What Are Social Movements?

Social movements are not spontaneous events, and they must build towards their goals over time on a series of phases and preconditions. Successful social movements rely on a number of micro and macro factors including efficient organizational structures, the ability to mobilize human and material resources, as well as effective leadership and rapid diffusion of ideas. As it will be shown, the presence of mobilizing structures, movement frames as well as suitable political opportunities combined with reactionary incentives during the Civil Rights Movement helped culminate both short and long term societal changes.

Therefore, it is understandable that movement scholars tend to write from a rather activist stance. There is nothing wrong with this per se, however, as historians, we should critically assess in how far this positioning might limit our scholarship. At times, Payne tends to overemphasize the unity and the solidarity among the organizers and the local population and fails to mention the tensions among direct democratic groups like SNCC. Every social movement is made up of people, united under what they perceive as an urgent need to bring about change. This unity tends to suppress theoretical and practical differences for some time and can thus create a tremendous amount of communality and solidarity among its members. However, as history has shown over and over again, as soon as the external threat either diminishes or proves resistant to change, movements tend to disunite. This is what Baker and other activists wanted to prevent by modeling their training around local long-term strategies and individual

Social movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s have been interpreted and written about in varying ways. While contemporary scholarship disagrees with past analyses and offer fresh perspectives, past research can also provide a pathway for defining important questions for future research on social movements in America.

Social movements typically concern institutions that serve explicit and implicit purposes, including “perpetuation of cultural norms, value maintenance, policy making, and enforcement of statutes and doctrines”. The significance of this is that institutions frame situations to their benefit by definitions and interpretations. Protesters challenge this definitional authority by offering counter frames that portray institutions negatively. In attempt to sustain power, credibility, and legitimacy, institutions will implement four strategies when responding to these challenges: evasion, counter-persuasion, coercive persuasion, and adjustment. For example, during the Selma to Montgomery marches law enforcement institutions strategically used the evasion strategy in order to place a frame that the social movements do not exist and that their preexisting laws were constitutional. During this time the government and media did not acknowledge black Americans as equals let alone citizens of the United States. Thus, were seen as unworthy of institutional response. The institutional strategy, counter-persuasion, deals with the notion of “challenge a social movement’s vision of reality and attempt to discredit its leaders, members, and demands”. During the Selma to Montgomery marches, ideas were framed as “ill advised, poorly informed, and lacking merit”. This then relates to the third strategy, coercive persuasion, where there was an “enhancing of fear appeals or a method to resist change due to the appeal to basic fear”. Coercive persuasion is formed in order to persuade target audiences that force will follow non-compliance. For example, law enforcement institutions of the Selma to Montgomery marches threatened protesters through fear that if they participated in any uncivil uproar that they would be incarcerated or

A force of imbalance in the power structure of the Line 3 debate is introduced through Neal Stewart’s communicative inoculation theory. Stewart begins by acknowledging the widespread effectivity and importance of rhetoric perpetuated by grass-roots social movements (such as women’s rights advocates, prohibitionists, and civil rights activists). Then the article addresses a woeful lack of analysis on behalf of the academic community, in reference to evaluating the rhetoric of institutions that oppose these movements. The modern conception of defining movements solely by their proponents disregards the communicational efficacy held by those opposing movements, and ultimately contributes to historical revisionism as the success of the movements is portrayed as inevitable rather than the product of organizations’ and individuals’ continued work, lobbying, and time. “Movements cannot be studied in a vacuum”, Stewart argues, and then goes forward to apply the scientific principle of Inoculation Theory to understanding how groups and institutions resist persuasion by

Despite the inequality in the United States, many Americans have been determined to have their voices heard. Recently, movements such as Occupy Wallstreet and the Tea Party Movement have formed in response to the growing wealth and control by the “1%”. These social movements have become very popular at times due to discontent among the populace and the wide accessibility of social media. While these movements tend to have rapid success early on; lack of cohesion, results, and true direction

Tarrow, Sidney G. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge University Press; 2 edition (May 13, 1998).

The idea of civil disobedience is one that has fascinated human beings and American culture specifically for generations. The idea of brave men and women going beyond the bounds of the law to fight whatever injustice stands in their path is one that has been frequently romanticized. However, today many are beginning to become disillusioned with the idea of civil disobedience, questioning whether or not today’s social activists are capable of any real change, as many issues such as widespread poverty or race relations seem to go unredressed. The distinction between the political protests in history that are idealized and those seen today which seem relatively ineffective is simply the ability to communicate. Movements that effectively communicate

What determines a movement? Malcolm Gladwell defines what pushes a movement to make a difference. He analyzes the concept of “strong ties” and “weak ties” and how these relationships affect an individual’s willpower and determination to help a cause. Gregory Orr puts these ideas into context in his memoir, “Return to Hayneville”, in which he recounts his experience and involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”, focuses, in particular, on the civil rights movement concentrates to the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. Gladwell’s ideas and opinions of social and political emancipations are given a real world setting, as

With the advent and ascent of online communication, it is easier to mobilize than ever before with a complete protest available within only a few hours of notice. Coupled with a rise in distrust of hierarchy and order, many movements are switching to looser association. Gladwell points out that transnational movements from Occupy to Al-Qaeda have all suffered from a lack of a unified leadership and structure (Gladwell). Like many issues relating to the organization dilemma, this is a simplistic breakdown of a complex topic. While more decentralized format taken to its extreme can prove fatal as in the case of Occupy, there are benefits to choosing such. Less hierarchy means fewer high valued targets for arrest or assassination depending on the county, ensures that different groups within can achieve goals without risking the whole, and allows for skill and ability to replace traditional management selection. These are double-edged swords, however; fewer figureheads means less accountability, a cell based approach means that one section’s actions can hurt the cause, and more difficult to organize large scale activities in a way that does not flounder. This is not a problem that should be taken lightly, as the Occupy movement showed us how easily the tempo of a movement can falter due to a lack of direction. Alinsky tackled this issue suggesting that the organizer is key in

Social movements shed light to social issues present in communities and harvest social change in political, religious, educational, health, government, and other institutional matters. Social movements give individuals a clear outlet to concerns about the rights and well-being of themselves and others, mostly through public protest and conversation, in order to promote social justice and democracy. Throughout history, humans naturally ended up starting movements to simply improve their way of life and movements have continually aided in a remarkable change in communities. In the essay “From Civil Rights to Megachurches,” Charles Duhigg explains the three critical steps that initiative successful social movements. Social movements must

“As they fathom injustice, organize to protest, craft a tactics, and engage in action, these bodies read what is happening and articulate their imaginative rebuttal. In so doing they demonstrate to themselves and all those watching that something can be done. Could this be why they are called political ‘movements’?”

Jackie DiSalvo (2015) wrote a paper called “Occupy Wall Street: Creating a Strategy for a Spontaneous Movement”. Her central claim is that Occupy Wall Street movement had the potential to grow and create military, national, class-planned, multi-issue movement that never been planned in our time before, but it was misuse by the anarchist’s influence so the social movement was a failed. She uses Mark Bray’s research and some of her own research to explain why the movement was a failed and how anarchists influence this failed movement. In her article, DiSalvo (2015) splits up her work into four sub topics which was: “Occupy Wall Street Anarchism, Occupy Wall Street Strengths, Sources of Occupy Wall Street Contradictions, and Problems with Anarchism”. She explained in each sub-topic the data that she collected and a conclusion based on this information (DiSalvo, 2015).

Start by narrowing the historical literature down into three main schools of thought so you can take a closer look at how social movements are born, why some succeed, and others fail. (Clearly, using a broad brush to paint a simplified scope of the topic, but this will help to centralize the data in a more digestible context.) The main schools of thought in this paper have been grouped in the following types of action: Collective Action, Economic/Political, and Leadership Centered.

The second characteristic of NSM’s is tied to the first, in that groups no longer tend to share an over-arching ideological framework, whereas in Marxist discourse, such a shared frame was the “unifying and totalizing element for collective action” (Buechler & Cylke 277). Ideological unity has been supplanted by “pragmatic orientations” where movement members seek “institutional reform” to attain greater power in decision making processes, promoting a “‘democratizing dynamic’” in social movement discourse.