Abstract
Recent work on social movement fields has expanded our view of the dynamics of social movements; it should also expand our thinking about social movement success. Such a broader view reveals a paradox: social movements often snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by narrowly targeting authorities with their actions instead of targeting the broader social movement field. Negative impacts from the wider social movement field can then reverse or overshadow initial victories. We distinguish between a social movement’s victory over the immediate target, and more lasting success that arises from shifting alignments in the broader social movement field. To test the predictive value of the distinction, we compare two very similar student-led social movements, both of which targeted university policies regarding sensitivity to race issues and changes in university personnel. One built a broad coalition of support that extended across its social movement field and was thereby able to institute durable change. The other did not, and despite its clear initial success, this protest movement produced consequences mainly adverse to its preferred outcomes. We demonstrate how pervasive this paradox is with examples from other U.S. protest outcomes and studies of revolutions. The paradox is resolved by focusing on changes in the entire social movement field. We thus argue that achieving, and understanding, lasting social movement success requires attention to the entire social movement field.
Highlights
Social movements operate in a complex environment
We develop our analysis in three steps: First, in regard to social movement theory, we argue that studies of social movement contestation must shift from the typical dyadic view, which highlights social movement/ target interactions, to the newer approach of analyzing movement dynamics through social movement fields
We suggest that our proposed definition of success—achieving a favorable realignment of the social movement field that impacts that movement— offers an intermediate approach that embraces these perspectives, but is a more useful and empirically accurate way to analyze movement success and frame diverse outcomes
Summary
Social movements operate in a complex environment. As many researchers have noted, this makes analysis of movement outcomes challenging. To further illustrate the merits of a field approach, in the remainder of this essay we analyze an empirical problem: How did a pair of very similar social movements in similar settings in the United States, that used similar tactics to achieve similar local victories, produce very different longer-term outcomes and costs/benefits for the movement actors? Our cases are both movements in which student protesters targeted university administrations for not doing enough to counter racist incidents and elements on campus.
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