In the last two decades, the emergence of new forms of collective action in advanced industrial societies stimulated a provocative and innovative reconceptualization of the meaning of social movements. Its relevance has been highlighted by the process of delegitimization of major political parties in Europe at the end of the 1980s, as shown in recent electoral results that have demonstrated considerable support for new or nontraditional parties in Germany, Austria, Italy, and France. In both Europe and North America, movements have arisen that stretch the explanatory capacities of older theoretical perspectives. Peace movements, student movements, the antinuclear

energy protests, minority...

Over the past two decades, the study of social movements has been among the most productive and intellectually lively subfields within sociology. But, as with all emergent paradigms, the recent renaissance in social movement studies has highlighted certain aspects of the phenomenon while ignoring others. Specifically, the dominance, within the United States, of the “resource mobilization” and “political process” perspectives has privileged the political, organizational, and network/structural aspects of social movements while giving the more cultural or ideational dimensions of collective action short shrift.

From a sociology of knowledge perspective, the recent ignorance of the more cultural aspects of social...

Concepts and theories in the social sciences are marked by a distinctive thriftiness. Few are wasted. Fashionable for a while, they are criticized, discarded, and then, sometime later, they are salvaged from the ash can of ideas and revived, often in new contexts and with new polish on them. In this chapter, I examine some characteristics of contemporary social movements. In my view, collective behavior and mass society theories, partially discredited in current thinking about social movements, can be very useful in examining certain movements and some aspects of many others. This is especially the case in the cont ext...

It has often been observed that social movements exist and rise and fall in clusters that are more or less unified by dedication to common underlying values and worldviews. During any given period in history and within a given socio cultural complex, a few basic themes tend to shape the goals and worldviews of the most significant social movements, even when their specific concerns are quite disparate. Herbert Blumer (1939) called attention to this principle by distinguishing between specific and general social movements. General movements are “rather formless in organization and inarticulate in expression” (201), reflecting the historic emergence of...

In systems of high information density, individuals and groups must possess a certain degree of autonomy and formal capacities for learning and acting that enable them to function as reliable, self-regulating units. Simultaneously, highly differentiated systems exert strong pressure for integration. They shift social control from the content of action to its languages, from the external regulation of behavior to interference in the cognitive and motivational preconditions for it. Conflicts tend to arise in those areas of the system that are most directly involved in the production of information and communicative resources but at the same time subjected to intense...

With the rise of nearly universal use of automobiles during the past fifty years, deaths and serious injuries associated with automobiles have escalated rapidly. Highway fatalities are chronic in all rich nations simply because the automobile is central to the everyday lives of most citizens. Driving crash deaths in the United States have totaled between forty thousand and fifty thousand a year during the last several decades. Close to on e-half of these deaths are thought to be alcohol related. Each of them has left behind grieving relatives and friends. A recent estimate of people who believe that they are...

Among social movement scholars there is a growing awareness that movement participants share a number of beliefs that make it possible for them to act collectively (Morris and Mueller 1992). Alberto Melucci introduced the term “collective identity” to refer to these shared beliefs. He defines collective identity as “a shared definition of the field of opportunities and constraints offered to collective action” (1985, 793). These shared definitions are developed in interactions between individuals. Collective identity, according to Melucci, provides actors with the “common cognitive frameworks that enable them to assess their environment and to calculate the costs and benefits of...

Two related but theoretically unconnected sets of concept s have influenced recent social movement theory and research. One set focuses on framing processes that affect the interpretive schema movement participants construct as they make sense of their social world s (Gamson, Fireman, and Rytina 1982; Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988, 1992; Johnston 1991; Gerhards and Rucht 1992; Tarrow 1992; Benford 1993a, 1993b). The other set of concepts directs attention toward the personal and collective identities movement actors construct in their everyday accomplishment of collective action (Pizzorno 1978; Cohen 1985; Melucci 1989; Taylor 1989; Gamson 1992; Friedman and...

This chapter reviews an old and central issue in social movement s research that focuses on their origins and evolution in order to understand the reasons for their emergence, the events and organizations that made them possible, their resulting processes, and their permanence and impact in society. This also was the object of my first empirical research on the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California, Berkeley (Larafia 1975). My goal was to explore the discontinuity of the student movement of that campus, one of the centers of student activism in the second half of the 1960s, ten...

In creasing cross-fertilization of social movement theory has occurred from both sides of the Atlantic over the last five years. The European “new social movements theory “and the North American theory of “resource mobilization,” developed since the tumultuous 1960s, have been the major contributors.¹ Resource mobilization theory is based in a strategic approach to the study of social movements; item phasizes the mobilization and allocation of resources by movement actors in the contex of opportunities and constraints imposed by the social and political environment. Particular attention focuses on the role of formal social movement organizations as the key social actors...

Alongside the growth of New Social Movements (NSMs) in the 1970s and 1980s, there has also been a proliferation of ethnic nationalist movements. In Spain and Canada, ethnic nationalisms challenge the integrity of the state; in what was Yugoslavia, they have destroyed it; and in several former Soviet republics, nationalism has become the fundamental principle of state power. Sometimes nationalist sentiments are so strong and pervasive that they subsume feminist, ecological, and peace agendas under the banner of the nation, as occurred in Quebec, the Basque region, Catalonia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Although ethnic nationalisms do not constitute a new...

Social movements under authoritarian systems have mobilization patterns and policy outcomes that are very different from movements in pluralist democracies. On the one hand, social forces have “unlimited possibilities” for articulating new issues because the inertia of official politics recasts any challenge in terms of the broader drama of democracy versus authoritarianism. In Eastern Europe, the result was the existence of some very limited initiatives that had public and intellectual significance disproportionate to the small number of supporters. These small groups set an example: they showed how small, powerless groups could become capable of articulating very important—even crucial—but...

This chapter compares three basic stages in the development of forms of collective action in modern Spain. I call the first stage traditional or classic. Its beginning can be dated around 1890, the year that a universal suffrage law was enacted and the first May Day was celebrated. The inaugration of universal suffrage made massive political participation possible for the first time. May Day marked the beginning of mass mobilization practices among the Spanish working class.¹ The first stage culminates in the Civil War of 1936–1939. A modern stage comprises collective protest actions arising under late Francoism and the...

Two hundred years after the French Revolution, when the division between Left and Right began to be used to map political alignments, it seems obvious to many that such clear-cut political differentiation has lost any meaning. Certainly, it is argued, the Left no longer can be said to have reality in the light of the collapse of international communism, the decomposition of the Soviet bloc, the abandonment of socialism by those living under its “actually existing” form, and the recent conservative drift of politics in many Western countries. I argue, however, that we still need “Left” and “Right” to signify...