Abstract
Over the past few years, there has been a renewed focus on leadership in social movements. While leadership is central in creating organisational capacity for collective action, not many studies focus on leadership engagement practices – a crucial element for movement goal attainment. Utilising the concept of “transactional activism” – the process whereby state actors manage challengers by providing benefits and a myriad of other opportunities to selected leaders – this article examines how the engagement practices of civic group leaders influence community protests. It does so by drawing on an extensive case study of the nature and patterns of engagements between the leaders of the Meqheleng Concerned Citizens (MCC) civic group and state actors, as well as community perceptions about such engagements during three community protests in Ficksburg during 2011. The analysis reveals that transactional activism generates substantial problems for civic organisations engaged in community protests. The complex engagements between civic group leaders and state actors reflect a value shift from attaining collective benefits for the groups towards protest leaders that are inherently predisposed to pursuing their own interests. The study generates several conclusions about how transactional activism derails opportunities to deal with the fundamental grievances of communities. These unresolved grievances are one of the reasons for the high prevalence of recurrent and violent community protests in different parts of South Africa.
Highlights
Over the past few years, there has been a renewed focus on leadership in social movements (Andrews et al 2010; Ganz 2010; Ahlquist and Levi 2013; Staggenborg 2015).Matebesi “A hungry stomach knows no allegiance”Leadership is central to creating the organisational capacity for collective action, as well as in facilitating subsequent collective action by members (Morris and Staggenborg 2004:171)
While leadership is central in creating organisational capacity for collective action, not many studies focus on leadership engagement practices – a crucial element for movement goal attainment
The analysis reveals that transactional activism generates substantial problems for civic organisations engaged in community protests
Summary
Over the past few years, there has been a renewed focus on leadership in social movements (Andrews et al 2010; Ganz 2010; Ahlquist and Levi 2013; Staggenborg 2015). One of the central mechanisms through which leaders in social movements achieve movement goals is by interacting with targets like state actors (Kalykas 2003; 2006; Brosché 2014:6) In this regard, Petrova and Tarrow (2007) proposed two types of activism that illustrate the mezzo-level networking between social movement organisations and state actors. The first type is participatory activism, which refers to the mobilisation capacity of movement activists (Petrova and Tarrow 2007). The second type of activism is transactional activism, which describes the capacity of movement activists to network, cooperate and communicate with others, including state actors (Petrova and Tarrow 2007). The primary focus of this article is to contribute to the understanding of the transactional type of activism, which broadly denotes the sustained direct engagement between social movement activists and state actors. The last two sections focus on the research design and presentation of the case study
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