SOCIAL

MOVEMENTS
HS 307
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

• Collective mobilisations and actions that are both institutional and extra-
institutional in nature which organise in the realm of civil society
• these mobilisations pursue interests of their major constituents based on
ideology or identity or both.
• They continuously evolve in their ideology and interests based on the
changing contexts and in interaction with their opponents and potential
allies.
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOUR SCHOOL (ALSO
REFERRED TO AS STRAIN AND BREAK DOWN)
• Assumed a mechanistic and linear relationship between macro level strain
and micro level behaviour
• The “collective behaviour” school did not look at political context in
which movements arise -- likeliness of perceiving collective behaviour as
deviant behaviour than political action
RESOURCE MOBILISATION THEORY

• Actors and the resources available to the actors especially social movement
organisations and also the creative deployment of available resources
• Tended to favour internal variables like resource control and micro-
mobilization efforts, some models cited external variables like elite divisions
and fiscal instability and the new approaches explicitly argued that
participants in social movements were “at least as rational as those who study
them”
FRAMING PERSPECTIVE

• This period also saw the invention of the framing perspectives which explored the
cultural-psychological aspects and widened the scope of resource mobilization
paradigm.
• Framing processes constitute a central mechanism that facilitates the linkage
between aggregation and assertion of aggrieved groups, identity constructions
(collective identity) are an inherent feature of the framing process
• Mobilising and conter-mobilising ideas and meanings; Framing as meaning
construction  Frames perform interpretive functions
POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES

• Political opportunity structure explored the external political environment. Stable or mobile
characteristics of the political system were understood to influence cycles of social protest
• Tarrow calls therefore for appreciation of “dynamic statism” that recognises the importance of
states and the reciprocal interaction of states and movements.
• Rise and fall of social movements as a part of political struggle and as the outcome of changes
in political opportunity structure
• Social movements do not overthrow the institutions of liberal democracy but have
strengthened them
NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

• Emphasis on political context and opportunity was criticised as political reductionism by

• Melucci, one of the important proponents of the New Social Movement Theory (Melucci,
1989).
• It is also argued that the concept of a political opportunity structure inadequately captures
the role that states in the third world play in determining the possibilities of third world
women’s movements
• NSMT emphasised the cultural aspects of social movements and can be termed as the
cultural turn in the study of social movements
NSM – BEYOND CLASS

• NSMs were not homogenising intellectual currents and multiplicity within each concern was equally
acknowledged.
• They critiqued the Marxist models and agreed that conflict among the industrial class was of decreasing
relevance
• These movements reveal the changing nature of central conflict according to the changing society (new
society emerging in the form of post industrial, post-Fordist, technocratic or programmed), they oppose the
intrusion of state and market into social life
• As opposed to the class based movements, the main constituents of New Social Movements were
students/middle classes, ideologically they were in sharp contrast to old labour movements; identity was an
important axes of mobilisation and also a mark of newness
NSM

• New Social Movements were viewed as efforts to regain control over decisions and areas
of life increasingly subject to state control, to resist the colonization of the lifeworld, and
to transform civil society
• Understand the role of identity in social movements, and it ultimately provoked the more
rationalist strands of social movement theory to attend to issues of identity and culture.
• Like social movement theory more generally, NSM theory attempted to explain
mobilization—that is, why and when people act. NSM theory both challenges and affirms
the idea that identity politics is a distinct political practice’
NEW– REALLY?

• New Social Movements as a need for studying conservative social movements to

understand their influence on state in contrast to understanding reaction against states 
NSMs and their effort to control civic sphere (Pichardo)
• NSM focus on post materialistic orientation of white middle classes in the Western world
where personal growth and self actualisation have become needs of the society  more
research needed in third world to weigh NSMT.
• NSMT’s continued separation too has been cautioned against of identity and culture
from the political economy
INDIA?