New Social Movements Research Articles

Conceptualizing Cultural Politics in Subcultural and Social Movement Studies

In this article it is argued that combining theories of social movements and subcultures provides a way of 'conceptualizing cultural politics'. The focus is on debates that have taken place over the conceptualization of subcultures and social movements as well as the status and viability of cultural politics. Contemporary subcultural theorists are critical of the rigid concepts used by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) but, it is argued, they provide few feasible alternatives. They also have little to say about the supposed contemporary significance of cultural politics. New social movement (NSM) theorists, on the other hand, have generated conceptual frameworks that recognize the complexity of collective phenomena and have developed an approach which enables us to engage with the controversy over cultural politics. However, they concentrate too narrowly on struggles waged at the level of lifestyle, culture and civil society. The article shows how, like the CCCS, critics of NSM theory rightly question the potency of symbolic challenges and stress the persistent role of material issues and the continued part that conventional political actors, such as the state, play in contemporary social conflicts. Finally, the case of New Age Travellers is used to illuminate these debates in subcultural and social movement studies and to show how elements of each approach can be employed fruitfully in empirical research.

NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: BETWEEN CIVIL SOCIETY AND COMMUNITARIANISM

In an effort to nullify the dehumanizing effects of modern life, New Social Movements (NSMs) tend to snub the principles of civil society and in the process embrace values associated with Rousseau's communitarianism. A crucial precondition for the rise of the latter is the establishment of small and intimate organizations, detached from open and multiple networks. This is an extremely difficult endeavor and few social movements achieve it, since the vast network of only partially overlapping modern institutions dilutes the simplicity and intimacy communitarianism thrives upon. Using ethnographic data from two environmental groups and their efforts to construct communitarian communities, the study suggests that success is based upon the ability of a movement to minimize its links with civil networks. This is more likely to be the result of a religious-like conversion, providing the necessary strength of commitment to the project and readiness to accept personal sacrifices. Tentatively, I conclude that whenever NSMs flirt with communitarian values, they face the dilemma either of withdrawing into a cult environment, or of being systemically incorporated into civil society.

Transnational Social Movements and Sovereignties in Transition: Charting New Interfaces of Power at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Keywords: Social movements, transnationalism, undocumented migration, American Southwest Introduction: The Nation-State, Its Withering Away and the Study of Social Movements [W]hat is the role of the state in all of this? Modern states developed in a strategic dialogue with social movements, ceding to them the autonomy and opportunity to organize when they had to and reclaiming that territory whenever these movements faded or became too dangerous. Why would states be any more supine today when faced by transnational diffusion, exchange, advocacy networks, or even social movements than they were against domestic movements in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century? --Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement; 1998: 194.One of the central debates characterizing discussions of globalization has been the future and fate of the nation-state. Some proponents of globalization have predicted the increasing irrelevance of state boundaries, particularly in light of the unprecedented crossborder flows of goods, ideas and persons in a globalizing world (Albrow, 1996; Appadurai, 1996). Others have underscored the declining powers of the nation state owing to the transnationalization of production and trade, as well as the increasing role of international financial and legal regimes (Ohmae 1990, 1995; Strange, 1996). As a result, in a growing literature, globalization has often been framed in terms of state attenuation.(1)Although such perspectives have generated provocative discussions about globalization, they also reflect a tendency to bypass the state in their analyses and in some cases, to treat the nation-state as an already moribund entity. Another literature on globalization, however, eschews such an assumption and in stead explores states as transitioning actors vis-a-vis a globalizing world--as transforming rather than declining institutions in the context of transnational processes (Castells, 1996; Giddens, 1990, Held, 1991; Mann, 1996; Rosenau, 1997; Scholte, 1993; Tilly, 1992; Verdery, 1996). This second position handily avoids forcing a choice between a strong and weak state (Sassen, 2000), but perhaps more importantly, reintroduces states into contemporary discussions about power and its exercise in a global context.(2)The notion of a transforming rather than declining state is a relevant one for scholars of contemporary social movements--a field in which the nation-state is also frequently treated as passe. Part of this treatment is perhaps owing to a recent theoretical dis-privleging of the state as a focus for study of collective action--something that has developed largely vis-a-vis the popularity of new social movements (NSM) scholarship and its decided turn away from as foundational to social movement formation (Magnusson, 1992, 1997). This dis-privleging has reflected a broader shift to a more postmodern understanding of power as decentralized, or web-like, and hence incapable of being localized in an institution such as the nation-state (Foucault, 1980; Rose and Miller, 1992). For social movement scholars adopting a post-Marxist political framework, then, the reduced role of the state has been linked to a critique of first, models which posit class as a privileged site for an understanding how social power works (Alvarez et. al., 1998; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Warren, 1998), and second, models which have assumed states as fixed referents of power.The neglect of the nation state as a significant actor in social movement literature, however, is also linked to a growing interest in transnational social movements which often seem, by definition, to exclude states as central players in contemporary relations of protest. Both scholars and activists alike often claim that transnational movements, coalitions and networks are those which transcend the traditional contours of the nation-state and, in so doing, represent a distinctive form of transnational politics. …

The Ecology of Tactical Overlap

Does sharing protest tactics influence the trajectory of protest activities among social movements? Focusing on the New Social Movements (NSMs), the authors apply concepts that have proven useful in the study of organizations. These concepts suggest that legitimation and competition processes influence both the upward and downward trajectories of protest. The sharing of tactics is specified in terms of increased overlap in the tactical repertoire of social movements composing a given cohort. A tactical overlap index is calculated between women's protest activities and activities generated by all other New Social Movements in West Germany, from 1953 through 1990. Results suggest that tactical overlap has a nonmonotonic effect on levels of protest activity generated by the West German women's movement.

The Ecology of Tactical Overlap

Does sharing protest tactics influence the trajectory of protest activities among social movements? Focusing on the New Social Movements (NSMs), the authors apply concepts that have proven useful in the study of organizations. These concepts suggest that legitimation and competition processes influence both the upward and downward trajectories of protest. The sharing of tactics is specified in terms of increased overlap in the tactical repertoire of social movements composing a given cohort. A tactical overlap index is calculated between women's protest activities and activities generated by all other New Social Movements in West Germany, from 1953 through 1990. Results suggest that tactical overlap has a nonmonotonic effect on levels of protest activity generated by the West German women's movement

Social movements, welfare and social policy: a critical analysis

This article proposes that theories of ‘new’ social movements (NSMs) may illuminate contemporary welfare struggles and inform research into collective action in social policy. NSM theory is relevant because it focuses on social movement cultures, identity politics and symbolic struggles for the recognition of difference. However, it does this to the exclusion of ‘traditional’ issues such as material redistribution and inequality. A critical social policy, on the other hand, has retained a regard for these issues, but is also concerned with struggles for recognition. It is argued that all social movements raise issues about redistribution and recognition, although these will coexist to varying degrees. Using work carried out in the United States into women's self-help movements, this article shows how movements that are largely cultural may change social policy by posing symbolic challenges.

New Social Movement Theory and Minority Language Television Campaigns

New social movement (NSM) theory has been the dominant framework for the analysis of European social movements since the 1970s. The framework has generally focused on movements articulating `new' grievances such as the women's, ecology and peace movements. This article attempts to use this perspective to account for the campaigns of indigenous European linguistic minorities for own-language television services. The analysis suggests that social movement theorists need to return to the work of early NSM advocates such as Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci, who focused on the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial society. This work helps explain how the goals set by social movements within more traditional cleavages have been transformed and restructured by the transition to post-industrial society.

Structure, Strategy, Sustainability: What Future for New Social Movement Theory?

The theoretical domain developed for the study of New Social Movements (NSMs) in the early 1980s has recently been largely abandoned by its main advocates. Increasingly, the cross-class, ‘post-materialist’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s, typified by the issues of environment, peace and feminism, cease to pose a radical challenge to contemporary western politics. This paper revisits the theoretical work of three of the European voices central to understandings of the emergence and success of New Social Movements. Claus Offe, Alberto Melucci and Alain Touraine succeed in amalgamating an essential emphasis on structural transformation and an understanding of the importance of identity in bringing about ‘new’ collective action in the 1970s and 1980s. In response, to the significant decrease in European work on the NSM phenomenon today the paper proposes that the existing body of theory may be insufficient for describing collective action at the turn of the Millennium. The increasing predominance of ‘identity’ politics (e.g. in the realms of ethnicity and sexuality) in the arenas previously dominated by ‘universalist’, post-particularist themes; the institutionalisation of elements of NSM action and concerns; and the perceived appropriation by transnational agencies of the issues dominating original state-NSM struggles are cited as reasons for the need to develop a new language to describe contemporary collective action phenomena.

Dilemas políticos sobre los movimientos sociales El accionar colectivo de los sectores populares en el Chile de los años ochenta

This study contains a theoretical analysis of the ways in which social theory conceptualized the collective action of popular sectors and the impact of these interprelations on the political process of the transition to democracy during the 1980s and the early 1990s in Santiago, Chile. A review of the two major paradigms to explain the type and characteristics of the new social movements; one aimed at the mobilization of resources, the other oriented towards identity, permils the reconstruction of the scenario and the theoretical discussion accompanying the emergence of the stalled New Social Movements (NMS) in Latin America in general and Chile in particular

The power of distance: Re-theorizing social movements in Latin America

Most scholars who work on Latin American social movements borrow frameworks developed by those who study Europe and North America. Little effort has been made to formulate alternative models deliberately sensitive to the unique political, social, cultural, and economic developments in Latin America. Furthermore, the two models most frequently utilized, mainly the political opportunity structure (POS) and new social movement (NSM) approaches, are limited in their explanatory potential and scope because they are built on "western" assumptions about state formation and state-society relations that do not hold in the Latin American context. In what follows, I offer a new and more historically specific framework for the study of social movements, built around a phenomenological understanding of space conceived as both a material and a social construct. By encouraging a sensitivity to space and how it articulates with historically given patterns of state formation, class formation, and citizenship, as well as racial, ethnic, and gender-specific identity politics, my larger aim is to provide a new way of understanding and theorizing the origins, nature, and consequences of social movements in different comparative and historical contexts. I argue that once we more conscientiously develop what Anthony Giddens, Doreen Massey, and Alan Pred, among others, call the "space/time" dimension of our theorizing,1 we can better understand social movements in Latin America and elsewhere, not just who joins them and the role that meaning and stragegy play in these decisions, but also their larger implications for political and social change.

Generational Differences Amongst New Age Travellers

Previous studies of ‘New Age’ travellers have paid no attention to generational differences within the travellers' scene. This paper looks at these differences to reflect upon the new social movement (NSM) literature. It is argued that NSM theory only analyses those movements with ‘post-material’ concerns about culture, identity and symbolic challenges. It thus ignores less privileged movements which are concerned with apparently ‘traditional’ issues, such as survival, political opposition and citizenship rights. A number of such movements have emerged during the past few years in the wake of economic and social restructuring under post-Fordist conditions and the dismantling of a Keynesian-style welfare state that is associated with these processes. While the older generation of travellers was tied to the NSM movements and chose to move onto the road, the younger travellers have been forced to do so for lack of any reasonable alternative, having faced unemployment and homelessness in a post-Fordist/Keynesian era. They are, therefore, part of the contemporary movement scene to which ‘old’ issues are seemingly still applicable. The article concludes by showing how both the older and the younger travellers are now struggling to survive in the face of legislation which effectively criminalises their way of life.

Les nouveaux mouvements sociaux constituent-ils un défi pour les partis politiques? Le cas du Québec

AbstractDoes the rise of new social movements (NSMs) represent a challenge for the traditional political parties in Quebec? Though this question can be answered from many perspectives, this study focuses on the programmatic aspect of this challenge that encompasses both a number of new societal issues and adherence to new values promoted by the NSMs. More precisely, it addresses the following questions: have the issues of environment and the respect of women's rights been already integrated into the political platforms of the two mainstream political parties in Quebec, the Liberal Party of Quebec and the Parti Québécois? Can the activists of those political parties be distinguished from the members of environmental and women's rights movements with regard to their values? On the one hand, both the Liberal party and the Parti Québécois have for a long time incorporated into their platforms issues linked to the defence of the environment and to the promotion of gender equality. On the other hand, the authors observe that the adherence to postmaterialist values is stronger in the NSMs than in the parties. One main conclusion is that one cannot compare adherence to the new values in the parties and the NSMs as two homogeneous blocs. Instead, the authors see four distinct organizations. They encourage further research to examine other dimensions of the problem such as the organizational aspect of the political challenge posed by the rise of NSMs.

The dialogic of media and social movements

In the contemporary “information society” the mobilization of information and knowledge may be as important as the mobilization of people in the struggle for social justice and equality. Emergent political actors, such as the new social movements (NSMs), must first reach and persuade their audiences with information and knowledge before they can hope to move them to action. In order to do so, movements must first develop strategic access to commercial news media organizations. As the major sources of political information for citizens in modern societies, news media are still one of the most crucial bottlenecks in the distribution of new information by and about emergent social movements. The question of whether (and how) the new movements can produce access to news media, and what kind of access they can produce, becomes an urgent democratic question about the possibilities and processes of social change in the United States.

Time to Gather Seeds

Explanations of social of 1960s occupy an idealismmaterialism continuum. Frequently (and wrongly), scholars of these seem to perceive an iron link between idealist explanation and sympathetic interpretation of a movement, and likewise between materialist explanation and hostile interpretation. Concerning new social movements (NSMs) that have emerged in United States since World War IIthe phrase is a European import that is supposed to denote, basically, that are not class based (but which really means that do not see themselves as class-based)-only best studies of civil rights movement have managed to combine idealist and materialist factors. Seeds of Sixties, by Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman, purports to direct attention to origins of all these NSMs, but its teleology is New Left and those branches of environmentalism, 1960s counterculture, and feminism that most resemble New Left. As we see it, fundamental to 1960s were ideas of liberation and participatory democracy and forging of autonomous realms for individual and collective growth (p. 220). In its argument concerning sources of these movements, their book perches on far idealist edge of spectrum. It is a set of intellectual sketches of fifteen independent-minded thinkers active between 1945 and 1960; these sketches possess intrinsic value, but their relation to the sixties is far more problematic than authors admit. Jamison and Eyerman are U.S.-born sociologists working in Sweden, who came of age in 1960s. They tell us that this work is at once a voyage of self-discovery and an attempt to identify some of intellectual roots of our generation (p. xi). Their specialties are, respectively, sociology of science, and of social and intellectuals. Previous collaborations include a recent overview of social that presents their full theoretical apparatus (mostly kept in background here) and, revealingly, an anthology on environmental activism in northern Europe.' Environmentalism is both social movement where authors' research interests intersect and

The New Politics of Class: Social Movements and Cultural Dynamics in Advanced Societies.

INTRODUCTION CLASS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Bringing Classes Back into the Theory of Society Culture as the Missing Link Between Class and Collective Action PART ONE: MODERNIZING THE NOTION OF CLASS Contradictions and Social Evolution A Theory of the Role of Class in the Production of Modernity Beyond Class as a Historical Subject Towards a Theoretical Construction of Collective Actors PART TWO: RECONNECTING CULTURE AND CLASS Culture and Class Bourdieu's Culturalist Refraction of the Traditional Theory of Class The Cognitive Representations of Social Inequality A Sociological Account of the Cultural Basis of Modern Class Society PART THREE: THE THEORY OF NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: A CHALLENGE TO CLASS THEORY? A New Social Movement? The Continuing Vitality of the Theory of the 'New Social Movements' Counterculture Movements against Modernity Nature as a New Field of Class Struggle? PART FOUR: NEW CLASS CONFLICTS? THE THEORY OF MIDDLE CLASS RADICALISM The 'New Social Movements' Moral Crusades, Political Pressure Groups, or a Social Movement? Does Social Class Matter in the Study of Social Movements? A New Theory of Middle Class Radicalism CONCLUSION: BEYOND TRADITIONAL CLASS THEORY From the Crisis of Class Politics to the Critique of Class Politics Reflecting the Role of 'Crisis Discourses' in Modern Society

Women and classes: Gender and the class base of new social movements in the Netherlands

Abstract. According to conventional methods of stratification, the occupational position of the male determines the class position of all members of his family. Mann and other authors suggest that the assumptions underlying this method no longer hold. This note seeks to test both the conventional method and an approach which includes the positions occupied by women, by studying the class base of the support for so‐called New Social Movements (NSMs). The data are taken from a Dutch survey held in four rounds in the year 1987. The results show that the inclusion of the class position of women themselves is an improvement, in comparison with the conventional stratification method. The position of women not only has an effect on their own levels of support for NSMs, but also influences that of their spouse.

Social Change, the Middle Class and the Emergence of ‘New Social Movements’: A Critical Analysis

Most recent analyses of New Social Movements (NSMs) by British sociologists have concentrated on broad social changes or the middle classes as the key explanatory factors. This paper criticizes recent contributions to the analysis of NSMs which emphasize the development of ‘post-Fordism’ and ‘disorganized capitalism’, and recent attempts to understand NSMs as a reflection of ‘middle class’ interests or values. An alternative theoretical approach is outlined which places at the centre of the analysis the social relations in which NSMs are grounded, and which NSMs seek to transform. In this alternative account the middle classes play the role of ‘traditional intellectuals’, that is, they provide the key social resources for mobilization of NSMs and all social movements.

Civil society in Slovenia: From opposition to power

‘Civil society’ is the concept that summarises the democratisation — or the transformation from totalitarianism to democracy — in Slovenia, as elsewhere in the socialist half of Europe.1 As elsewhere, the concept implies a normative political philosophy, as well as describing and helping us to analyse and understand a wide range of empirical democratic struggles. The distinctive feature of the transformation to democracy in Slovenia, however, is that it was initiated by the new social movements (NSM) and that they — and not dissident intellectuals, or reform communists, or the aging New Left elite — played the crucial role in the formative period of civil society. The network they formed was called ‘the alternative scene’, or simply ‘the alternative’.

Three waves of political mobilization in Western Europe and the coming of a fourth

Abstract This paper analyzes the new social movements (NSMs) from the perspectives of historical sociology and futures studies. The NSMs are seen as the fourth and last wave of broad ideological‐political mobilization in European history. This wave, called green and beginning in the 1960s, is compared to the violet wave (sixteenth and seventeenth century reformation), the blue wave (eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism) and the red wave (nineteenth and twentieth century socialism). It is argued that the four waves form a cumulative pattern, in which the preceding waves prepare the ground for the next. On this basis the northwestern part of Europe is predicted to fall under the strongest impact of the green wave while eastern and southern Europe are expected to provide meager soil for this type of development. The paper also investigates the future possibility of women's liberation becoming a major force behind a green mass mobilization.

Recalling the 1960s: The new left and social movement criticism

THE SIXTIES: YEARS OF HOPE, DAYS OF RAGE. By Todd Gitlin. New York: Bantam Books, 1987, pp. 513. $19.95. IF I HAD A HAMMER: THE DEATH OF THE OLD LEFT AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW LEFT. By Maurice Isser...