Comment on Wilson and Zurcher's "Status Inconsistency and Participation in Social Movements"

Wilson and Zurcher (1976) set out to discuss the relationships within a set of four variables—income, occupation, education, and pornactivity, that is, activity in relation to two anti-pornography crusades—and to proceed from this discussion to conclusions about status inconsistency as an explanatory framework for the analysis of social movements. We should like to comment on three levels. First we discuss the purely numerical aspects of their analysis; second, the inferences they draw from that analysis; and third, we present some reflections on the theoretical apparatus of Wilson and Zurcher.