Patterns of Protest: Trajectories of Participation in Social Movements By Catherine Corrigall-Brown Stanford University Press. 2012. 192 pages. $45.00 cloth

Abstract

Patterns of Protest: Trajectories of Participation in Social Movements, by Catherine Corrigall-Brown, is a welcome addition to the literature on social movement participation. Much of the extant literature has focused on lifetime activists, often charismatic leaders, leaving a dearth of research on the everyday participants who make up the bulk of social movements. Work that has considered everyday participants has tended to examine factors associated with initial engagement, leaving unanswered the questions: What happens next? Who will stick with activism and who will give up on it, either temporarily or permanently? What factors contribute to these varying outcomes? In this book, Corrigall-Brown offers a theoretical framework, supported with empirical evidence, for understanding protest participation over an individual's lifetime. To think about what happens after someone first engages in protest, Corrigall-Brown proposes four trajectories of participation: persistence, transfer, abeyance and disengagement. The first and last are fairly straightforward. Persistence describes participants who continue activism in the same social movement organization (SMO) over time and disengagement describes those who leave activism all together. One of the book's key contributions is the articulation of the two other trajectories. In the transfer trajectory, participants continue their activism, but move out of the original SMO and redirect their activism elsewhere. In the abeyance trajectory, participants leave activism, often because of life changes, but later return. To understand what contributes to a given participant's participation trajectory, Corrigall-Brown proposes a model that includes: individual factors (e.g., biographical availability, ideology), the circumstances of a participant's initial engagement (e.g., organizational and relational contexts), and intermediary mechanisms (e.g., social ties and participant identity).