Social movement theory and the political context of collective action

Abstract

The foregoing chapters have begun to explore the mutual influences between collective action and its political contexts. The perceptions of the social actors involved in collective action are clearly important to these influences, and often act to 'mediate' them. On the one hand, Matti Hyvarinen reveals that these perceptions can create their own 'expectational context', and, consequently, the rhetoric of collective action comes to constitute its contextual reality in some degree. On the other hand, Irmela Gorges demonstrates that cultural and institutional contexts can condition the perceptions which shape the collective generation of knowledge. This chapter seeks to develop these insights by taking a step back from collective action and the perceptions of the actors themselves, in order to examine theories of collective action (in the form of social movement theory) and the perceptions of the theorists. It will be argued that these theoretical perceptions are themselves strongly influenced by the theorists' own political and cultural contexts, and, furthermore, that these perceptions are capable of creating their own 'expectational context' - an ideal-typical world which serves the theoretical purpose of 'explaining' collective action. The problem is that this 'expectational context' of social movements may correspond little or not at all to the real political contexts where most social mobilisation now occurs. The ways that collective action in the form of social movements is 'imagined' may therefore fail to take account of the real features of the majority of these movements.