QCA and Fuzzy Set Applications to Social Movement Research

Abstract

Abstract Much of social life is routine and highly repetitive. Social actors appear to be either constrained by norms or driven by the pursuit of mundane self‐interest. For this reason, many social scientists are drawn to the study of nonroutine events, especially those that are large scale and collective in nature. Of special interest are events that are culturally, historically, or politically significant in some way—big events that stand out as qualitative departures from the stream of everyday social life. The extreme case of departure from routine is the social revolution, where there is a concerted, collective effort not only to topple an existing state but also to reshape the social order. Of course, social revolutions are rare, as are “mere” political revolutions. Fortunately, however, many of the analytic attractions of revolutions are also present in the study of social movements and other forms of collective action. In many respects, such phenomena provide the opportunity to study large‐scale social change in embryonic form.