SP Final Exam
Lecture 7- Social Movements and Sustainability
Social Movements and Social Change
Social movements appear to be cyclical (Dalton and Küchier) and have some relationship
with the economic Kondratieff cycles.
So far, there are four major ones which have been identified:
1. The French Revolution (1789)
2. The Democratic Revoltion (1848)
3. The Progressive Era (~1908)
4. The Social Movements of the 1960s
SMs are shaped by a Zeitgeist or cultural climate:
These are specific configurations of worldviews, emotions, ideas, beliefs and utopias
prevailing at a particular time;
This creates sensitivity to particular problems;
Narrows/broadens the horizon of what is seen as feasible;
Guides political practices, and lifestyles;
Channels psycho-social energy inward to private, or outward to public sphere;
These provide or deprive movements of social response;
Especially in times of cultural critique, they may mobilize critique to be:
Optimistically (belief in progress; utopianism);
Pessimistically (economic decline, modernity’s side effects) inclined— this can
change over time.
The Resource Mobilization Approach
Key questions:
How are social movement organizations organized?
How do they seek to realize their goals?
How do they achieve the required resources?
McCarthy & Zald define a social movement as:
A set of opinions and beliefs in a population which represents preferences for changing
some elements of the social structure and/or reward distribution of a society.
A social movement organization (SMO) is a complex, or formal organization which
identifies its preferences with a social movement or a counter‐movement and attempts to
implement those goals.
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, Since SMOs differ in objectives, strategy, and composition, the resource mobilization
approach focuses on them.
Overarching question:
How come SMOs differ in recruitment success and that individuals differ in their
temptation to join?
Key derived questions:
How do they recruit members/sponsors?
How important are leaders?
What resources do they draw on?
What impacts do they achieve?
Kitschelt identifies three SMO impacts:
1. Procedural impacts open new channels of participation to social movement actors and
involve their recognition as legitimate representatives of demands.
2. Substantive impacts are changes of policy in response to social movement activity.
3. Structural impacts indicate a transformation of the structures and rules of the political
system themselves as a consequence of social movement activity.
SMOs are a key factor in mobilizing and coordinating social movement activity:
As with interest groups in pluralism, their precise power depends on potential power
and the degree of turning it into actual power.
For the latter, the structure of the organization is important.
Together, they form a tightly knit social movement, as they are mutually well connected
through an infrastructure of national or international networks.
Kitschelt, from a neo-pluralist perspective, contends that the resource mobilisation
approach is useful to narrow down the relevant features of SMOs and their impacts.
However, since it focuses too much on the internal dynamics, it overlooks the SMOs’
strategic choices and impacts within the political system and their interplay with access
and the distribution of power.
Questions that still need to be answered:
What are the external structures?
How do they shape strategic choices?
How do both factors shape impacts?
Steinmetz, from a neo-Marxist angle, argues that the RM approach fails to understand the
deeper nature of conflicts and the nature of movement members’ grievances.
It reduces mobilizing to smooth organizations with strategic leadership, ignoring the
relationship between evolving social conflicts and changing identities;
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, For instance, the lack of action from elites enables the rise of youth environmental
movements.
The more rational choice-oriented versions overemphasize individual interest and
underrate symbolic, expressive and moral aspects.
For example, the movement “Grandparents for Climate” breaks away from the idea
of self-interest tied to the limited time horizons of a generation.
The New Social Movement (NSM) Approach- Steinmetz (1994)
The NSMs:
Focus on post-material values, such as: autonomy, identity, self-realization, and
qualitative life chances, rather than divisible material benefits and resources;
Are as much defensive as offensive in orientation and are often directed toward limited
demands which allow little or no regulation;
Are less orientated toward social-utopian projects, formal political theories, or meta-
narratives of progress.
Do not appeal or mobilize along class lines, but cut across them.
In the NSMs, socio-economic categories begin to lose their subjective salience and
give way to identities that are either more permanent and ascriptive (natural) than
class or more flexible, partial, and voluntary.
Prefer organizational forms that are non-hierarchical and un-differentiated with
respect to roles, with unmediated direct democracy as a regulative norm if not
reality.
They resort to unconventional politics.
Rely on temporary or part-time membership and informal or submerged networks,
resulting in individual patterns of shifting but continuous involvement in various
movements that are only partially differentiated from one another.
Work mainly outside of the parliamentary political system, employing unconventional
means, such as direct action.
Politicize aspects of everyday life formerly seen as lying outside of politics.
Can be seen as at least partially unified through their shared opposition to a system
that is itself perceived as monolithic, even if they are fragmented and diversified in
terms of issues, ideology, and organizational base.
The NSMs, given that they abstain from parliamentary politics and assume forms that look
from the outside like sub-cultural deviance, may not even recognize themselves as social
movements.
Core Claims in Steinmetz:
New Social Movements pose specific problems for traditional Marxist theory:
The new social movements pose a direct challenge to Marxist theories on what is
supposed to be their most secure terrain: their ability to identify the main lines of social
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, division and conflict and to explain the broad contours of historical change in the
advanced capitalist world.
The collapse of the communist regime articulated the failure of classical Marxism to
explain the socio-economic dynamics that led to it.
The NSMs and their results cannot be specified by their novel aims or constituencies, as
some have also been adopted by established political organizations.
The goals of the movements have also not been framed in terms of specific social
classes.
The socialist and community movements were concerned with mobilizing the proletariat
and allied social groups and classes to gain state power and effect major redistribution of
resources.
On the other hand, NSM often claim to abjure power altogether, to prevent things from
happening, such as constructing nuclear power plants or completing censuses;
They aim to secure social spaces that are autonomous from both markets and the
state and to directly implement and exhibit an alternative form of social life.
It is a class struggle without class.
Neo-Marxist analyses of NSM have their limitations:
Authors critical of Marxism shift relations of exploitation to patterns of domination without
(Foucault) or with (Beck) a materialist basis.
They also shift to an infinite number of stratifications, in various fields, beyond class, with
specific capitals, distinctions, and conflicts (Bourdieu).
New post-structuralist elaborations of Gramsci emerge:
In Gramsci, both hegemonizers and hegemonized transcend their earlier identities in
the process of hegemonizing.
It entails the discursive construction of the hegemonized and the hegemonizing
agents.
For others, like Laclau and Mouffe, conflicts become only intra-discursive:
They lose their material basis in social (class) relations.
There are many factors, together over-determining the course of history.
The new social movements have been explained as an outgrowth of the interests of the
new middle class;
As protest movements within the working class;
As the re-emergence of traditionally lower-class resistance among those highly
educated but blocked in their chances for upward mobility.
Offe outlines groups that constitute the NSM’s social base:
The old and the new middle classes and economically peripheralised strata;
The unemployed;
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