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Hi everyone,
Thanks for reading this. It is the first chapter of Passion and Purpose: Action Theory of Social Movements, my effort to pull together emotions, cognition, and strategy, and to view them as mechanisms or microfoundations of political action. It gets rougher as it goes along. The final section, “Challenges,” is meant to be something like a sidebar that will appear at the end of each chapter, with questions that still need to be answered.
Jim

Chapter 1: After the Big Paradigms: Social Movement Theory Today


No one excels in big things who fails in small things. – Quintilian
For a generation, beginning in the 1960s, research into social movements, resistance, and collective action flourished under the inspiration of several big theories. Two of them, influenced by Marxism, were primarily macrosociological: an American version which emphasized the mobilization of resources and interactions with the state, and a French version focused on programmed or postindustrial society and its characteristic conflict. A third paradigm, largely American, drew on very different sources, namely the assumptions of microeconomics. One name was especially associated with each of these ambitious approaches: Charles Tilly, Alain Touraine, and Mancur Olson. Each was at the center of a network of fruitful intellectual work, but as the founding members of these networks they can stand fairly well for the broader paradigms.
FIGURE I ABOUT HERE
After a generation of productive research, by the early years of this millennium these paradigms had reached their limits, for a number of reasons including the accumulation of anomalies, the partiality of the approaches’ central metaphors, historical changes, and simply the dulling of the excitement they had once generated. Tilly and Olson are now dead, and Touraine has turned from the study of social movements back to a more general social theory. The passing of these giants from the intellectual stage has left a silence, but hopefully one in which we audience members can continue a more modest conversation among ourselves. Having examined these paradigms at their peaks elsewhere, especially The Art of Moral Protest, I want to concentrate more on their recent impact or lack of impact, in the hope of discerning some directions that theorists of social movements might now take.1 In many cases today’s theorists are synthesizing the insights of the older schools while adding dimensions they overlooked. The overall trend I would like to embrace is a bracketing of big structures in favor of a concern for the microfoundations of social action.
Players after Structures
For thirty years, the dominant paradigm in American social movement theory and research was resource mobilization, which later morphed into political process theory. Grievances and attitudes of potential participants were downplayed in favor of organizational factors such as professional staffs and fundraising, and external circumstances such as elite allies and resources, state crises, a slackening in state repression, and other “windows of opportunity” in the political environment. This was a powerful organizational and structural perspective that accounted especially well for movements by the repressed such as labor and civil rights–movements in pursuit of full inclusion and “citizenship rights.”2 The goals of such movements were taken for granted; what they needed were the means to act. 3

Charles Tilly (1929-2008) was one guiding force behind this long trajectory, as much by the example of his tenacious research as through explicit theory. From his first and best book, The Vendée, in 1964 through Popular Contention in Great Britain in 1995, he demonstrated that demographic, urban, economic, and especially political changes in France and Britain led to transformations in the forms of popular protest: “Most of all, the attentive coding of contentious gatherings reveals how the concentration of capital and the expansion of the state pushed popular struggles from local arenas and from a significant reliance on patronage toward autonomous claim-making in national arenas.”4 In Britain a series of controversies in the late eighteenth century gave birth to the modern social movement, as factions of the political elite found common cause with groups on the fringes of the polity.5 Most of Tilly’s career focused on the emergence of a new arena, an accountable parliament, with all its ramifications.

Foremost, Tilly was rejecting earlier views that saw protest as beginning in the minds and emotions of individuals, especially due to economic hardships, and working its way upward or outward from there. In doing so, he took advantage of the lazy formulations of these so-called grievance theorists, who themselves had done little to think through how grievances are culturally and psychologically formulated, or by whom.6 Even so, culture was in Tilly’s work from the start; The Vendée was based partly on grievances, minutes of meetings, and other evidence about people’s points of view. It was doubtless because he already had a place for culture in his framework that Tilly showed little initial interest in the conceptual products of the cultural turn that reached the field of social movements in the late 1980s.7

Tilly boiled cultural meanings down to repertories of collective action (although for some reason he always insisted on the French “repertoire”): familiar routines which reflected moral sensibilities, know-how, and available channels in a local setting.8 In a trick of alchemy, he could then dispense with attitudes and goals, moral intuitions and principles, emotions, and anything that smacked of what he derided as “phenomenological individualism.” In ignoring the meanings for the related practices, Tilly’s approach was not so different from that of Bourdieu and other “practice” theorists, a view which has been criticized for assuming that practices reflect shared meanings instead of being the mere coordination of action.9

The process of making claims might also have been an opening for cultural meanings, but for Tilly claim making was central because it defined contention, so that the claims tended to be about hard interests such as resources, or sometimes equally undefined “rights.” He paid little attention to the cultural construction of claims, and as a result it is difficult to find a definition of claims in his work. Likewise protestors’ efforts to display their unity, numbers, commitment, and moral worth are all about rhetoric, which Tilly also took for granted. His primary data were carefully coded newspaper accounts, which he might have used to show how this industry framed and constructed protest, but even this was an opportunity he did not take. His rejection of anything smacking of mental life left him open to charges that his model of human motivation looked like that of rational-choice models, a pursuit of self-interest.10

Emotions, present even in Tilly’s more resolutely structural phase, were another source of unresolved tension. His detailed analyses are peppered with statements like, “To answer this question we must specify the hopes and fears of each of the three participants in [French] industrial conflict.”11 Or “Members of the Protestant Association [of Lord George Gordon] acted against what they saw as an expanding threat to Protestant ascendancy in Great Britain.”12 In Tilly’s descriptions almost all players act out of a sense of threat, but in Tilly’s theory the subjects of his causal statements are factors such as “the concentration of capital and the related proletarianization of the British workforce,” “urbanization, migration, and rapid population growth,” “the rising intensity of British military efforts,” and “short-run shifts in the mobilization and strategic advantage of different parties.”13 After lovely opening vignettes, players fade into the background structures. We never hear how a sense of threat is constructed – although near the end of his life Tilly did address the related topic of blame.14

Tilly also claimed to reject general, universal theories of the sort exemplified in Neil Smelser’s Theory of Collective Action, which had a structural-functional box for every sort of collective fad, protest, and movement. Tilly occasionally fell back on big concepts, such as the urbanization which framed The Vendée, but to his credit he constantly questioned his own tools and was forever rejecting his own prior formulations. Yet he usually replaced them with similarly broad factors. He admitted in his 1976 preface to The Vendée that he had “lost some of my confidence that urbanization was the best possible analytical focus,” but his reason turns out to be that it “draws attention away from the independent effects of capitalism and statemaking.”15 In 2006 he wrote, “When it comes to large-scale political structures and processes, no general laws or sufficient conditions exist,” but proceeded to argue that “variable combinations and sequences of invariant mechanisms produce variable outcomes under different initial conditions.” And later, we find him speaking of the “laws of contention.”16 He also cycled through a series of terms such as “pro-active and reactive,” meant to get at changes in repertories. Although uneasy with terms such as “laws,” he could never quite give them up.17

Tilly tried to avoid undue reductionism. “Struggle has its own partly autonomous history,” not simply derivative of the economy or the state, and in turn influencing both of them.18 But here too he did not go far enough. This should have been an opening to the complexities of strategic engagement, but Tilly said little about this. His inattention to goals almost forced him to reduce struggle to the arenas in which it unfolded, as well as preventing him from addressing issues of failure and success (they could only be “outcomes” detached from intention).

The late 1990s saw the final crystalization of the political-process paradigm but also mounting criticism. In a triumphal 1996 volume, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, supporters presented the approach as having defined the language–reduced to the general concepts of opportunity structures, mobilizing structures, and frame alignment–necessary for answering the basic questions about social movements. Some advocates denied that political process was a paradigm at all, but saw it merely as a post-paradigmatic “emerging synthesis” of extensive empirical findings.19 Tilly seemed to retain a faith in empirical investigation that can only be described as an empiricist vision that truth can be found in the evidence not the theory.20 (Others defended political process as a paradigm, in recognition of the unavoidable nonempirical elements any theory contains.)21

Theoretical critiques claimed that rational-choice assumptions were often surreptitiously buried in the models, that concepts like resources and political opportunities were overextended, that the idea of opportunities conflated short-term strategic openings and long-term structural horizons, that the paradigm made protest look too easy and normal, that a structural bias prevented full attention to cultural dynamics, and that emotions were altogether missing. Much of the criticism suggested that the approach ignored actors’ choices, desires, and points of view: potential participants were taken for granted as already formed, just waiting for opportunities to act. Was phenomenology fighting back?22

Empirical assessments also challenged the paradigm. Jeff Goodwin organized more than forty collaborators to look at the role of political opportunities in the rise of one hundred disparate cultural, political, and revolutionary movements.23 He tested the four opportunities about which Doug McAdam claimed there was considerable consensus: openness of the political system; instability of elite alignments; presence of elite allies; and decreasing state repression.24 In 41 of the 100 cases, none of the four opportunities was present, even by fairly liberal definitions. In another 24, only one was present. In the 59 cases in which one or more political opportunities were relevant, furthermore, the opportunities were sometimes contracting rather than expanding. One or more opportunities were unambiguously expanding in barely a third of the cases.25

In the face of external assaults and internal weaknesses, several of the paradigm’s most prominent advocates, including Tilly, feinted as if to retreat. As early as 1998, Sidney Tarrow revealed some anxiety about the approach, revising his bestselling textbook by assiduously adding “and constraints” each time he mentioned “political opportunities.”26 He mentioned the salience of threats – a complex emotional and cognitive process – even though they did not fit the rest of his scheme, and his own convoluted discussion ended up downplaying their importance.27 Worse, he portrayed threats as simply the opposite of opportunities, misreading the cultural constructions of the two. Just as Tilly never resolved the tensions in his work over culture, emotions, or causality, the broader process tradition retained a structural sensibility despite trying to incorporate more interpretive and psychological factors.

Few projects on social movements have been as well funded or well connected as that organized by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in the late 1990s.28 A mission that was intended to summarize what the process tradition had learned instead cracked that tradition open. The central result, Dynamics of Contention, appeared in 2001. In a breathtaking and often poignant critique of their own work (although they managed to ignore everyone else’s critiques), the three scholars pointed out four major defects of the process model, in terms repeated like a mantra throughout the book: “(1) It focuses on static, rather than dynamic relationships. (2) It works best when centered on individual social movements, and less well for broader episodes of contention. (3) Its genesis in the relatively open politics of the American ‘sixties’ led to more emphasis on opportunities than on threats, more confidence in the expansion of organizational resources than on the organizational deficits that many challengers suffer. (4) It focused inordinately on the origins of contention rather than on its later phases.”29 The authors admirably try to draw links with other scholarly literatures, especially those on revolution and democratization.

“McTeam,” as they often called themselves, gestured toward an open-ended, strategic, and cultural perspective. They admitted that opportunities (and threats) must be recognized as such by insurgents, rather than being objective structural conditions. They recognized that cultural work goes on all the time, and is not restricted to recruitment appeals (although they unfortunately lump all this under the rubric of “framing,” rather than distinguishing the many mechanisms through which meanings and emotions are developed, promoted, and contested). Finally, they proposed to examine the actions of all strategic players rather than just movement activists, and to follow contention through to its conclusions rather than stopping after people are mobilized. Criticisms 1, 2, and 4 are expressly strategic.

Even better, they promised to adopt a “mechanisms” approach to explanation. The idea that there are discrete causal chunks that can be combined to explain broad social developments is a promising alternative to universal, general theory as well as a necessary supplement to the identification of statistical regularities. Like tools in a toolbox, you explain complex phenomena by using relevant conceptual mechanisms as needed. It is ad hoc but realistic, breaking the complexities of social life down into small, local effects which then add up to big outcomes. Structural approaches almost unavoidably present general models, whereas strategic visions allow open-ended complexity and lots of surprises. So a mechanisms approach should have helped McTeam forge a new, interactive (and fully strategic) way to think about collective action.

Yet Dynamics of Contention widely disappointed.30 The authors’ criticism of their own prior work was more compelling than the alternative they presented. They recast, in chastened form, their own structuralism. The trio had apparently not carried on sufficient dialogue with contending approaches, either those that concentrate on meaning or those that use a strategic or a game lens. They seemed to feel they had adequately captured meaning by incorporating frames and identities into their approach, but the inattention to game theory was more surprising–since it concentrates on just the kind of dynamic interactions in a broad range of settings that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly invoke.

The main weakness in their new line of attack was how they defined–or didn’t define–mechanisms, despite dozens of examples. As Ruud Koopmans and others pointed out, the list included a grab-bag of disparate entities, many of which violate the spirit (and reduce the intellectual power) of social mechanisms. 31 The utility of mechanisms, as embraced by researchers such as Arthur Stinchcombe, is that they reach down to a different, more concrete level of reality.32 If you are explaining institutions or revolutions, for instance, you try to find personal networks and interactions; to explain these you might turn to individuals or psychological mechanisms. From the macro perspective, these are relatively concrete and uncontroversial (although they may be neither to psychologists, who search for neural pathways in turn). This is the reason that rational-choice theorists such as Jon Elster have embraced the concept.33 Mechanisms offer microfoundations. They are a model of scientific progress, as black boxes are opened to investigate; “to not identify relevant mechanisms,” says David Waldner, “is to not explain.”34

McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly smuggled in too much general theory behind the Potemkin-Village façade of their mechanisms. Far from being concrete chunks, their favorite mechanisms were complicated social phenomena–close to what we wish to explain in the first place. Although they had a few cognitive mechanisms, most were “relational”–more complex entities than basic building blocks ought to be, and too structural to do justice to cultural meanings.35 One of their favorite mechanisms was brokerage, the new linking of two “social units” by a third. A lot of activities fall under this rubric. It may be individuals or it may be entire groups who act as brokers. There are also various types of broker, depending on the third party’s relationship to the others.36 The cognitive and emotional dynamics will vary accordingly. It seems tautological to claim that such a broad and complex set of interactions would “produce the same effects everywhere”: brokerage so broadly defined can only be recognized by its effects, the problem that a mechanisms approach is supposed to solve.37 And if mechanisms have this problem, then the same authors’ idea of “processes,” concatenations of mechanisms, suffers from it even more. Agency and actors disappear into processes, just as they did in the original process models. This is a structuralist interpretation of mechanisms, harking back to Merton’s use of the term as a kind of middle-range theory, a necessary component of functional analysis.38

Tilly soon applied the new approach to collective violence, in a formulation that reflected the same tension between general theory and mechanisms. He rejected the former, but hoped that mechanisms would eventually add up to its equivalent. “The explanations we are seeking do not take the form of general laws for collective violence as a whole or even particular laws governing one type of violence or another.” Instead we “look for the recurrent causal mechanisms and processes that cause variation in the character and intensity of collective violence.”39 The latter statement contradicts the former, as Tilly is not content to identify mechanisms (a different assortment of which will be drawn from the conceptual toolkit to explain each case), but hopes to see how they all fit together in multivariate style to explain the universe of collective violence. His aim is still a general explanation of collective violence.

In their rush to a more dynamic model, McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly did not take the time to describe the micro-level building blocks for such an effort, but merely waved a magic wand over the static model: let it be dynamic. A more patient approach, but more promising in the long run, is to look at the little pieces of strategic interaction, many of them social-psychological and even psychological: moods, reflex emotions, affective commitments, decisionmaking heuristics, identity formation, memories, feelings of efficacy and control, leader dynamics, demonizations, escalations, and so on. This inattention is surprising, given that so many of the necessary components have already been described by cognitive psychologists, behavioral economists, discourse analysts, organizational sociologists, and others. Without these raw materials, how could we recognize something like “appropriation” except by its effects? Most of all, we need to insert individuals into our models, along with their decisions, dilemmas, defections, and so on. Meanings operate inside people’s heads and in public embodiments.

Strategic choices, at the heart of game theory, are another potential microfoundation. The stuff for a richer strategic vision often appears in Dynamics, unexploited. In discussing the Mau Mau Rebellion, for instance, McTeam claims, “the heightened sense of threat or opportunity associated with the uncertainty prompted all established parties to the conflict to monitor one another’s actions closely and engage in reactive mobilization on an escalating basis.”40 Jomo Kenyatta was crucial as both decisionmaker and symbol. There was a symbolic spiral in which rebels gained support after he and others were arrested arbitrarily in 1952. The colonial government reinforced his image by charging him with “managing Mau Mau, a secret society to force British rule and white farm settlement out of Kenya.”41 The two sides almost conspired to make Kenyatta central. McTeam, like the process tradition from which they come, had no place for these complex emotional reactions to repression. They did not in the end adopt a strategic perspective, and strategy is dissolved in what are still basically structural (and hence static) images.

For example, they embraced a “relational” approach, for instance, by which they eschewed a methodological individualism that they defined as seeing reality as existing within the minds of individuals. (They ignore the common-sense possibility that individual minds are shaped through social interactions but then have a reality independent of those interactions, in particular carrying past experiences along as memories and beliefs and so on.) But relationships differ from interactions. Relationships are already structured and ongoing, and interactions take place within them. A more strategic approach would examine the interactions first and foremost, and then perhaps work back to see what the players bring to those interactions, without assuming a relationship to start with. Thus McTeam spoke of relational mechanisms which “alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks.”42 Why not speak of players as doing things to and with each other, rather than as restructuring relationships that then affect what they do? What are relationships outside of interactions or beliefs and feelings about others? What can the term do for us other than to cast a structural spell over us? 43

McTeam remained blind to cultural meanings and the rich emotions of strategic action. McTeam replaced framing with the broader but vaguer term “social construction,” yet who is doing that construction work remained unclear. They spoke of “collective interpretation,” but thinking is not precisely collective (there is no collective mind to do it). They might have applied their ideas of claimsmaking and relations to compound players’ internal dynamics, getting at the rhetorical processes by which claims (and players themselves) are constructed. The creation of a collective identity or a shared diagnosis of events is no simple matter; it is often as contentious as a group’s external relations.44 The processes by which compound players hold together (or don’t) offers rich veins for sociologists and anthropologists to mine. It is unusual for a collective identity to convince all those who fall within it. Some feel more comfortable with the label than others. Factions disagree about the interests of the collective, and which means are appropriate to pursue them. Individuals defect, partly or wholly, to pursue their own goals, alongside or instead of collective ones.

Despite these limitations, we must be impressed by scholars willing to cut loose their own lives’ work in a call for a new framework. They cleared considerable brush for us, it’s up to us to use new microfoundations to build in the clearing.

In the final years of his life Tilly intelligently addressed a dazzling number of topics in a series of books meant to assimilate them to his vision. My favorite is Credit and Blame, a brief examination of how we allocate these moral attributes which turns out to be a treatise on rhetoric as Tilly traces claims across a number of arenas. “Every collective memory,” he observes, “emerges from a contest among advocates of competing accounts concerning what happened and why.”45 And yet it is a thin account which tells us nothing about why we blame others or what we blame them for, since this book – like the others that deal with cultural concepts such as identities, trust, boundaries, performances, and stories – works so hard to avoid any attribution of mental states that it ends up attaching meaning to social contexts without any thinking players involved. Once again, without meaning we can only assimilate goals and decisions to the rules of arenas. At the end, Tilly was still battling phenomenological individualism, which might have been a serious foe in 1964 but by 2008 had become a straw villain.
Subjects after History
While Tilly and others were forging the mobilization and process approaches in the United States, Alain Touraine (1926- ) was grappling with postindustrial trends in France. If Tilly drew heavily on French labor history for his primary exemplar, Touraine derived inspiration from the movements of the 1960s with special origins in the United States. If the political process model was crafted to explain how protest changed under the rise of industrial society and national parliaments, the programmed-society approach was meant to understand what happened at the other end of industrial society, when a new type of social movement no longer aimed at state control. In a programmed society humans control their destinies (or “historicity”–the pace and direction of change) to an unprecedented degree, no longer tightly constrained by religious dogma or natural scarcity.

Touraine’s early theory and research had examined workers and factories, but he wrote about universities as he came to formulate the idea of a post-industrial society in which the manipulation of symbols and of human relations increased in importance compared to the production of physical commodities.46 The influence of Talcott Parsons led Touraine to investigate the broader social functions of various institutions, eventually bringing him to social movements after 1968. In the late 1970s Touraine began investigating a series of social movements through “sociological interventions.” He and his team would invite a number of participants to a series of meetings aimed at investigating the movement’s goals, identity, opponents, and factions. In some cases, opponents of the movement would be invited to confront the members. In an astounding burst of research, funded as heavily as Tilly’s, Touraine and his assistants recreated in a kind of laboratory setting the dilemmas that a series of movements and their leaders faced. Participants were carefully selected to represent different tendencies in each movement.

The climax of each intervention came when the intervention leader (usually Touraine himself) presented the group with Touraine’s hypothesis about their historical significance: that their “highest” purpose was a broad-based effort to oppose the corporate and government technocrats who initiated and mostly directed social change. The antinuclear, feminist, student, and other movements were different facets of one underlying anti-technocratic movement, struggling to emerge, which would assume a central role in postindustrial society that the labor movement had occupied in industrial society. In Touraine’s rather grand language, this is the moment of “conversion,” in which participants are to see the “highest meaning” of their activities. There was one problem: Touraine was unable to convince his movements of their real significance. They insisted on their own purposes. Like Marxists before him, Touraine seemed to know participants’ goals better than they did. Their “highest meaning” followed from Touraine’s grand theory of history, not from their ownconcrete goals.47

Touraine also borrowed from Marxism the image of periods of history, as well as of a central social conflict within each period. Nonetheless, Touraine was concerned to reject the revolutionary Marxist aspirations of the French Communist Party. This came out clearly in the book on Solidarity, the only intervention outside France. “Our tradition,” by which Touraine and his coauthors mean French communism, “has encouraged us…to see every great social movement as necessarily revolutionary, … a movement whose objective is the seizure of power and even the imposition of absolute rule.” But Solidarity, as a new social movement like those inspired by 1968 in France, “never sought to seize power.”48 As Tilly was reacting against a dominant functional sociology in the United States, Touraine was forging a new political strategy for the “new left” embodied in the CFDT trade union, the main alternative to the communist CGT. As Foucault said of the post-1968 movements that Touraine studied, they “have endowed themselves with a strong reference to Marxism and, at the same time, have insisted on a violent critique vis-à-vis the dogmatic Marxism of parties and institutions.”49

Touraine had a special definition of social movement, designed to highlight its highest meaning rather than explain its empirical reality. I don’t think it is necessary to recount the old details, but he excludes two things dear to my heart. Emotions tend to be reduced to a sense of communal solidarity paired with a feeling of threat to that community – a kind of moral battery that I shall argue later contributes to mobilization but which for Touraine makes a mobilization into a defensive effort instead of a social movement. (Tellingly, in one of the antinuclear intervention groups, it was the women who tended to drift toward the communal, i.e. emotional, pole.) He also uses the term strategy in a special way, aligning it with the resource mobilization models that highlight organizational competition. Although these approaches, he says, rightly focus on actors rather than on systems, they miss cultural meaning (true) and they miss the underlying structural conflict that defines a social movement.50 But if we can add meaning to strategic models, and if we begin to doubt this underlying structure, then strategic approaches look much more promising.

In their examination of Solidarity, the book, Luke Martell and Neil Stammers see the seeds of doubt in Touraine’s project, adumbrating his later shift. “The application of preconceived categories,” they say, “combined with a desire and a commitment on the part of the authors to present Solidarity in a positive light, resulted in a failure to take account of the potential for neo-liberal and reactionary nationalist currents to develop.”51 The highest meaning was in the eyes of the intervention team, not the participants. This is fine as politics, not so good as explanation. Big theory and normative lenses operate in tandem.

Somewhat like McTeam’s Potemkin mechanisms, Touraine’s intervention groups might have been too artificial to generate the kind of dynamic change he sees as key to social movements. In speaking, several years afterward, with several of the antinuclear activists who had participated in Touraine’s intervention, I realized that the laboratory setting “froze” the movements at a particular moment. Each participant knew s/he was there to play a certain role, to represent a distinct faction of the movement. They could not grow beyond the movement, and its social context, in real dialogue with Touraine. Even when confronting adversaries and allies, whom Touraine invited to some meetings, the group members felt they had to play the proper role. Unlike the real movement, they stopped being genuine players and subjects, interacting in creative, fateful ways. I suspect that the intervention groups became something like those dioramas in natural-history museums, meant to show what life was like in some exotic part of the world. The participants had no real choices, no history to make.

Partly as a result of the many rejections, Touraine to some extent abandoned the project of discerning the social movement that would carry on the fight for social justice in postindustrial society. His mood grew more pessimistic, as the movements he studied mostly lost in their efforts to control social change, especially to corporations.52 With the election of Margaret Thatcher and of Ronald Reagan, history began to move in a new direction. “During the last twenty years,” he wrote in 1998, “the idea of a postindustrial society has disappeared because the most important change turned out to be not a structural transformation but the victory of a new kind of capitalism.”53 In a process of “demodernization,” society–as a unified system–has unraveled. Sociology, which traditionally looked for that underlying unity and order, must in turn change. “Instead of regarding society as the matrix of personal and collective behavior, as if roles were solely defined by statuses, forms of authority, norms and values, we [must] consider society as a place of combination and conflict between strategic action and identity....Such is the great transformation of sociology, which has remained for so long the study of the structure and processes of social systems, and is now increasingly turning to the study of social actors’ conditions of existence and initiative.”54 Like Tilly, Touraine recognized the importance of strategic engagement without being able to incorporate it into his big theory.

Agency no longer lies in some collective actor that will emerge to direct historicity at the level of a social system, but rather in people’s small efforts to expand and protect their own individualities–what Touraine terms the Subject. He vehemently rejects the self-interested Economic Man of rational-choice traditions, but also the oversocialized human of traditional sociology. Touraine now emphasizes the ethical dimension, centered largely on individual autonomy rather than structured social conflict. But who are these people? What do they want? Touraine points to the need for new microfoundations of sociology, but his primary concern–to show how and why we need them–prevents him from providing them. Humans are equal and different, a situation that–it seems to me–will inevitably inspire strategic interaction. Whether their goals are individual or collective, or most likely some complex and ever-changing combination of the two, is an open question.

To express Touraine’s ideas about the movements of programmed societies, Alberto Melucci (1943-2001) helped to promulgate the term “new social movements,” inspiring more misunderstanding than clarity. France and Italy still had an Old Left hoping (or pretending to hope) to seize the state through a revolution, so new social movements were distinctive in rejecting that goal. Because the United States didn’t have this kind of Old Left, the distinction was distorted when it migrated: old movements were assumed to be the labor movement.55 American movements of the 1970s and 1980s were certainly not entirely new, especially in their tactics, nor were they necessarily more oriented toward cultural meanings than the labor movement had been, especially in its early stages. 56 Debates over what was new and what was old, if sterile in some ways, had the salutary effect of inspiring research into the cultural dimensions of earlier movements as well as the new ones. American researchers embraced the term “new social movements” because it opened the door to culture at a time, the early 1980s, when our tool kits had few cultural concepts.57

Melucci’s main intent was to promote cultural views of social movements, concepts with which we might get inside them, to appreciate the point of view of participants. Identity was the central rhetorical device of Challenging Codes, although he recognized the risk that the very term seems to imply a static quality rather than an interactive process. He retained a place for strategy: “Action has to be viewed as an interplay of aims, resources, and obstacles, as a purposive orientation which is set up within a system of opportunities and constraints.”58 But something was still missing at the psychological level. This is apparent in Melucci’s discussions of the relationship between movement leaders and followers, where he lapses into the language of exchange, of costs and benefits. He does not say enough to indicate whether he means this at a vague, metaphorical level or at the measurable level of material trades–because he does not really fill in the complex psychology of leadership. This would perhaps lead to charisma, a concept currently out of fashion, as well as to a range of emotions, then also out of fashion. Even Melucci, more attuned to psychological and social-psychological dynamics than most (he was trained as a clinical psychologist as well as a sociologist), had thin microfoundations. To me, this shows that Touraine’s approach, despite a central logical place for identity, still operated at a macrosocial level that discouraged serious examination of microsocial mechanisms–much like the process school which was its main rival.59

Tilly and Touraine shared a strong sense of economic and political context, but also a number of corresponding blindnesses. They did not take participants’ stated goals seriously, preferring to read the goals of action from the context. They both had a place for culture in their work, but a limited, well-defined place. By not attending to goals they could ignore potential psychological and social-psychological mechanisms. Tilly and Touraine both took some steps toward a strategic and rhetorical vision, but their fondness for big structures prevented them from developing the micro-foundations that would fulfill that vision.

It is obviously possible to build structural models that ignore the microfoundations of political action, but they are precarious. Macro-level models must be compatible with motivations and other micro-level phenomena. If the microfoundations are not explicit they cannot be tested, and the macro models will be puzzled or surprised from time to time. Often, micro assumptions are smuggled into the models that practitioners would deny if they were made explicit. It seems preferable to start with micro-foundations, as it is always possible to build up to the macro level. But if you start at the macro level, and try to build down, you are only deducing assumptions from your own starting point. But the most prominent micro-level approach does not really do the job either.
The Wrong Microfoundations
The year after Tilly published his book on the Vendée that would begin to define the process perspective, Mancur Olson (1932-1998) published a small book called The Logic of Collective Action that applied microeconomic assumptions to collective action. Rational actors would participate only if they personally gained something that they would not have if they did not participate. The big step was that Olson, like Tilly and Touraine, assumed that participants were rational. But rational in a specific way, focused on material losses and gains for themselves as individuals. In the absence of these “selective incentives,” individuals would choose to free ride, refusing to participate but enjoying any collective benefits attained. Only in small groups, where members can monitor each other and shame each other into contributing, will people participate.

Olson famously recognized moral and emotional factors, only to exclude them from his model on the grounds that “it is not possible to get empirical proof of the motivation behind any person’s action.”60 Of course it is just as impossible to get proof that one is motivated by self-interest. And neuroscientists are indeed mapping the parts of the brain activated in different actions. Olson further muddied the waters by insisting, without evidence (but sounding much like Tilly), that “most organized pressure groups are explicitly working for gains for themselves, not gains for other groups.” Finally, in the same notorious footnote, he admitted that affective groups – his examples are families and friendships – are probably best studied with other models than his. To the extent a protest group has affective ties, his model is inadequate.

In the generation since Olson wrote, there has been a wave of theory and research into the rationality of protestors, reflecting the expansion of rational-choice and game theory, especially in political science. Much of it has developed “solutions” to Olson’s free rider problem. Mark Lichbach offers more than two dozen of them, which amount to nothing less than a how-to guide for activists. Under “the social origins of social contracts,” for example, he discusses the value of patience and a long time horizon (a low discount rate, in economists’ terms); the tradeoffs between homogeneity and heterogeneity in a group (what I call the Extension Dilemma); preexisting social ties and formal organizations; the creation of these when they are missing; and the benefits of autonomy, stability, and concentration of the dissenting group. All the items in Lichbach’s catalogue are mechanisms that mobilization, process, and culture theorists have described, a literature that he draws on admiringly. Most insights can be made compatible with rational-choice language, but it is less obvious what independent insights this paradigm has generated.

The mathematically inspired language of problems and solutions seems to imply that creating successful insurgency is straightforward if only one follows the right algorithms. There are (at least) two problems with this hope: every choice has both positive and negative consequences, and your opponents and other players know the same rules you are following. They try to thwart you at every step, so that you must deal with an entirely new level of “problems,” a kind of moving target. Lichbach acknowledges this in using the language of dilemmas, although this proves to be for purposes of catchy titles more than a way to get at the tradeoffs of decisionmaking.

For a long time, calculating rationality and self-interest remained assumptions rather than testable hypotheses –the main reason that most sociologists dismissed this approach out of hand.61 But in the 1970s cognitive psychologists began to examine experimentally how people actually make simple decisions, elaborating some of the promise of Herbert Simon’s concept of bounded rationality.62 People use a range of “heuristics” to remember and calculate: with anchoring heuristics they tend to remember the first piece of information they receive in a situation; with availability heuristics they place too much weight on examples they can remember easily, perhaps because they are dramatic, famous, or especially typical in some way.63 They make a number of mistaken inferences about probability. Even when they wish to make a series of moves in a random order (a common “solution” in many games), they have a hard time doing so.64 Game players do not remember very many past moves, and rarely anticipate more than one or two moves into the future. Apparently they are more guided by their own culture and psychology than by the mathematical foresight needed to make optimal choices.65 This lack of anticipation casts doubt on the essence of game theory, the avoidance of “dominated” moves that will eventually, many steps down the road, lead to unfavorable outcomes.

Over time many economists embraced cognitive research, so that this branch of psychology began to be called “behavioral game theory” and eventually, in a bit of disciplinary imperialism, simply “behavioral economics.” In this field, economists use games, not as a theory, but as a method to force people to reveal preferences about their morals and emotions. It turns out that most people look rather like the normative folks that sociologists had long insisted upon as a way of distinguishing themselves from economists. Experimental subjects are willing to pay a significant amount to enforce norms of fairness, for instance, and to take revenge on those who violate them.66 They tend to try to “share” rewards in a way that is irrational from a strictly self-interested perspective. Fairness, because it can be captured to some extent by monetary distributions, has been tested in game models, although there remain numerous other norms, traditions, and emotions that shape strategic action. If nothing else, many players value cooperation for its own sake, rather like enjoying the game itself.67 This blurring of means and ends is hard to model mathematically.

Findings like these have broad implications for political action. In the last two decades, game theory has become almost synonymous with strategy in social science, the main holdouts being a few pockets of business or military theory. Traditional game theorists – mostly mathematicians – made a series of decisions that attained rigor and universalism at the expense of realism, producing a vast edifice of equations of little interest to most social scientists. Behavioral economists have uncovered a human actor of considerable complexity, rendering the equations of game theory more applicable to lizards than to humans (that is, in settings with a large population of relatively unthinking players engaged in thousands or millions of interactions).68 For humans, we need models that come to grips with emotions, morals, and other components of culture and psychology.

The influence of culture is only starting to be addressed. The ends, the means, and even the mistakes made in political action are thoroughly shaped by human interpretations of the world. These meanings provide the raw materials for any calculation of costs and benefits, advantages and disadvantages, and risks. Jail time and other forms of repression are, from Olson’s perspective, pure costs, but they contain many elements of benefit as well. For many, it is a badge of honor to have been imprisoned, increasing not only their reputations but their own deontological pride and honor. Martyrs are difficult to understand through rationalist lenses, since they typically weigh group benefits so heavily. The sources of preferences, long dismissed by rationalists as exogenous to their models, also take us into the realm of culture. Rationalists have tried to incorporate this role of culture and psychology in constituting costs and benefits, but only by turning rational choice into the platitudinous endeavor that Olson feared.69

Culture does more than help to define costs and benefits. It tells players how much information should be collected to make a decision, a choice that cannot be made on purely logical grounds. It allows players to satisfice rather than maximize, partly by providing reference groups for players to decide what is satisfactory. It helps to shape the many decisionmaking heuristics and biases that cognitive psychologists and economists have described. Culture, and especially emotions, tell us what to do in situations of extreme uncertainty, where no single rational option could be derived but a decision must be made anyway. Finally, without culture we would have difficulty ranking different preferences, especially when we have noncomparable preferences such as the overriding moral goals that Charles Taylor calls “hypergoods.”

Even methodologically, the real “work” of game theorists is often in their interpretation of situations, not in the mathematics that follows. In game theory, seeing an interaction as a familiar game is the creative moment, often requiring an interpretive leap (especially about a player’s goals). Culture is there from the bottom up, and always has been, even in game theorists’ own methods.

Morality is a salient part of culture that behavioral economics has only begun to probe. Culture influences how individuals try to balance their own personal interests with those of broader groups. Individuals are willing to give up monetary gains in order to punish players they believe are acting unfairly. When they view the other player’s unfair action as out of her control, they are less likely to punish her for it. Radical economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have studied cross-cultural differences in reciprocity, finding that roughly half the variation they observed was due to the relative development of markets and cooperation in the division of labor. People learn fairness in their cultures.70

Experimental evidence has severe limits. Lab experiments can get at people’s sense of fairness in interpersonal exchanges more easily than their outrage over the injustices in a complex political system. Outside the laboratory, in addition, an action can be a move in several simultaneous games, and any player has a mix of noncomparable goals. Too, virtually all experiments have been with individuals, so that the vast area of how teams and other “complex players” arrive at decisions and actions remains to be studied. (Creating teams in lab settings, as in Touraine’s interventions, has the artificiality I discussed earlier, but the problem is much worse when subjects are chosen randomly.) In other words, behavioral economics is adding a few new microfoundations, but we need far more, drawn from sociological traditions. And we still need to work from these useful mechanisms up to institutions and groups.

Despite occasional universal pretensions, economists remain concerned with the choices people are likely to face in markets, in dealing with goals and outcomes expressible in monetary terms. Sociologists and political scientists need to push further, to incorporate a range of motivations that are salient in other institutional settings. Dignity, honor, and fame; orgasms and other peak experiences; curiosity, truth, and voyeurism; love, solidarity, and spirituality; fears, anxieties, and utopian longings; sadism, revenge, and contempt–all are urges and goals accompanied by strong emotions that elude monetary valuation but motivate much protest and politics. We’ll never understand strategy until we appreciate the full range of goals that motivate it outside the laboratory. Only a cultural approach to strategy can provide this.
New Voices
Inevitably, the intellectual pendulum has swung away from the great structural and historical paradigms and back toward creativity and agency, culture and meaning, emotion and morality – the great realm which Tilly rejected as phenomenology. Action as opposed to structure. Small things as opposed to big.71 Yet a pendulum does not swing back to quite the same place each time. Instead of a return to the high phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the trend today is to place meaning and intention firmly in social contexts, in the institutional arenas and social networks and forms of interaction that the structuralists thought important. Social theorists such as Touraine, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jürgen Habermas pursued such syntheses – with greater or less success – in the 1970s and 1980s, and a decade later the ripple effects began to appear in the study of social movements.

Cultural theories were the first, often confused, effort to break with the organizational and structural paradigm (as we’ll see in more detail in chapter 3). As early as 1986 David Snow, Robert Benford, and their collaborators offered framing processes as a way to see meanings in action, as orators tried to persuade their audiences of their diagnoses. Collective identities were the next big cultural concept, fruitfully theorized in the 1990s, especially by scholar-activists for gay and lesbian rights, whose fissiparous debates helped define the LGBTQ family of protest movements. At the turn of the millennium narrative became the popular concept, often as a reassertion of the structured, constraining nature of cultural meanings. Although my own version of culture theory included emotions – I defined culture as cognition, emotion, and morality – most versions did not.

Renewed appreciation of Pragmatist philosophy and the Chicago School of sociology have offered a theoretical heritage for parallel efforts to understand action, meaning, and emotion. In a magisterial effort, Daniel Cefaï unearthed the Chicago heritage of Robert Park and his intellectual descendents, sifing through diverse literatures from rumors and fads to Enrico Quarantelli’s pathbreaking work on natural disasters to investigations of the riots of the 1960s.72 He shows the power of Park’s idea of publics, as opposed to the more easily dismissed crowds and masses. He also traces a Chicago tradition through researchers like Orrin Klapp and Joseph Gusfield, a constructionist point of view that was down but never out during the structural era. Rejecting the idea that crowds are irrational, Cefaï shows that plenty of “collective behavior” nonetheless occurs in and around social movements. He combines the Chicago legacy with the process and programmed-society approaches, and throws in the latter-day Chicago work of Erving Goffman. In Tilly and Touraine, he finds an inadequate understanding of meaning, a gap he fills with concepts aimed at grasping the practical creation of meaning: discourses, codes, moral boundaries, collective identities, emotions, rituals, and so on, including a plea for greater attention to law.

Cefaï makes a methodological point, as well. In contrast to Tilly’s statistics and Touraine’s interventions, he presents ethnography as the surest way to understand the situations in which humans work and rework their understandings of the world around them. We need to build up beyond the face-to-face situations that preoccupied Goffman, but our starting point must be little things, the interactions where meaning and intention begin. Cefaï’s intellectual history generates a number of useful mechanisms at the micro-level, as well as clearing the way for further elaboration of cultural, emotional, and meaningful concepts. (He is less useful on strategic thinking, which he tends to see as an aspect of the structural paradigm.)

In the United States, Mustafa Emirbayer has followed a parallel path back to Pragmatism. Calling his version “relational pragmatics,” he follows Dewey in attacking “inter-actional” versions which assume the interacting entities remain stable through the interactions. Instead, he insists, “the units involved in a transaction derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the (changing) functional roles they play within that transaction.” Promisingly, he recasts into seemingly strategic language several prominent sociological concepts, such as inequality, which “comes largely from the solutions that elite and nonelite actors improvise in the face of recurrent organizational problems….These solutions, which involve the implementation of invidious categorical distinctions, resemble ‘moves’ in a game, or perhaps even attempts to change the rules of the game.”73 Emirbayer has applied this relational approach to agency and to the emotions of collective action, finding in network analysis a promising method for examining relations without reifying the entities that are related to each other.74

Unfortunately Emirbayer’s project is much like that of the later Tilly, whom Emirbayer cites approvingly, in that goals and meaning disappear into the system of relationships. Emirbayer seems to be tormenting the corpse of homo œconomicus, with its unsocialized individuals who have full preferences before they engage others, a trope that even economists have moved beyond. Sociologists since Durkheim, about whom Emirbayer has written, have reacted to economics with their own, oversocialized caricature. We must continue to search for a balance in which fully social individuals nonetheless can move from social setting to social setting, or even create settings, with their own projects in mind. They are embroiled in relations of many kinds, but something also precipitates out of those relations that we can call individual biography and which exerts its own force. Individuals pursue a variety of goals through their interactions with others, not all of which are easily predicted from the setting itself, or the relations they have with others.

If Pragmatism represents a rather American approach, appealing to liberals in the broadest senses of the word, then Marxists and post-Marxists have turned to Soviet activity theory to accomplish many of the same goals. Rooted especially in psychology of the 1920s and 1930s, among figures like Leontyev, Luria, and Vygotsky, activity theory aims to balance individuals performing actions and the social contexts in which they perform them, with equal attention to each. There is also considerable awareness of the cultural symbols and other tools that enable this action, of people’s purposes and goals, and the ways in which we learn to do things. The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, a fellow traveler, has inspired some work on social movements, such as Marc Steinberg’s investigation of weavers’ discourses, but the full vision of activity theory remains to be applied.75 [Hurry up, John!]

These efforts have retraced some of the landscape covered by feminist theories of social movements over the last three decades. Feminist scholars, often examining the women’s movement, have investigated cultural processes, emotions, and micro-level interactions. The internal debates and fissures of the women’s movement proved especially fruitful for understanding collective identities, for instance.76 The interactions between oppressor and oppressed are especially intimate in the case of gender, in contrast to the workplace interactions of class or the relative segregation of caste and race, and so gender must be based on cultural processes such as the internalization of dominant ideas. Much of the theorizing of cultural constructionism comes from feminists, from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler, and feminism was one main source for the initial rediscovery of emotions in social movements in the mid-1990s.77 In stark contrast to Emirbayer’s “manifesto,” no one has pulled these pieces together into a coherent program or Big Theory that I can use here as representative of this tradition. The modesty of these scholars will help us borrow mechanisms in future chapters without having to clear the underbrush first.

These theoretical efforts are woven from many common threads. Reflecting broad trends in social science, they are grappling with notions of agency. Individual choice guaranteed a place for agency in game theory, but reductionist images of human goals then constrained it. Touraine also touted agency, but his broad historical vision never quite located it in actual human beings–although his new formulations come closer. Finally, agency is a promising way to guarantee the dynamism that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly claim to seek, but to which their residual structuralism blinded them.

Serious efforts to grapple with agency must remain close to agents’ lived experience. Can it be an accident that the main practitioners of each of the big paradigms were men? The style that connects them is a rather gruff abstraction from lived reality, into a world of model, exemplar, or method. This is the intellectual equivalent of fantasy literature or computer games–an escape from social reality that I have elsewhere argued is characteristic of men more often than of women.78 Richard Flacks and others have linked this concern for the actors’ point of view with sympathy for their activism, but I think we can have this as a methodological precept whatever our sympathies. (We do not necessarily help activists if we become cheerleaders rather than analysts–a common tendency quite common today. I am not against scholars’ having active political lives, just against their confounding their politics and analysis.)79



Meaning must remain front and center, and a great wave of cultural research (examined in chapter 3 instead of here) guarantees it will. Inattention to culture is one reason that game theory, even in its revamped form, is no more than suggestive of the new path. Not all meanings can be expressed in monetary value. Yet those meanings must be the ones actually held by players, not the “meaning” scholars attribute to history or society. We have a variety of tools and metaphors for tracing meanings in politics: narrative, discourse, text, place, icon, characters, rhetoric, and so on. These are distinct mechanisms that carry meaning, they should not be reified into separate, incompatible theories.

As part of this effort to incorporate a full range of meanings, we must add emotions and moral visions to the cognitive apparatus that all frameworks have tried to adopt. So far, the rediscovery of emotions has been an independent track imperfectly incorporated into the other approaches. Behavioral economics attends to emotions, but too narrow a range and with little independent measurement of emotions. The two macrosocial traditions have yet to embrace anything so close to the ground.80 Through emotions we might also get at the role of bodies in human action, an important part of lived experience. “This corporeal aspect of human agency,” as Bryan Turner insists, “is not in some sense beyond, alongside or outside the social.”81



Interactions among different players must also be central. To call this emphasis “relational,” I argued, actually takes the choice and dynamism out of it, as “relations,” such as differences in power, are based on a static, structural metaphor. Interactions are not fully determined by existing relations, as the point of many interactions is to challenge or reinforce prior relations. Clever strategy can often compensate for lack of resources. Interactions are central to game theory, where they have been simplified enormously. Too often, other strategic players have been reduced to “the environment” for social movements, as in process theory. But to grasp their interactions we must comprehend the perspectives, goals, claims and actions of all the players in an arena.82

Recent theories of “globalization” have forced social-movement theorists to rethink their obsession with the nation state and to recognize the importance of different arenas. Some mobilization efforts are cross-national. Within a nation, too, there are many possible relationships between local, regional, and national protest groups. Global controversies have expanded our images of organizations and networks. At the level of theory, one of the great gifts of globalization debates has been a recognition of just how much sociologists have reified “society” with its corresponding “culture” and “state.” If there is such a thing as a state, it consists of a number of strategic players constantly jostling with one another across different boundaries. As political scientists Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach complain, “For several hundred years theorists and practitioners of global politics have been accustomed to regarding the sovereign state as the object of humanity’s highest loyalties, the primary locus of political authority, and the source of important public values.” This was a strongly normative commitment, to the Westphalian system which since 1648 has given priority to the territorial sovereignty of European nation states. Scholarship under this paradigm, traceable most famously to Thomas Hobbes, “masked the fact that human beings have always lived in a variety of political communities, with varying degrees of autonomy, and had multiple identities and loyalties.”83 Once we begin to question states as unified entities, it is hard to stop similar ontological skepticism until we get down to individuals and their interactions. We can no longer simply pit “movement” against “state.” Paradoxically, we cannot understand the special nature of the global without understanding the microfoundations that make up global, national, and local politics.84

Conclusions
It is hard to understand Tilly without knowledge of the grievance tradition he and others were shattering; much of their work was devoted to showing that people who were connected in networks and through organizations were more – not less –likely to protest. Similarly, Touraine is explicable through his reaction against a Communist left still hoping to seize the state. Their respective paradigms are built on the foundations of what had come before, because paradigms are largely centered around moral intuitions and root metaphors. Because Olson’s purports to be a theory of small things, it has somewhat less of this problem, but the excitement of rational choice theory in the 1970s and 1980s borrowed from the Friedmanite “free-market” revolution that sought to explode encrusted institutions and ways of thinking.85 It is hard for us today to grasp these intellectual contexts.

Some day, perhaps, the structural paradigms of a generation ago may come to be seen as a useful parenthesis, reminding us that the means of action matter as much as the goals. We’ll have to cling to this insight, keeping it in the background even as we return to the question that most people care about: what do people want? Goals are as central to strategic approaches as are tactics, despite the common misconception that strategy is instrumental while goals reflect culture and emotions. As scholars return to issues of motivation and the ends of action, to people’s points of view, we can give better answers than the irrationalists of the distant past or the rationalists of the recent past. To reverse Foucault’s notorious snide remark about “man,” structuralism is an invention of recent date, and one perhaps nearing its end.86

Does the end of the ambitious paradigms mean we should give up on theory?87 Should we devote ourselves to the empirical tasks of normal science? Should we allow the field of social movements to fragment into subspecialties, so that specialists in the women’s movement, or in globalization, networks of recruitment, or emotions no longer need to carry on a conversation? Is there no reason for students of mobilization in Australia to learn from those who write about Nigeria? This fragmentation is well underway, alas, but one way to reverse it is through theoretical debate and synthesis. Struggle between several distinct paradigms is a fruitful situation for academic disciplines, as Randall Collins has shown.88 If we ignore theory in social movement research, we will make more conceptual mistakes. But the way to do theory today may be to avoid big theories to concentrate on small ones. A strategic and rhetorical approach may help us get the little things right.

Challenges


How can we adopt robust structural concepts while giving them a cultural, strategic, and micro-level reinterpretation?

How can we rethink resources? Physical resources are the capacity to accomplish something, but how are the decisions taken to deploy them? Who makes those decisions, based on what understandings and emotions, and with what room for defection from their own team? With repressive resources such as tear gas or tanks, when do those controlling them display them publicly as a threat, and when do they actually go beyond the threat and put them into action? Can we discern stages as they move from capacity to threat and from threat to deployment? What messages are the resources used to convey, what emotions are they meant to arouse? When is the threat successful?

How can we rethink the mobilization of resources? How, in addition to well-studied framing processes, do SMO leaders appeal to audiences for money and time? How do leaders themselves embody messages and hopes to insiders and outsiders? How do they distinguish different audiences, and craft different messages for each? How do they inspire love, trust, admiration, and confidence? What deals do leaders and brokers make so that entire blocs of recruits join a movement?

Biographical availability for recruitment, based on the lack of demands from a job, spouse, or children, is a venerable structural notion that could be rethought as a set of cultural processes. Rather than an either-or variable – one has these other demands or one lacks them – we need to see the demands as raising the costs or channels of participation. But all costs and benefits operate through the cultural and psychological filters of decisionmakers, who then make different decisions. We need to understand why. Some potential protestors stay home because they have young children; others incorporate the children into their protest, often as symbols of the family (as in the American anti-abortion movement).89

How can we refigure political opportunities? What are the cultural and emotional processes by which protestors imagine opportunities? Who packages them? What information and events in their environments are useful in this packaging? What rhetorical work helps people imagine they are part of a collective entity that might take advantage of these opportunities? Can we reimagine the external constraints on protestors so that we see the players, the decisionmakers behind them rather than viewing them as firm structures?


TABLE 1: FOUR BIG PARADIGMS, 1965-2005


Level of Focus

Primary Image of Human Action




Materialist

Culturalist

Macrosocial

Mobilization or Process:

Tilly, Oberschall, McCarthy, Zald, Perrow, McAdam, Tarrow



Programmed Society:

Touraine, Melucci, Castells



Microsocial

Rational-Choice or Game Theory: Olson, Hechter, Coleman, Lichbach

New Approaches

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