Handbook of Social Movements Across Disciplines

329 Pages·2009·2.41 MB·English

by  Bert Klandermans

Handbook of
Social Movements Across Disciplines
Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research
Series Editor:
Howard B. Kaplan, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
HANDBOOK OF COMMUNITY MOVEMENTS AND LOCAL ORGANIZATIONS
Edited by Ram A. Cnaan and Carl Milofsky
HANDBOOK OF DISASTER RESEARCH
Edited by Havidán Rodríguez, Enrico L. Quarantelli, and Russell Dynes
HANDBOOK OF DRUG ABUSE PREVENTION
Theory, Science and Prevention
Edited by Zili Sloboda and William J. Bukoski
HANDBOOK OF THE LIFE COURSE
Edited by Jeylan T. Mortimer and Michael J. Shanahan
HANDBOOK OF POPULATION
Edited by Dudley L. Poston and Michael Micklin
HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
Edited by Helen Rose Ebaugh
HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Edited by John Delamater
HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
Edited by Jonathan H. Turner
HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION
Edited by Maureen T. Hallinan
HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS
Edited by Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner
HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF GENDER
Edited by Janet Saltzman Chafetz
HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF MENTAL HEALTH
Edited by Carol S. Aneshensel and Jo C. Phelan
HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE MILITARY
Edited by Giuseppe Caforio
HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ACROSS DISCIPLINES
Edited by Bert Klandermans and Conny Roggeband
HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC RELATIONS
Edited by Hernán Vera and Joseph R. Feagin
Handbook of
Social Movements Across
Disciplines
Edited by
Bert Klandermans
Free University
Department of Social Sciences
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Conny Roggeband
Free University
Department of Social Sciences
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Bert Klandermans Conny Roggeband
Faculty of Social Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences
Vrije Universiteit, Vrije Universiteit,
De Boelelaan 1081c De Boelelaan 1081c
1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands
ISBN-13: 978-0-387-70959-8 e-ISBN-13: 978-0-387-70960-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007929232
Printed on acid-free paper.
©2007 Springer Science(cid:2)Business Media, LLC
All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the
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Contributors
Ronald Aminzade, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Willem Assies, Van Vollenhoven Institute, University of Leiden, Leiden, the Netherlands
Brian Dill, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Tina Fetner, Department of Sociology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
James M.Jasper, Independent Scholar, New York, NY
Bert Klandermans, Faculty of Social Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Lindsey Lupo, Department of Political Science, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA
David S.Meyer, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA
Conny Roggeband, Faculty of Social Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Ton Salman, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the
Netherlands
Jackie Smith, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Stony Brook,
StonyBrook, NY
Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, Department of Sociology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the
Netherlands
v
Table of Contents
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Chapter 1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Conny Roggeband and Bert Klandermans
Chapter 2. Structural Approaches in the Sociology of Social Movements . . . . . . . 13
Jackie Smith and Tina Fetner
Chapter 3. Cultural Approaches in the Sociology of Social Movements. . . . . . . . . 59
James M. Jasper
Chapter 4. Assessing the Politics of Protest: Political Science
and the Study of Social Movements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
David S. Meyer and Lindsey Lupo
Chapter 5. Individuals in Movements: A Social Psychology of Contention. . . . . . 157
Jacquelien van Stekelenburg and Bert Klandermans
Chapter 6. Anthropology and the Study of Social Movements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Ton Salman and Willem Assies
Chapter 7. Historians and the Study of Protest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Brian Dill and Ronald Aminzade
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
vii
CHAPTER1
Introduction
C R B K
ONNY OGGEBAND AND ERT LANDERMANS
Students from divergent academic disciplines share an interest in the phenomena of social
movements and collective action. Through a variety of disciplinary approaches and tech-
niques, researchers seek to understand the emergence and development of social movements,
protest, and contentious politics. Their different perspectives have contributed to development
of research and theory in the field of social movements. The last few decades social move-
ment studies have proliferated enormously, covering a wide array of movements, issues and
places, as evidenced by the rapid growth of the number of journal articles on social move-
ments published since the 1980s (see Fig. 1.1).
The growing interest and importance of the study of social movements as an area of the
social sciences appears to be closely related to how its object of study developed in the
course of time. Over the last decades, social movements as a social phenomenon grew
rapidly. In the early 1960s, many sociologists believed society had reached a stage of devel-
opment in which pluralist, pragmatic consensus, instead of protest, would resolve social
conflict. Their expectations proved wrong and the 1960s became a decade of activism, riots,
demonstrations, sit-ins, strikes, and many other forms of collective action. Over the last
decades, social movements emerged as a common and central feature of the political land-
scape across the globe. Diverse and multifaceted forms of mobilization materialized; “left-
libertarian” movements such as the student, women’s, peace, and ecology movements and
right-wing organizations such as the pro-life movement, fundamentalist religious move-
ments, and the extreme right movement alike. In the 1970s, for instance, Islamic fundamen-
talist and Marxist movements mobilized in Iran, in Nicaragua the Sandinistas organized, and
in Germany and Italy a number of radical leftist terrorist groups were formed. These
instances of protest gained international visibility and in some cases sparked new mobiliza-
tions and counter-movements. Over the past two decades, we have witnessed further expan-
sion of the movement sector, but also new forms of mobilization such as the rise of
transnational protest, ethnic mobilizations, Internet protest, and Islamic movements. The
myriad of movements, issues, action forms, and strategies has clearly fueled the proliferation
of social movement studies.
The increasing interdisciplinary cooperation of the field has resulted in a crossing of the
various boundaries—disciplinary, thematic, historical, and geographic. Owing to the efforts
of social historians, political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, and anthropolo-
gists from all parts of the world, our knowledge of the dynamics of collective action in past
episodes has extended tremendously. Geographically, social movement studies are no longer
1
2 Conny Roggeband and Bert Klandermans
14000
12000
10000
8000
6000
4000
2000
0
1960- 1966- 1971- 1976- 1981- 1986- 1991- 1996- 2001-
1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
FIGURE1.1. Number of journal articles on social movements in English language journal (1960–2005).
Source: Google scholar
mainly the domain of European and North American scholars. The expansion of the field has
also been the result of an important internationalization of social movement studies. Cross-
national collaborations and networking have been important goals for social movement
scholars who since the 1980s have tried to bridge theoretical gaps and divides (Klandermans,
Kriesi, and Tarrow 1988). All this offers us the potential of making systematic comparisons
across time and also across space. Institutional infrastructures such as the International
Sociological Association (ISA), the International Political Science Association, and the
International Society of Political Psychology have enabled independent interaction and
networking of scholars across national borders. Internationalization has offered the opportu-
nity to learn about new cases, to test theoretical insights in different settings, and to study
cross-national similarities and differences. Such knowledge of cases across the globe helped
to determine what general variables apply across boundaries and what variables must be
specified and particularized with respect to different national–cultural settings and different
historical periods.
As a result of all these efforts, central concepts and frameworks have been developed
across disciplines and one could argue that social movement studies in itself contain what
Smelser (2002) calls a “hybrid subfield” with shared concept and approaches.
The proliferation of the field has led to increased theoretical debate and attempts to
synthesize the different theoretical perspectives (Goodwin and Jasper 2003; McAdam,
McCarthy, and Zald 1996; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tarrow 1998). Nonetheless,
McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2007) recently complained that “with expertise divided across
a confusing patchwork of disciplinary boundaries, geographic areas, historical era, and
nominal different types of contention” the field of social movement studies has become very
much fragmented.
Perhaps such a state of affairs is given with the object of study. Social movements are
phenomena that are not concerned about disciplinary boundaries. The study of social move-
ments is by definition interdisciplinary, as many scholars of social movements never tire of
1. Introduction 3
asserting. At the same time, real interdisciplinary research on social movements is rare,
because the awareness of what is available in the neighboring discipline is limited. Social
movement students from different disciplines often speak little beyond their discipline
andfail to connect their theories and concepts to that of neighboring disciplines. As a conse-
quence, wheels are invented for the umpteenth time and cross-disciplinary collaboration
can easily lead to mis-understandings, because researchers use an identical vocabulary with
different meanings and operationalizations.1 Moreover, different disciplines have different
subcultures, which may be overlooked by focusing on similarities and adopting common
conceptual frameworks.
Instead of a new attempt to integrate theoretical perspectives, this volume aims to revisit
the disciplinary roots of social movement studies. The focus is on sociology, political science,
anthropology, social psychology, and history, which we consider the central disciplines study-
ing social movements, although admittedly the field is much broader and still growing.2The
various disciplines involved in the study of social movements raise their own specific ques-
tions and approach social movements from a variety of angles or perspectives. Moreover, each
discipline has distinctive working arrangements, vocabularies, and “standards of explanation”
to which students are exposed during their professional socialization, and which are enforced
by a variety of disciplinary gatekeepers, from journal editors to grant reviewers. Let us give a
few examples of questions characteristic to disciplines. While social psychologists focus
on the individual level and look at attitudes, motives, and identities of activists, they pay
little attention to the political or cultural context of mobilization or the impact of protest. Nor
do they provide explanations for the rise and decline of social movements or the role of
globalization. Political opportunities and the impact of protest are obviously topics political
scientists are exploring, while such topics as the rise and decline of social movements are
food for sociologists and historians. The role of culture in shaping protest and the cultural
consequences of social movements are central topics for anthropologist and sociologists.
We hold that knowing the specific questions and approaches of the various disciplines
will help us in our interactions with colleagues from disciplines other than our own. There-
fore, we invited scholars from what we defined as central disciplines of social movement
studies to elaborate on how their own disciplines approach and conceptualize the dynamics of
social movements. It is our conviction that genuine interdisciplinary research requires schol-
ars who are firmly rooted in a disciplinary tradition, but at the same time well aware of what
other social science disciplines have to offer. Despite the wealth of written material on social
movements, we are not aware of a comprehensive publication that takes the major disciplines
that are involved in the study of social movements as its point of departure. Most anthologies
instead provide synthetic examinations of a comprehensive set of movement-related issues or
focus on central theoretical perspectives on social movements such as resource mobilization,
political process approach, or framing (Buechler 2000; della Porta and Diani 1999; Snow,
Soule, and Kriesi 2004; Tarrow 1998).
1 The concept of political opportunity structure is a case in point. McAdam (1996) demonstrated that this concept is
understood in multiple ways. Also, in many cases the concept is either narrowed or stretched, which leads respec-
tively to very limited or tautological explanations (Koopmans 1999). This volume makes clear that concepts such as
culture and identity are also interpreted and used very differently across disciplines.
2 Recently social movement and collective action have become the object of study in other disciplines like social
geography (Miller 2000), organizational studies (Davis et al. 2005), and communication studies (Downing 2000).
Also, social movement literature and theory are applied to areas of research as diverse as education policy, civil
wars, terrorism, health care, and international relations.