SOCIAL MOVEMENTS & COLLECTIVE ACTIONSocial movements & SM organizations are collective actors

Social Movement - Collective actions by relatively powerless challenger groups using extra-institutional means to promote or resist social change (political, cultural, economic, ethnic, sexual)

Civil Rights Movement; Pro-life & Pro-choice SMs; Handgun control

Social Movement Organization (SMO) - A named formal organization engaged in actions to advance a movement’s goals

Movements often have many SMOs pursuing change agendas

Greenpeace; Sierra Club; Friends of Earth; Audubon Society; Earth Now!

Is Islamic fundamentalism an international religious/social movement? Are Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaida & Islamic Jihad all SMOs? Should social movement definition include both ends (revolution, reform) & means (lobbying, terrorism)?

Old & New Social MovementsMajor 19th & 20th c. social movements were national struggles for independence from colonial rule (Norway, India, Algeria) and working-class movements for union collective bargaining rights.

U.S. Civil Rights Movement of 1950-60s was a new type of movement based on social-group identities. Deprived minorities sought rights of political inclusion: Latinos, Native Americans, women, gays & lesbians, aged, disabled, ...

With post-industrialization, many New Social Movements emerged around cultural values, lifestyles & middle-class interests: human rights, environmental, peace/anti-war, social justice, consumer protection, animal liberation, …

Some new social movements draw international participants and rely on transnational networks to achieve goals

Penetrating the Polity

Social Mvt #1

Government

When SMs gain recognition, legitimacy, and access to the polity, they cease to be outside challengers. Transformed into institutionalized interest groups, they now compete to influence state/gov’tl policies, using conventional political tactics such as campaign donations and lobbying.

SM #2

SM #3Interest Group #1 IG #2

IG #3

Movement Recruitment & MobilizationDense networks provide pre-existing channels for recruiting participants and micro-mobilization for collective action. Movement activists target friends, family, coworkers whose shared social identities & attitudinal affinities for movement values and goals may predispose them to participate.

High-risk/cost activism raises barriers to mobilizing SM supporters: Rational decision is not to participate when perceived low success outweighed by potentially great cost; e.g., state violence, loss of job (König 1999)

But, networks can offset negative rational calculations, if ego values preserving or forging strong social ties to SM adherents. To assure compliant control, religious cults often recruit weakly tied persons & force members to cut links to family and friends.

Mississippi Freedom Summer

Doug McAdam’s SM recruitment model emphasized strong identification with values, prior activism, and integration in supportive networks. Evidence for this model came from 961 applicants to SNCC’s 1964 MS Freedom Summer black-voter registration drive.

Compared to 241 who withdrew, the 720 who went to Mississippi had more org’l affiliations, higher levels of past civil rights activity, more extensive & stronger prior ties to other Freedom Summer participants.

“The differences are especially pronounced in the two strong tie categories, with participants listing more than twice the number of volunteers and nearly three times the number of activists as the withdrawals” (McAdam 1986; see also McAdam 1988; Fernandez & McAdam 1988; McAdam & Fernandez 1990; McAdam and Paulsen 1993).

Collective BehaviorSocial movement action is an example of diverse forms of collective behavior, including fads, rumors, strikes, panics, rubber-necking, football riots, lynch mobs, herd stampedes…

Contemporary collective action models seek to explain how behaviors diffuse among actors in a collective context, while emphasizing how decisions to participate involve the rational choices of interdependent decision-makers. The eruption and spread of collective behaviors depends on social relations within a group and on the imitators’ identification with the instigators.

Gabriel Tarde and Gustav Le Bon tried to understand collective behaviors as mass social psychology. The Laws of Imitation and the dynamics of a “group mind” could explain the apparently irrational aspects of collective actions.

Threshold Models The decision whether to join a collective action can be analyzed as a threshold process. Derived from percolation theory, a critical threshold (tipping point) generates an aggregated critical mass: below the threshold, a collective action will fail; but if mass exceeds the threshold, collective action can grow exponentially.

In a crowd, ego’s decision to riot depends on others’ actions. Although instigators start to riot before anyone else does, others join only if each perceives a specific critical N (or X%) of troublemakers. Small shifts in personal thresholds can yield diverse group outcomes.

Mark Granovetter’s (1978) threshold model linked individuals’ behaviors to their perceptions of the aggregate level of action. The probability distribution of everyone’s thresholds determines whether an entire crowd reaches the critical mass required for rapidly escalating and widespread collective action.

Individual assumed to be rational, subjective expected utility maximizers. “The threshold is simply that point where the perceived benefits to an individual of doing the thing in question (here joining the riot) exceed the perceived costs” (p. 1422). Formal model seeks to predict, from the set of individual thresholds, the ultimate numbers of rioters and nonrioters. For example, if the large majority of on-lookers must observe more than half the crowd rioting before they would join, then the riot will fizzle.

Precipitating Urban RiotsThe major predictor of size & severity of 1960s urban riots was the absolute size of a city’s black population (Spilerman 1976).

Can thresholds explain this city-size differential?

“..a city has, each time a crowd gathers, the same probability of reaching this particular equilibrium [number of rioters]. … If this probability is, say, .10, … then we may think of each incident as a Bernoulli trial with probability of success (of a large riot) of .10.” In a small city with only one incident, no riot occurs 90% of time; but in a larger city with 10 incidents, the chance of no riot falls to (.90)10 = .35, even though the distribution of thresholds is the same” (Granovetter 1978).

How to incorporate networks into threshold models? Lower-threshold persons mobilized by a few key alters, higher-threshold persons by large aggregate participation. Strong links mobilize participation if low thresholds, weak links mobilize if high thresholds (Chwe 1999)

ReferencesFernandez Roberto M. and Doug McAdam. 1988. “Social Networks and Social Movements: Multiorganizational Fields and Recruitment to Mississippi Freedom Summer.” Sociological Forum 3:357-382.

Granovetter, Mark. 1978. “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior.” American Journal of Sociology 83:1420-1443.

König, Thomas. 1999. “Patterns of Movement Recruitment.” Paper presented to American Sociological Association meeting.

Le Bon, Gustav. 1895. La psychologie des foules (The Crowd). Paris: Félix Alcan.

McAdam, Doug. 1988. “Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer.” American Journal of Sociology 92:64-90.

McAdam, Doug and Roberto M. Fernandez. 1990. “Microstructural Bases of Recruitment to Social Movements.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 12:1-33.

McAdam, Doug and Ronnelle Paulsen. 1993. “Specifying the Relationship between Social Ties and Activism.” American Journal of Sociology 99:640-667.

Spilerman, Seymour. 1976. “Structural Characteristics of Cities and Severity of Racial Disorders.” American Sociological Review 41:771-793.

Tarde, Gabriel. 1890. Les lois de l’imitation (The Laws of Imitation). Paris: Félix Alcan.