactics while still believing in their collective power to engender change; and that pledgers craft a moral self, engaging in ‘personal’ identity work. Expanding the lifestyle movement literature to think about outcomes and influence, I then show how pledgers contest perceptions of movement success, redefining effectiveness towards abstract, long-term, and subjective measures. I conclude by locating lifestyle movements in the context of late modernity and suggesting how theorists might use and further develop the concept in the future.     

Ideas, thinkers, and social networks: The process of grievance construction in the anti-genetic engineering movement

Popular commentaries suggest that the movement against genetic engineering in agriculture (anti-GE movement) was born in Europe, rooted in European cultural approaches to food, and sparked by recent food-safety scares such as “mad cow” disease. Yet few realize that the anti-GE movement's origins date back thirty years, that opposition to agricultural biotechnology emerged with the technology itself, and that the movement originated in the United States rather than Europe. We argue here that neither the explosion of the GE food issue in the late 1990s nor the concomitant expansion of the movement can be understood without recognizing the importance of the intellectual work carried out by a “critical community” of activists during the two-decade-long period prior to the 1990s. We show how these early critics forged an oppositional ideology and concrete set of grievances upon which a movement could later be built. Our analysis advances social movement theory by establishing the importance of the intellectual work that activists engage in during the “proto-mobilizational” phase of collective action, and by identifying the cognitive and social processes by which activists develop a critical, analytical framework. Our elaboration of four specific dimensions of idea/ideology formation pushes the literature toward a more complete understanding of the role of ideas and idea-makers in social movements, and suggests a process of grievance construction that is more “organic” than strategic (pace the framing literature). Rachel Schurman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental sociology, and social movements. She is co-editor of Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents (University of California Press, 2003) and several articles and book chapters on the anti-genetic engineering movement. Her current book project, with William Munro, explores how organized social resistance to GMOs has shaped the trajectory of agricultural biotechnology. William Munro is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, International Studies Program, at Illinois Wesleyan University. His research and writing focuses on the politics of agrarian change and state formation in Africa, as well as post-conflict development. He is the author of The Moral Economy of the State: Conservation, Community Development and State-Making in Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press,1998). He is currently collaborating with Rachel Schurman on a book about social resistance to agricultural biotechnology.     

Navigating the technology-media-movements complex

Abstract

In this article we develop the notion of the technology-media-movements complex (TMMC) as a field-definition statement for ongoing inquiry into the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social and political movements. We consider the definitions and boundaries of the TMMC, arguing particularly for a historically rooted conception of technological development that allows better integration of the different intellectual traditions that are currently focused on the same set of empirical phenomena. We then delineate two recurrent debates in the literature highlighting their contributions to emerging knowledge. The first debate concerns the divide between scholars who privilege media technologies, and see them as driving forces of movement dynamics, and those who privilege media practices over affordances. The second debate broadly opposes theorists who believe in the emancipatory potential of ICTs and those who highlight the ways they are used to repress social movements and grassroots mobilization. By mapping positions in these debates to the TMMC we identify and provide direction to three broad research areas which demand further consideration: (i) questions of power and agency in social movements; (ii) the relationships between, on the one hand, social movements and technology and media as politics (i.e. cyberpolitics and technopolitics), and on the other, the quotidian and ubiquitous use of digital tools in a digital age; and (iii) the significance of digital divides that cut across and beyond social movements, particularly in the way such divisions may overlay existing power relations in movements. In conclusion, we delineate six challenges for profitable further research on the TMMC.     

Are social movements truly social? The prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements

A growing body of research demonstrates that U.S. politics has become increasingly polarized over the past few decades. In these polarized times, what potential roles might social movements play in bridging divides between, or perhaps further dividing, people across a variety of political and social groups? In this article, we propose a research agenda for social movement studies focused on the prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements. Although scholars commonly frame their work on the consequences of social movements in terms of social movements' political, economic, cultural, and biographical outcomes, we suggest a focus on two categories of social movement outcomes (prosocial and antisocial outcomes) that cut across prior theoretical categories, and we show how an emerging body of scholarship has documented such outcomes at micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. We also consider how emerging scholarship has addressed the sociological question about the conditions under which social movements produce prosocial versus antisocial outcomes. As we argue, attention to prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements holds both theoretical implications for social movement research and practical implications for social movements navigating the United States' political and social divides.     

A situated understanding of digital technologies in social movements. Media ecology and media practice approaches

Abstract

The article tackles two main aspects related to the interaction between social movements and digital technologies. First, it reflects on the need to include and combine different theoretical approaches in social movement studies so as to construct more meaningful understanding of how social movement actors deals with digital technologies and with what outcomes in societies. In particular, the article argues that media ecology and media practice approaches serve well to reach this objective as: they recognize the complex multi-faceted array of media technologies, professions and contents with which social movement actors interact; they historicize the use of media technologies in social movements; and they highlight the agency of social movement actors in relation to media technologies while avoiding a media-centric approach to the subject matter. Second, this article employs a media practice perspective to explore two interrelated trends in contemporary societies that the articles in this special issue deal with: the personalization and individualization of politics, and the role of the grassroots in political mobilizations.     

Unfinished Imagined Communities: States, Social Movements, and Nationalism in Latin America

This article addresses two shortcomings in the literature on nationalism: the need to theorize transformations of nationalism, and the relative absence of comparative works on Latin America. We propose a state-focused theoretical framework, centered on conflicts between states elites and social movements, for explaining transformations of nationalism. Different configurations of four key factors — the mobilization of excluded elites and subordinate actors, state elites’ political control, the ideological capacities of states, and polarization around ethnoracial cleavages — shape how contrasting trajectories of nationalism unfold over time. A comparative analysis of early– and mid–twentieth century Mexico, Argentina, and Peru illustrates the explanatory power of our theoretical framework. José Itzigsohn is Associate Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Developing Poverty (Penn State University, 2000). His current research focuses on two main topics. The first is the formation of ethnic, racial, and national identities. The second is grassroots economies and workplace democracy. Matthias vom Hau is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Brown University. He is currently completing his dissertation, a comparative-historical analysis of nationalism in twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. His research interests involve the intersections among culture and identity, state power, and social movements.     

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.     

Time for change

ABSTRACT

This introductory article sets out the core concerns of this special issue on time and temporality in relation to social movements. It examines three areas: historical times, events, and sequences. In each area, we examine the ways that time and temporality are (often implicitly) embedded in existing social movement scholarship. We then introduce some of the problems raised by our contributors, and the ways in which they utilise greater sensitivity to time and temporality in furthering our understanding of the dynamics of the mobilisation, functions and fortunes of social movements.     

Enclave deliberation and social movement mobilization: the DDays in Occupy Central

ABSTRACT

Scholars have called for a synergy between studies of deliberative democracy and social movements for their mutual enhancement. The existing literature generally applies the principle of deliberation to evaluate social movements, but few studies have examined the corresponding practice of deliberative democracy within a movement. The Occupy Central (OCLP) campaign in Hong Kong is a rare case in which the organizers incorporated Deliberation Days into a social movement; however, participant self-selection turned it into an instance of ‘enclave deliberation’. This paper studies the impact of enclave deliberation on social movements based on the case of the OCLP campaign and argues that enclave deliberation can be a powerful tool for mobilization, particularly for gaining public support and for recruiting core participants. However, the coherence and support of the movement can decline when enclave deliberation is used to make decisions for the general public, because enclave deliberation incorporates only a small spectrum of like-minded participants who might not seriously engage with opposing views. The findings of this study imply that enclave deliberation could facilitate mobilization, but it has its inherent limitations for decision-making in a movement. Given the selective nature of social movements, deliberation within social movements is likely to be enclave deliberation in most cases. This study thus has significant implications for the practice of deliberation in social movements in other contexts.     

‘Anger is Why We're All Here’: Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization

The emotions involved in social activism are central factors in the recruitment to, motivation for, and sustainability of social movements. But this perspective on the role of emotions within social movements contrasts with studies of emotions within mainstream organizations where employees are called on to manage their own emotions and those of others. Thus, while much social movement research focuses on how activists actively cultivate emotional expression, these ideas rarely intersect with the organizational research that examines how a diminished quality of working life may result from the need for employees to modify, suppress or emphasize emotions. Using in-depth interviews with activists at Amnesty International, this article bridges this theoretical divide by examining emotional labour and emotional regulation among paid activists in a professional social movement organization. I explore the ways in which employees struggle with the emotional component of their work and the implications of these emotions for the quality of their working life, the stability of such organizations and the maintenance of social movements.     

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.     

Analyzing ethnoracial mobilization

This article examines scholarship about ethnoracial mobilization written by sociologists within the subfields of social movements and race and racism. We situate our synthesis within critiques put forward by other scholars about the treatment of ethnoracial movements within the social movement subfield. Using these critiques as launching points, we find two broad patterns in the literature: (a) a focus on ethnoracial social movements that decenters race, at times treating it as an independent variable and (b) a focus on mobilizations for racial equity that treats race as a dynamic and constructed process. Within the latter focus, we note research that investigates ethnoracial mobilization at the macro‐, meso‐, and micro‐levels. We call for more research on movements that specifically consider the mobilization and construction of ethnoracial identities. In doing so, we provide a conceptual map of the field and make suggestions for how social movement scholars employing distinct theoretical foci can engage in ethnoracial analysis. Finally, we hypothesize why there might be a dearth of research within the social movement subfield that engages in critical analysis of ethnoracial dynamics of social movements.     

Temporality in social movement theory: vectors and events in the neoliberal timescape

ABSTRACT

Existing theories of social movements have a weak conception of temporality, which is generally tied to truncated protest waves or else to micro-scale sequences of interaction. Neither approach enables an understanding of continuity and change in the content and form of social movements over longer periods. This article develops a new conceptual terminology intended to bring temporal sensitivity to our understanding of the interplay between movements and their socio-political environments. Vectors highlight evolving patterns of interaction that carry ideas and action orientations into a range of social settings over a period of decades. Examining the interplay of different vectors, and accounting also for the unfolding character of historic events, enables the apprehension of an overarching timescape within which movements move. This theoretical approach is illustrated with an examination of three significant periods of transnational contention associated with the Alter-Globalization, Anti-War, and Occupy movements. Analysis of vectors that shape discourses of conflict, organizational preferences, and practices of individual autonomy explain dynamics of continuity and change across different movements, each of which is shaped by a dynamic neoliberal timescape.

Abbreviation CBDM: Consensus-based Decision Making; ICT: Information and Communication Technology; IFI: International Financial Institution; IMF: International Monetary Fund; WTO: World Trade Organisation     

Social Work,Spirituality, and Diasporic Communities

Abstract

The discourse surrounding the role of spirituality in social work practice has been expanding exponentially in recent years. Similarly, the discourse surrounding the role of spirituality among diasporic communities has expanded in recent times as well. In this paper, we will consider the linkages between social work, spirituality, and diaspora. We will focus our discussion on a particular diasporic spiritual community, the Sathya Sai Baba movement and its social service activities. We will then consider the implications of such spiritual movements for the social work profession. Among the key issues explored in this paper are the change in the social construction of populations that have moved between two countries as 'immigrant communities' to 'diasporic communities' and the implications of these changes for social work. Another critical issue we discuss is how working with spiritual movements may help address the 'spiritual deficit' concern that some social work academics have referred to, and indirectly at least, we begin to address 'the social work crisis' issue that has negatively affected the social work profession over the last few years.