SOCS15001 - 27-Sep, automated transcript

Sep 27, 2022

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Yeah, good. Thanks. Quick announcement.

Thank you, isn't making it. So no, no, no, no, it's just too many people. Yeah,
you can do a very quick shout-out. Amazing. Thank you, just hold it.
Attempt to hello. So I didn't didn't hear us. We're just running three tracks this
year. At the University of Manchester will be taking three teams of students to
Kilimanjaro Machu Picchu and to the Balkans. All of them, Six-Day tracks their
opportunities.
Time pretty epic site different and raise some amazing money for WWF. One of the
biggest conservation charities in the world as well as supporting Marie Curie a
fantastic charity with some people, end-of-life care and their families here in
the UK.
Want to find out more come and grab our fliers. They'll be down the front there
and there's a QR code. You can scan, finding out how you can beat us next week and
find out everything there is to know about what we offer. Thank you. So, welcome
everybody to this power and value module. So you should know who I am, if not then,
I don't know what to say. Okay, so okay, so I'm gonna program director, but also
the cost convener of the module. So, I just want to give a very, very quick
introduction
to the module, before I pass the mic to Kevin. So, again, welcome everybody to the
module. So you might be a bit confused. Why am I in the module? So they're tooth
purposes of this module. The first one is to introduce you to social sciences
because
after all your, you'll be a graduate of social sciences.
At the end of your three or four years of the program. So the main purpose also
is to introduce you, like, why we are in the school of social sciences as well,
right? So we're going to talk about a lot of things that we'll have a little bit
relations with what you're going to learn in economics. And we're going to offer
a list of different perspective on what that might happen or interaction between
the social sciences and economics. So I know most of you have no idea what
sociology
is so
And it's going to talk about that today. And last year is the first year that we
did this module 4 of risk. But yesterday, I was talking to a student's and she told
me that because of this module, she is now switching to Sociology. So so is it she
did a good job Kevin. So yeah, so every week we have different lecturers or careful
bear for two weeks and after that we have a different lecturer. So so yeah, so
every
week there will also be a quiz after lecture
Again, this quiz, I expect everybody to get four or five months out five so don't
worry too much about that but on the Blackboard, you'll be able to find a link to
the quiz on the topic. On the lecture one page, it will be available from 2 p.m.
tomorrow all the way until 2:00 p.m. on Friday, tested last time, you can do that.
So once you get it started, you have 30 minutes to do the quiz, okay? And but you
will take you less than that. Okay, so don't worry. You can just do it anytime you
want, but make sure you do it before 2 p.m. on Friday, this will be recorded as
well. So
You should be hopefully recorded but you should be able to watch it later if you
want to revise it at the end of the module. You also required to write critical
reflection on what you have learned in this module, so so no idea what it means.
Don't worry. Because we have a for tutorials throughout the semester that we're
going to teach you how to prepare for that. All right, so so without further Ado,
our past my microphone back to Kevin, who would talk about sociology today,
Hello, this is Mike from, pick me up. It is, isn't it? Okay so welcome aboard. Very
nice to see you all here. I'm going to do two lectures so I'm going to talk about
social social movements this way, you can then Corporate social responsibility next
week in a moment I'll explain the link between those two themes. As Ron said I'm
a sociologist I'm a lecturer in sociology. I do.
Research and teaching around a few different themes. And so, I'm covering kind of
my favorite themes in these weeks to give you a bit of a taster, of what social
entrepreneur analysis might bring add to conversations about topics that hopefully
will have some interest in but also to Center on these questions as Central to the
course of power and value. And I think what you'll see through the course, is that
the
Different social sciences, provide different perspectives on those objects of
analysis,
power and value. And we can bring them together. There is some coherence, some
shared
language between the different disciplines but there are also some kind of
distinctions
as well. Different habits of thought the different disciplines have different
histories
often, they have kind of different key theories that have been working with
different
methodologies. So the way we
We talked about these common Concepts, often indicates, a different sort of
perspective,
we can be quite competitive over that sometimes. So if you're in a research seminar
which brings in economists and sociologists, they might be at each other's throats
by the end of the hour. Hopefully we're a bit more collegial and that most of the
time, but those different what that indicates is that those different perspectives
are meaningful to us.
So, I'm going to approach power and value through these two, different forms of
organization and action that we can see in societies right across the globe. So
I'm going to start by talking about social movements, which is really my primary
area of research. And I'm going to talk about how movements construct alternative
values. So
Here, we're thinking about on a cultural values, a set of beliefs that are
important,
that motivate action. So we're already kind of broader conception of value. Then
you might immediately expect in an economics course where you might be thinking
about a particular kind of value, evaluating things through perhaps monetary means
some other kind of kind of instrumental values that you might imagine. So we're
into kind of a broad set of cultural and political.
All values, motivating action. And then in the second after this lecture, I'll talk
about strategies for Change and the ways that movements try to achieve action and
the point of that is to think about power. So, how do movements try to gain power
social movements don't typically have much money behind them, but they do try to
motivate lots of people to act and so power comes through that coordination. That's
the answer in a nutshell, but I'm going to explore that in more detail.
And then next week, I'm going to talk about transnational corporations and
particularly
the shift we've seen over the last, well, over the last 40 or 50 years, but really
accelerating over the last twenty years, towards finding something, called
Corporate
social responsibility. And that about corporations, trying to act in ways that go
beyond a very narrow conception of economic value, and to somehow Act,
World's other cultural social and political values, which is a challenge for a
corporation
because it's a legal form that is set up in order to generate economic value. So
it's something that's relatively novel in the history of capitalism. It's also
something
that kind of brings those competing notion Notions of what value might be to the
fore.
The two things are linked partly because a lot of social movements make claims on
corporations. Make critiques of Corporations and claims that they should act
differently.
They try to exert power to force corporations to act differently, and they try to
win moral arguments to make corporations act differently. And what we've seen in
recent decades is a shift in corporate Behavior to some extent to some limited
extent
and corporate social responsibility is one way of seeing that shift.
Okay? So we'll study in focusing on social movements and for this week and I'll
start by just talking in very broad terms about what social movement is and what
sociologists are interested in about societal social movements. How do we study
them? Why do we study them? What might we learn in a general sense from that and
then I'm going to focus on these two things value and power. The way I'm going to
look at Value is
Ask how movements construct values. So movements always make demands they always
make statements. They have something to say. They're always communicative. And at
the heart of what they're communicating is often a set of values that is, in some
way alternative to or in conflict with some mainstream values. So, we've got
various
concepts for approaching understanding how those values are generated in social
movements.
So we took a bit more detail about that and then I'm going to get on to strategies
of protest and try to see within that the different kinds of forms of power that
might be operating within social movements.
Okay, so I'm going to the there's lots of definitions of social movements floating
around, I'm going to use my own, it's probably not great practice to quote your
yourself, but this is a relatively recent piece of work a done. The whole point
really of the piece of writing, I'm quoting from is to be a kind of student
friendly
guide to this field of research. So social movement research is a calling an
interdisciplinary
field. So I sometimes am
It's political scientists or historians occasionally economists as well get
involved
in social movements scholarship. So we have this field of study with social
movements
at its heart so it's a social movements. First of all Collective actor, not
important,
particularly from a sociological perspective because sociologists are always
interested
in the collectives and there's something about a collective that is more than the
sum of its parts. So it's not just
A bunch of individuals doing the same thing, there has to be some coordination.
Some recognition that they are moving together that they are working together. So
we can look at things like market trends, and Fashions and fads. And we can see
lots of individuals doing the same thing. That doesn't make the same as a social
movement, because there isn't that kind of awareness of each other being part of
a kind of Greater whole. And it doesn't necessarily turn into a kind of a greater
whole
Social movements Collective more than the sum of the individual Parts made up of
individuals informal groups, sometimes formal organizations coordinating in various
ways. So that's what makes the collective some form of coordination. That doesn't
necessarily mean some leadership structure where there's a leader who decides on
action and makes everyone else follow it. Although that does happen in some social
movements, it might be much more
Grassroots Network e informal emergent but nevertheless, some form of coordination
and that coordination has to be voluntary and a social movement, we sometimes see
things that look a bit like social movements, but where there is essentially paid
activity behind it and then we start to think what the motives here, make it
something
different. It's something quite different. If you're being paid to act,
Compared to if you're doing it, voluntarily on the basis of some deeply held
belief,
sorry. This the slides are progressing automatically, which I don't like, I'll just
save and stalker.
Ashley account. I'll just have to cope with it. So, where was I? Coordinating?
Voluntarily
voluntary actions, obviously quite different to paid action. We do see today. Some
corporations blurring that boundary. So Uber you probably all know what ruber is
Ubers often finds itself in a kind of regulatory battle with the sea
cities in, which it sets up shop because taxis are heavily regulated. In most
countries
will certainly used to be. And so, to become a taxi driver, you need a license who
often needed to set an exam. My dad was a taxi driver, had set a really long exam
to do the knowledge to show the understood the area, kind of had a map of the area
in his head but also it's a way of ensuring that takes drivers are well behaved
and from the taxi drivers perspective,
Ensuring that they're paid a certain rate so they'll agree a minimum rate of pay.
Now, Uber has managed to undercut that in lots of cities but it's brought it into
kind of regulatory conflict. There are had to be either changes of rules or rules
ignored its upset. A lot of the time, local taxi drivers, the old-school taxi
drivers,
who are losing business or having to accept lower rates of pay. Now, one of the
things that over does is to mobilize its drivers to
To appear, like a social movement. So, if you're, if you've got the driver version
of The Uber app, occasionally before it gives you a job, it will make you sign a
petition and you really haven't got much choice but to sign the petition, which
is being sent off to, you know, the local mayor's office or wherever it is. The
regulatory conflict comes from. Now, from my perspective, even though that looks
like protest, I don't want to call it a social movement and it's this distinction
between voluntary and
Kind of paid or in forced participation much more. Dramatic example would be the
sometimes, say, in authoritarian countries, a leader kind of producing a
demonstration
of support either by coercing or paying people to turn up on the streets and wave
placards and so on.
So for me, I'm picking a definition that kind of cuts her out. Now there's lots
of interesting stuff going on there but it's not kind of what I'm thinking of what
I'm talking about. Social movement and the ways their value and power operate.
There
are going to be different
final aspect of the definition then is, we've got some sort of conflict and the
way I've written up here is the movements are pursuing a range of values or
interest
the bring them into conflict, with perceived systems of power, those systems of
power, might be perceived rather than real. We could, of course, you know, social
movements have all have different perspectives on how power operates in the world
around them. And one of the things social movements Scholars do,
Is to find out what those perspectives are. Some movements have a version of
reality,
they'll probably match very much the version of reality. The you would learn in
a social science degree, other movements have a version of reality that doesn't
match that and a less connected to reality. So that for example the anti-
vaccination
movement we saw a round covid, expressed a bunch of beliefs that could be
disproved.
Act. So there was a perceived system of power. They were confronting is just that
wasn't the actual system of power they existed in the world around them, which
makes
it much harder to act, effectively of course.
So perceptions of power then are clearly important because the perception of power
can motivate action, just as readily as a real system of power, if you
misunderstand
how power operates in the world, then you might still act on that understanding.
And so, one thing that I do as a scholar of social movements, is I talk to people
in movements about how they see the world. What is their critique of the world?
What is their kind of beliefs about a preferable alternative?
Now, I'm not setting myself up to go to them and say actually you misunderstand
the world. Let me tell you how it is. That's not my job. I'm going to there to
listen
and learn about the processes by, which these beliefs come into being. I'm not
there
to correct, and it would be a kind of, it would be unethical Minefield to start
doing that. Be A different kind of function, a political function, but we can see,
we can see those beliefs about power operating
and being important in shaping action,
Okay. So why are why study movements won't bother? Well I find them intrinsically,
interesting. So, I mean that's not much of an answer for you. Could you might not
as a sociologist, there are some good reasons to study social movements for a start
movement to do produce change, or at least our one actor, among a bunch of actors
in any historical process. And we can look at moments of political, and cultural
processes.
Us through progress. Sorry through history.
I do. So regressive retrograde steps. Mm, seem to make the world a worse place.
We can find both kinds and we can link them to social movement activity. Now, in
any historical process, of course, has lots of different. Actors involved are
institutional
political actors. There is there are kind of classes defined by money and so on.
So a historical process is complex in that sense, but movements are often. They're
in the big processes of
Change in democratization, for example, the shift from authoritarian, to democracy
and Democratic control every country. That is democratic today, had social
movements
involved in pushing that change that change, democratization doesn't happen without
social movements. So if we're interested in those big historical processes, then
social movements are inherently a part of that picture for me. They're also
interesting
because we can look around at
Movements and whether or not they make a difference to the world. What we can see
there is the generation of alternative Norms, a lot of sociology is about the
reproduction
of norms and practices and usual ways of doing things whether that's within a
country
or a smaller sub group, own kind of subculture within a country or even a more
International
Regional level. We find patterns in the way that people act and a lot of sociology
is about explaining. Why do people keep doing the same things? What are they will
believe roughly the same.
Same. But of course not everyone does and I'm interested in those people who might
be on the margins might have alternative perspectives so I find that interesting
as well. There is also a kind of economic or a puzzle inspired by economic theory
that is often used to kind of as a way into thinking about why social movements
might be interested. So man car Olson from way back in the 1960s wrote book with
the logic of
Collective action. And he used a set of theories, the kind of under the umbrella
term Game Theory, which is a part of a broader rational Choice perspective that
informs a lot of economic theory. And there you treat individuals and as
individuals,
so you're less interested in this kind of collective more than the sum of the
individual
Parts you sailor. We've got a bunch of individuals making decisions about action.
And if we treat them all as rational, now they're not all going to be perfectly
rational. But probably the errors will average out so we can treat them all as if
they're rational. And then we can try and understand the group action through a
bunch of rational individuals making individual decisions about the costs and
benefits
that accrue to them on the basis of a particular form of Behavior. Now from that
perspective, any involvement in most social movements is a puzzle. It's
It's not logical to take part in a social movement if under some conditions to
this.
But broadly if that's a social movement is trying to achieve a common benefit
cleaner
air, and more stable climate and more stable economy, maybe if that, if the claims
of that movement are benefits, that would accrue to everyone. Whether they took
part in the movement or not, then the logical thing to do is not to take
Risk of movement participation. But to wait for the movement to win and collect
the benefits. So that according to Olson is the individually, rational response.
We shouldn't take by movements, which hope that the movements were in, and then
we benefit from the movement winning. Small-scale example, might be your workplace
Trade, union calls, a strike for better pay. You don't want to lose the
A on the day that because you lose pay on the days. You go on strike. Don't get
paid on strike day. You don't want to lose that pay so you decide not to
participate
in the strike, but if the strike wins, you still get better pay. So you become a
free rider, you decide not to act. Now, of course, the problem with that is that
if everyone acts like that, the collective action never happens because everyone
acts like that. So we never see strikes will never see social movements. We never
see people taking a risk on the basis of some other values. So clearly there's
Else going on here and that's the puzzle is like, what is the something else going
on here? And there's a few different answers to that values is part of the answer
and that's why I'm going to come onto for Olsen Olsen was mostly interested in
organization.
So here's our answer was actually if you got the right kind of organization you
can reduce the costs of participation and you can also offer selective incentives.
So although if you win everyone gets the main benefit, maybe there are other
Benefits that you can give to people for taking part. So they'll feel good about
themselves for having Taken part in this movement or strike or whatever a formal
organization can give them information that they wouldn't get otherwise and so on
and so on.
However also never really satisfactorily answered the puzzle. But what it did do
was Express the puzzle and interesting way.
I should probably speed up. Some of the slides are quite wordy. I've made them
quite
wordy partly so that you've got the record during download them from Blackboard.
If you haven't already, I'm going to flick through some of them quite quickly
though.
Including this one. So what do we do? When we study movements? We look at the
historical
context and then we look at the movements themselves. So in the context we're
looking
for, what is the conflict? Who's involved in the conflict? What are the other
actors
like?
They is it conflict with the state is it with the corporation is it was a set of
dominant cultural values and then we'll look at well what are the what are the
meanings
attributed to those actors and actions by the people involved. So we often look
centrally and social movements attribution of meaning but it's relevant to to look
at. How does the state make sense of this conflict or how does a corporation makes
sense of the conflict that gets us into thinking about what, what are the values
in play here?
And in addition to that, we think about what is the nature of the collective and
that changes over space and time collectives. Look like all sorts of different
things
but we can see that often they're brought together around values and I'm going to
give you the concepts of interpretive frames and Collective identity in a second
to make sense of values. And also by investigating means of coordination. So how
do people get together and then what do they actually do? What are the
INS, What are the strategies involved?
So in terms of frames, have concept name, it goes back to some social psychology
and but by a scholar called Erving Goffman, who is kind of still on all the
sociology
syllabuses syllabi and the central Insight really there is that ideas don't stand
alone. They come together in packages. So if we want to understand
A value like equality. Now you've all got a sense of what a quality might mean,
but when we start to dig into the detail will find, there are probably some
different
senses of equality. I'm not going to do it. We could do this in a smaller group.
We could do this as an exercise in gavel, want to define the term and look at the
differences but I'll tell you what the common want your commonly find is you'll
find some people who think of a quality in terms of everyone having the same. So
a
Straightforward definition of equality. Now, if we apply that to kind of political
economic realm, that becomes something like equality of outcome. So a national set
wage, perhaps everyone gets the same amount out know, kind of competitive labor
markets, no, differential pricing of Labor. So it's obviously, it's not what we
see today, in any society really but
B1 vision of equality. Another one would be equality of opportunity and that's
probably
closer to what you get in Liberal Democratic countries. Is the kind of underlying
vision of equality, equality of opportunities. So everyone should have the same
opportunity to do well in a society that shouldn't be barriers of discrimination.
They shouldn't be legal barriers that stop some people advancing and other people
encourages other people to advance.
Meritocracy, the idea that you get what you deserve on the basis of your merits,
can be tied to that vision of equality of opportunity. So, there's two versions
of equality there and we could go on. Now, in order to. So, if I say the word
equality
in order to really communicate, what I mean, I need to start giving those other
details. So, I need to work with other ideas, other Concepts in order to Deacon
test the meaning of equality across
He might the meaning of equality, might be contested, we might have different
Visions
so in order to Deacon test it, we linked it to other ideas and that's what I mean
by ideas coming in packages, they don't sit alone. Most ideas that matter most
politically
political or economic ideas in order to understand them. You need to see this
framework
within which they sit now. For having Goffman, the social psychologist that
reflects
the way our brain works. And there is a cognitive
Of schemata got it. So a pattern of thought that we develop as we socialize and
learn language and so on that puts ideas into these kind of Frameworks,
interpretive
Frameworks now because we're social beings with pretty good at guessing what
somebody
means by particular concept by context and so on so if you went to a radical left
meeting, people were talking about equality. You'd
Asia is one version of equality. Say, and if you were in a very different sort of
meeting an economics class, then then you might think are what they're talking
about
and saw the vision of equality. So we can work with these multiple ideas, but
ultimately,
we kind of package them up with other beliefs and values as into a structure of
thought. Now, one of the things that social movements do is framing, they produce
interpretive frames, so they make claims about
Out values that link them to their experiences of the real world. There has to be
some empirical referent here, it's not all theoretical work, it's about describing
the world where in today, and then they use those Concepts in packages of ideas.
And if you can successfully convince people, that your package of ideas is
coherent,
and consistent, and matches the reality. Then you've gone quite a long way towards
mobilizing those people in.
Taking action on your behalf, the abortion. The conflict over abortion particularly
in the United States is quite interesting in this sense because both sides of that
conflict to claiming to be standing for rights either. They're standing for the
rights of women to have control over their own bodies, or their standing for the
rights of the unborn child. And so the conflict plays out in these
Value turns in interpreting. What is a right? Who gets to have a right? What are
the consequences of saying that somebody has a, right? So values are hugely
important,
they shaped conflicts, they encourage people to participate in conflicts and they
exist in these interpreted frames. So one of the things movements do is they
generate
interpretive frames and we find ourselves using the interpretive frames of
successful
past movements all the time in our everyday discourse.
That's enough on frames another way of approaching identity values is through
identities
which is a similar way of understanding the world. But the difference is perhaps
that it's less about cognition what we consciously think about the world.
And more about how we relate to other people who we see, as sharing something
sharing
a position in the world or sharing a perspective in the world. And this is
important
for understanding that Collective nature of social movements because it's how we
bring these individuals into a sense, or it's how individuals bring themselves into
a sense of being part of a shared Collective. So,
As individuals, we might have multiple identities. So the things that are important
to me, that shape, who I am, what are they? Well, I'm an academic. I'm a parent.
I'm a cyclist. That's probably pretty important to me, than to my view of the
world.
I'm a lefty politically. I'm not going to get any more specific than that. I'm just
going to give you that so that might be part of my identity as well. Now, all of
those aspects of my personal identity, link me to groups. And those links might
be obvious in the way we dress or the way we speak, or the way we share ideas. So
if I turn up a conference and I see someone else in a bright yellow,
Key carrying a bicycle helmet. Then I know we've got something in common in might
be the beginning of a conversation, we might share Tales of near misses. We've had
with bosses in the recent week. We've got something to talk about and that might,
that might be quite a superficial connection. But when Collective identities, get
politicized, they can become much more much deeper, much more meaningful, and
attached
to these interpretive frames and values often when we name a
All Movement, we are using the identity category. So if we talk about workers
movement,
as a group of people recognize an important aspect to their selves, is the fact
that they are workers. Same for a women's movement, of course.
We might sometimes refer to sets of beliefs, when we name a movement, a feminist
movement or a socialist movement. And I kissed movement are obvious examples and
here. Again, the individuals who play a part in that movement May well, identify
they might not all, there might be debates about it, but they may well, all
identify
with that term of ideology that name for a way of thinking.
And identities are important because they, they are meaningful to us, not just in
a cognitive sense. But in an emotional sense, we start to invest emotionally in
that sense of self. And in those connections, we build with other people who share
a sense of self. And at times of Our Lives, we might go and explore some aspect
of ourselves that we thought was important and then it gets dropped by the wayside
as we move on to something else. So they're not permanent necessarily permanent
aspects of
Self. But for the time that they're kind of Part of Yourself understanding, there
is an emotional load and that motive motivates action. So we don't need necessarily
mine Carlson's notion of the rational individual actor to say, what motivates
action
because sometimes what motivates action clearly isn't calm, controlled cost benefit
analysis.
And if you look, if you look at the most recent budget, produced by the UK
government,
you will see that perhaps something other than cold calculation of costs. And
benefits
was at play in making the decision, budgetary decisions in the most recent budget.
So we in a mover, we might construct a sense of us, a wee and it's we who are
acting
or we are acting on behalf of other people who share that kind of category that
identity. And so that gives those values a kind of emotional load and a motive
force
that is beyond the kind of merely cognitive. It's not just about how we think about
the world but why how we think about the world matters?
To us.
Okay, that's values. And I'm going to stop talking about that the kind of cognitive
and emotional side of movement. Start talking about. Okay? What a movements do.
So movements do lots of things and a lot of that activity, is kind of about
generating
the movement itself. A lot of it is mobilizing people to support to give money to
to turn up a protest to start sharing the beliefs or chairing the identities within
the movement.
So that's kind of self-directed action and and it's always a bit mysterious when
a new movement Springs up Suddenly there's all this activity or the shared belief.
And usually there's been loads of work behind the scenes that's not in the public
eye before that stage of a movement seemingly spontaneously arriving. It's not
usually
spontaneous is usually loads of work behind the scenes that kind of practical work
generating new ideas.
Ideas and generating resources and so on. But the ones we see most often are the
public ones. The ones that might make the news, the ones that make a noise and
Chaos
on the streets and that's protest. So if we compare social movements from other
ways of acting politically protest, is often seen as the distinguishing feature
as in this quotation from Taylor and Van Dyke, there's a single element that
distinguishes
social movements from other political actors.
It's the Strategic use of Novel. Dramatic unorthodox, eyes, unorthodox and non-
institutionalized
forms of political expression to try to shape public opinion and put pressure on
those in positions of authority. Now, at the end of that quotation, we've got
something
that I want to call into question, which is the protest is always about shaping
public opinion and putting and thereby putting pressure on people in positions of
authority. There's a
it's of different ways to do protest and they have what I'm going to explain in
a moment. Different strategic Logics. So, by strategic logic, I mean, what is the
set of connections that someone has in mind when they're deciding about action?
That leads from, let's take this action to and then we will get the change. We want
to see movements are usually pretty strategic in their activity. There are lots
of different protests. You could do lots of different things you could do.
You need to think about. Well, these are the resources, we have, these are the
goals.
We want to achieve, what's the link between them? So the link is a strategic logic.
Now, one strategic logic is I mean, it's pretty dominant, but is implied in the,
in this quotation. So, the idea that we express a set of ideas to shape public
opinion
and thereby change, the actions of people in Authority. Now, that is a version of
changing the world that were
Works primarily in Democratic countries, you need a reasonably Democratic policy
for public opinion to change, political behavior and even in Democratic countries,
changing public opinion, doesn't always work when I was doing my PhD. This was 2012
from 2001 onwards, but the key movement of the time of the movement, I studied for
my PhD was movement against the invasion of Iraq. That happened in the invasion.
In 2003, what we saw in Britain, and in many countries across the globe, was the
largest peaceful social movement, ever recorded in history at that point.
Certainly.
In Britain, it was the largest ever social movement in the states. It was enormous.
Italy, absolutely vast. So you had this huge peaceful movement and it shaped public
opinion against the war. If there was undoubtedly a big majority of people were
Against the invasion of Iraq, The Invasion went ahead anyway, so these are all
Democratic
countries with strong Democratic credentials shaping public opinion, wasn't enough.
Now that might you might just read that saying, well movements don't work
movements,
do often fail. It's true movements. Do also have successes as a different lecture,
really
But the point is that shaping public opinion isn't the only way to make change and
don't isn't, of course, guaranteed to work. Here's a few protests, they look quite
different on the surface and they are quite different. They're all indicative of
existing social movements, on the left hand side of your screen, you've got the
English suffragettes from the early 1900's talk, right? We've got
gay pride March that one is in Istanbul and the bottom right we've got a guy who
as far as I know his name is still unknown against referred to as tank guy who when
there was a massacre in Tiananmen Square, in 1989, huge student protests and the
state sent in the military to put down the protest and
And this really evocative photo was snuck out of the country by a journalist of
this guy standing in front of a line of Tanks. The story ends. There we don't know
what happened to him. These are in protests so poorly. That word is covering a lot
of bases here. It's covering a lot of different forms of interaction. It's covering
a lot of different levels of risk. There is risk involved in all of these.
But very different levels of risk. They're all protests for sure. Now, for a lot
of social movements Scholars, when we look at protests, one thing we can look at
is this this kind of set of four elements? We could call them four elements of
power?
It's not quite describe like that in the literature, but it is pretty much how
people
are using it. So what's the power of protest? Well, we could say.
The power of protest is equal to. Its worthiness is Unity, it's numbers and its
commitment. So, this is from some historical work by Charles Tilly, which really
shaped the, the field of social movement studies. His concept was repertoire as
a contention, which is just really those forms of activity that we all recognize
to be protests, which changes over time in different countries in different
contexts?
What counts,
Proteus. What is universally recognized as a protest? Might vary, but one classic
form in all Democratic countries is the mass March. And the massive rally with some
speeches by movement leaders making political claims as classic form of protest
and fertility. What defines its power. Is this combination of worthiness? Is it
seen as worthy by those who aren't part of the movement? Are they United? Are
there?
Large numbers is everyone.
Committed to the same form of change. And this is Martha. Look, Martin Luther King.
He's about to deliver his. I Have a Dream speech, probably the most famous ever
social movements speech well worth the read. Look it up, it's all over the Internet
to millions of black Americans, claiming civil rights opposing, the legal
segregation
on the basis of skin color and the US
It was a hugely powerful movement. It had a series of Victories didn't end racism,
of course, but they did improve the lives of millions of black Americans.
And this March will be a classic case of high worthiness, Unity numbers and
commitment.
A little critical question in there is about the notion of worthiness. I'm really
got time to do this justice of our, by doing a because it's on the next slide. I
need to give you a bit of a Content warning. So the next slide has some critical
text about Martin Luther King written at the time. By someone in a position of
authority.
It uses the n-word which
I'm not going to say out loud because for good reasons, it's word, we've stopped
using and those reasons come from this movement because this movement one we don't
use the word casually so but I'll put it on the slide so you can read it. I think
it's important to see these texts not to shy away from them, but there's just no
point in me right now because you can all read itself. So the point here is to
question
this notion of worthiness
From the perspective of today, we all look at that March and we can easily agree
that was worthy. It was on the side of the good. It was on the right side of
History.
It was route to progress, but of course if everyone agreed that at the time, you
wouldn't need a million people marching in Washington d.c., you wouldn't need
conflicts
with the police. You wouldn't need sit-ins and all the other strategies of protest
that we used and of course, there was opposition.
Listen to this. So This fairly unpleasant bit of text is representative of the fear
that existed within the US establishment. So within the FBI about the power of this
social movement and particularly one of its leaders, Martin Luther King. So we can
say today that an illegitimate way of assessing what was going on there. But of
course, it was a powerful
A full assessment. That was shaping the actions of the authorities. So that's just
to say we need to be a bit careful with worthiness, we in the present moment,
movements
are always trying to change culture. So in the present moment, our assessments
worthiness
might be different to, you know, the next Generations assessment of worthiness,
depending on suppose on whether the movement wins or loses.
I've been banging on about different strategic, Logics what I'm going to do because
we're about out of time is I'm just going to get to the tantalizing introduction
to an alternative, strategic logic, but I'm here next week and I've got thing about
corporate social responsibility, but there is a good like intellectual connection
between the two lectures. So, I'm going to finish this lecture off next week,
you'll
have to wait for the punch line as it were
Were so I'll just give you another 2 minutes now. And then that last little segment
it's only sure I'll deal with in the next lecture. So the classic marches we will
recognize a March blockades, is another form of protest that would? I think most
of us would recognize as a form of protest. This one is, I'm pretty sure this is
from the Battle of Seattle in 1999 and the u.s.
Protesters managed to stop a big ministerial, meeting the World Trade Organization
actually, stopped the World Trade Organization managing to make any agreements in
this huge. Like these things don't happen. Every year in this huge ministerial
meeting.
One of the ways they stopped. It was literally by just stopping the streets.
Delegates
to the meeting couldn't get air. So, they've got to the country. They couldn't get
to the convention center to make the agreements. So that's a lock on a way of
stopping
traffic moving.
Hang on the streets. Why does it work? It works because you're in a democratic
political
environment in an authoritarian country. They would have no problem. Shifting these
people off the streets is just, they would break their arms in the process. So this
is an example of what Scholars called call manufactured, vulnerability, when
protesters
put themselves in a vulnerable position knowing that the security services won't
risk their health, which works in America, obviously doesn't work everywhere,
time's the next property, destruction
conflict, obviously the root of all of this. What we're seeing in some of these
examples is a way of trying to change the world. That doesn't involve necessarily
changing public opinion or getting politicians to change the way they act. Because
actually if you blockade a conference and that means the delegates can't make any
decisions. You've already changed the world, you didn't have to change her opinion,
but you've stopped a process from
happening. And so that's often described as direct action. It's truly direct. If
it's having an impact and unmediated impact on your opponent. So you've decided
the wto's the problem. So you've literally stopped the WTO. So that's quite
different
to this notion of like changing public opinion, which I'll call in direct action,
which is often the basis of social movement, power to visions and social movement
powder, which I will fill out next week. So, we'll talk about different.
Between indirect and direct action and then we'll talk about the impact on
corporations.
Thanks for listening.
Hi, thank you. I'll sing out three of the slides. So you know,
Yeah, 10 minutes to get everyone out, then, doesn't it? Yeah, no problem solved.
Oh that's walk off for the Mike so you get the room sets, the quiz questions? Yeah.
Straining. Okay.
I have no idea why the middle. You can see that one.