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1 I hadn’t intended The Art of Moral Protest to challenge political process theories as thoroughly as it did. But Doug McAdam, reviewing the manuscript for the press in 1995 and again in 1996, pushed me at many points to relate my cultural mechanisms to process theory. He expected a nice synthesis, confident that process theory could incorporate any and all new factors. Instead he helped me realize that process theory was always going to have a structural slant, that there was a way in which I inhabited an interpretive world that McAdam did not, and that process theory was a distinct paradigm with which I disagreed rather than the empirical synthesis McAdam imagined. My discussion there focused on McAdam and Tarrow’s work, which is one reason I look more at Tilly here, and why I devote some attention to Tilly’s main period rather than just his recent work.

2 In The Art of Moral Protest I distinguished citizenship movements composed of those demanding citizenship rights from post-citizenship movements of those who already have basic political rights, arguing that process theory was developed to explain the former and was poorly suited to the latter.

3 Herbert Kitschelt, “Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest,” British Journal of Political Science 16 (1986):57-95, Hans Peter Kriesi, “The Political Opportunity Structure of New Social Movements,” in J. Craig Jenkins and Bert Klandermans, eds., The Politics of Social Protest (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), and others strengthened the concept of political opportunity by restricting it to structural characteristics of states–variables seen more clearly in the comparative light of Western Europe than in the United States. Although they seem to have taken a step into Touraine’s territory by examining “new social movements,” they in fact applied a more purely structural theory, with solid results. Movements use the institutional machinery that is available to them. As Ruud Koopmans has pointed out (“Political. Opportunity. Structure. Some Splitting to Balance the Lumping,” in Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, eds., Rethinking Social Movements (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), such a state-oriented approach works best with political movements most interested in making policy demands of the state, and less well with more cultural movements. (Although I suspect that most movements make policy demands and try to affect meanings at the same time. At any rate I try to avoid broad typologies in favor of the micro-components of which all are composed, albeit in different combinations.)

4 Popular Contention in Great Britain 1758-1834 (Harvard University Press, 1995), 53. Thirty years earlier, Tilly had found much the same thing in the Vendée region of western France: “The very act of contending for the prizes [where new administrative offices would be placed] committed the contestants to the revolutionary reorganization, gave them practice in a new variety of politics, and made them aware of the connection between the decisions of the national legislature and their own welfare.” The Vendée (Harvard University Press, 1964/1976), 172.

5 According to Tilly the social movement was a synthesis of three elements: (1) “a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target authorities,” which (2) used a characteristic repertory of associations, meetings, marches, and rallies, petitions and pamphlets, and (3) tried to display the worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment of participants and/or their constituencies. Social Movements, 1768-2004 (Paradigm Publishers, 2004), 3-4. In Great Britain (p. 369) he adds that social movements are of disadvantaged groups, although one of his recurrent examples in that book is the anti-Catholic mobilization that arose in reaction to efforts at Catholic emancipation.

6 In his research on Britain, Tilly later found that unemployment helped explain mobilization, especially when combined with price increases. Great Britain, 292.

7 Despite his frequent vilification of mental processes and dispositions as explanatory factors (his usual strategy was to pretend that scholars who use these factors use no other factors, even though almost all recent cultural approaches try to place meanings in their social contexts), Tilly admitted, “I try hard to avoid descriptions and explanations that contradict what scientists are learning about how the human nervous system generates recognition of right and wrong behavior.” Credit and Blame (Princeton University Press, 2008), 30.

8 Tilly emphasized that repertories are historically specific, not universal, a point which seems obvious today, perhaps because of Tilly’s influence.

9 Pierre Bourdieu, Le Sens Pratique (Editions de Minuit, 1980). For a cogent critique see Stephen Turner, The Social Theory of Practices (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison complained of Tilly’s inattention to mental processes of any sort in Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (Penn State University Press, 1991).

10 Tilly once joked that I was using him as “a stalking horse for Michael Hechter,” a rational-choice sociologist. But without attention to goals and motivation, something like concern for one’s “objective interests” is the obvious way to make sense of his models. Tilly’s own student, James Rule, criticized the implications of rationality in Tilly’s work in “Rationality and Non-rationality in Militant Collective Action,” Sociological Theory 7 (1989):145-160.

11 Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France 1830-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 1974), 28.

12 Great Britain, 160.

13 Ibid, 49.

14 Credit and Blame.

15 The Vendée, x.

16 Regimes and Repertoires (University of Chicago Press, 2006), viii, ix, and 58.

17 Perhaps he thought it sufficient to renounce teleology, of which he would no doubt accuse most Marxists and, probably, Touraine.

18 Great Britain, 37.

19 Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2. Jeff Goodwin and I began working out our critique of process theory in the form of a review essay on this book, which seemed to boast that nothing interesting was left to discover in the field of social movements. That small essay developed into “Caught in a Winding, Snarling Vine,” Sociological Forum 14 (1999):27-54, reprinted with responses, our rejoinder, and other commentary in Goodwin and Jasper, Rethinking Social Movements (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Our essay dealt primarily with process theory as laid out in that volume, and in work by McAdam and Tarrow. It did not criticize Tilly’s work, and the several cites to Tilly it contains are approving.

20 Tilly wrote extensively about methods and the logic of explanation, not about theory, as though if only we could get the data right we would have the answers: As Sociology Meets History (Academic Press, 1981); Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (Russell Sage Foundation, 1984); Why? (Princeton University Press, 2006); Explaining Social Processes (Paradigm Publishers, 2008). By the late 1990s, Tilly may have begun to lose faith in the statistical methods to which he had devoted thirty years. In Great Britain (p. 73) he gives only simple descriptive statistics, mentioning that he is doing more sophisticated causal analysis that will be published separately. It never was.

21 David Meyer defends political process as a paradigm in “Tending the Vineyard: Cultivating Political Process Research,” in Goodwin and Jasper, Rethinking. Tilly himself was generally cautious about generalizing beyond his cases, but others like McAdam were less so. When I suggested in The Art of Moral Protest that the model worked well for citizenship movements, but not post-citizenship movements, I was being generous. The farther in time and space from France and Britain, the less well it works. Ho-fung Hung, for instance, finds the opposite pattern in China, which he claims moved from mostly proactive and peaceful repertories to more reactive and violent forms: “Early Modernities and Contentious Politics in Mid-Qing China, c. 1740-1839,” International Sociology 19 (2004):478-503.

22 The critiques include Piven and Cloward, 1992; Gamson and Meyer, 1996; jasper, 1997; Goodwin and Jasper, 1999/2003; and Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta, 2000. For replies, see Goodwin and Jasper, Rethinking Social Movements (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

23 Jeff Goodwin, “Are Protestors Opportunistic?,” paper presented at the ASA annual meeting, Washington, D.C., 2000.

24 McAdam, Comparative Perspectives, 27.

25 Michael Young and I then went back to review the empirical evidence, cited in major theoretical summaries, for several of the process paradigm’s main claims: that social networks are necessary for recruitment of new members; that individual mental traits do not matter; and that political opportunities are necessary for movement emergence. We found the evidence distorted and the claims exaggerated in a number of ways–exactly the rhetorical tricks and cognitive biases that advocates (unintentionally, I presume) use to inflate their favorite paradigms. Not only did the paradigm do poorly in Goodwin’s tests, but the evidence originally used to establish the general approach was weaker than proponents often claimed. See James M. Jasper and Michael P. Young, “The Rhetoric of Sociological Facts,” Sociological Forum 22 (2007):270-299.

26 Tilly too picked up the “opportunity and threat” chant, as in Popular Contention in Great Britain, 204.

27 Tarrow, Power in Movement 2^nd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 85-87.

28This large project, funded partly by the Mellon Foundation, combined intellectual discussion and avid networking. I suspect the attention given to Dynamics of Contention is due to the latter more than to the book’s intellectual promise.

29Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 42. I disagree with (3), which might apply to mobilization theorists such as McCarthy and Zald, but not to the process perspective proper, which was developed with French labor history as its primary exemplar, thanks to Tilly’s research. It actually works poorly with the movements of the 1960s, with the telling exception of the U.S. civil rights movement. Opportunities matter most to movements that have few of them, that are severely repressed: what I have called citizenship movements (Jasper, 1997). They matter less to middle-class movements that can take them for granted.

30 For reviews see Colin Barker, review of Dynamics of Contention and Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, Sociology 37 (2003):605-607; Ruud Koopmans, “A Failed Revolution – but a Worthy Cause,” Mobilization 8 (2003):116-119; Pamela Oliver, “Mechanisms of Contention,” Mobilization 8 (2003):119-122; Gerald M. Platt, “Unifying Social Movement Theories,” Qualitative Sociology 27 (2004):107-116; Verta Taylor, “Plus ça Change, plus c’est la Même Chose,” Mobilization 8 (2003):122-126.

31 Koopmans, “A Failed Revolution.” Koopmans also complains about the large number of different mechanisms, but that is the nature of a mechanistic account: more conceptual tools mean more explanatory resources. He also wants more of an account about how they fit together, and how we predict which mechanisms will be relevant in what circumstances. He wants a general theory – an overly simplistic approach that mechanisms were designed to remedy. The world is not parsimonious.

32 Arthur L. Stinchcombe, “The Conditions of Fruitfulness of Theorizing about Mechanisms in Social Science,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21(1991):367-388. In Dissecting the Social (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Peter Hedström comments, “Mechanisms can be said to consist of entities (with their properties) and the activities these entities engage in, either by themselves or in concert with other entities” (p. 25). See also Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, eds., Social Mechanisms (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

33 Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

34 David Waldner, “Transforming Inferences into Explanations,” in Richard Ned Lebow and Mark Irving Lichbach, eds., Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), 146.

35 Platt, “Unifying.”

36 Roberto M. Fernandez and Roger V. Gould give a useful typology in “A Dilemma of State Power,” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994):1455-1491.

37 Koopmans, “A Failed Revolution.”

38 Robert K. Merton includes rituals, the division of labor, hierarchic ordering of values, and role-segregation as “social mechanisms” through which functions are fulfilled: Social Theory and Social Structure (Free Press, 1957), p. 52 for instance. I suspect this old interpretation is why Hedström and Swedberg did not include Tilly’s conference paper in the resulting volume, Social Mechanisms.

39 Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 79.

40 P. 97.

41 They are quoting John Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials: Breaking and Making an African Nationalist,” in Peter Coss, ed., The Moral World of the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197.

42 Page 26.

43 Tilly even admits, “Strictly speaking, we observe transactions, not relations….From a series of transactions we infer a relation between the sites.” Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties (Paradigm, 2005), 7. Should our basic building blocks really be based on inferences rather than observables, when the latter are available? This contradicts the mechanisms approach as I understand it.

44 Francesca Polletta examines this internal strategic work, in which most of the audiences are internal to protest groups, in Freedom Is an Endless Meeting (University of Chicago Press, 2002). This rich study shows groups struggling with a number of strategic dilemmas, especially what I call the Band of Brothers Dilemma, the Pyramid Dilemma, and the Janus Dilemma, but without the notion of dilemmas. We’ll return to this book later.

45 Credit and Blame, 125.

46 L’Evolution du Travail Ouvrier aux Usines Renault (CNRS, 1955); Université et Société (Seuil, 1972). For Touraine’s social theory see, for example, Sociologie de l’Action (Seuil, 1965), La Société Post-Industrielle (Denoël, 1969), and Production de la Société (Seuil, 1973).

47 For instance see Alain Touraine, Michel Wieviorka, and François Dubet, Le Mouvement Ouvrier (Arthème Fayard, 1984). They see historical studies of labor as too empirical and “synthetic” to capture the “highest meaning” of the worker’s movement, which only a grand theory can isolate.

48 Alain Touraine, Michel Wieviorka, and Jan Strzelecki, Solidarity: Poland 1980-81 (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2.

49 “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” a 1983 interview translated and reprinted in Aesthetic, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion (The New Press, 1998), 434-435.

50 Touraine, “An Introduction to the Study of Social Movements,” Social Research 52 (1985), 768-9.

51 Luke Martell and Neil Stammers, “The Study of Solidarity and the Social Theory of Alain Touraine,” in Jon Clark and Marco Diani, eds., Alain Touraine (Falmer, 1996), 142.

52 Touraine, Pourrons-Nous Vivre Ensemble? (Fayard, 1997). To be fair, Touraine never took the failure of a movement as evidence that social change was impossible, even in his book on Solidarity which appeared right after the 1981 military crackdown in Poland.

53 Touraine, “A Reply.” European Journal of Social Theory 1 (1998):207.

54 Touraine, “Can We Live Together, Equal and Different?” European Journal of Social Theory 1 (1998):178.

55 Nelson A. Picardo reviews the English-language literature in “New Social Movements: A Critical Review,” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997):411-430.

56 Even in a form more appropriate to the American context, the term “new social movements” downplays both the cultural components of old social movements and the strategic elements of the new. Jean Cohen unfortunately exaggerated this very contrast in her comparison of Tillyian and Tourainian theory in “Strategy or Identity,” Social Research 52 (1985):663-716. One symptom of the problem is that the women’s and gay rights movements were typically included as new social movements, alongside the peace, antinuclear, and ecology movements. But only straight men would so easily see these movements as primarily cultural, aiming to change meanings and symbols, in contrast to class-based or race-based efforts. Women, gays, lesbians, trans- and bisexuals are pursuing their basic rights, denied them because of ignorant prejudice, often encoded in law. They are citizenship movements fighting inequality, even if they use symbols and the media in smart ways. A few years before his death, Melucci admitted to me that he was frustrated with the ways the concept of new social movements had been translated into American sociology.

57 Thus Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R. Gusfield edited a volume on culture mistitled New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity (Temple University Press, 1994).

58 “The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements,” Social Research 52 (1985):792.

59 I had not read Melucci’s Challenging Codes (Cambridge University Press, 1996) when I wrote The Art of Moral Protest, but like my own book it summarized much of what we knew about cultural dimensions and pointed in some future directions. He touches on emotions, on individuals, leaders, and strategy, but these all get subordinated to collective identity, the master trope. Castells?

60 Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Harvard University Press, 1965), 61.

61 Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro complain of the thin empirical evidence in Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (Yale University Press, 1994).

62 This work is well represented by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment under Uncertainty (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

63 Tversky and Kahneman, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability,” Cognitive Psychology 4 (1973):207-232; Amnon Rapoport and David V. Budescu, “Randomization in Individual Choice Behavior,” Psychological Review 104 (1997):603-617.

64 James N. Brown and Robert W. Rosenthal, “Testing the Minimax Hypothesis: A Re-examination of O’Neill’s Game Experiment,” Econometrica 38 (1990):1065-1081; Rapoport and Budescu, 1997.

65 Martin Sefton and Abdullah Yavaş, “Abreu-Matsushima Mechanisms: Experimental Evidence,” Games and Economic Behavior 16 (1996):280-302.

66 Werner Güth, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze, “An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3 (1982):367-388; Matthew Rabin, “Incorporating Fairness into Game Theory and Economics,” American Economic Review 83 (1993):1281-1302.

67 Robyn Dawes and Richard Thaler, “Anomalies: Cooperation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 2 (1988):187-197; Elinor Ostrom, James Walker, and Roy Gardner, “Covenants with and without a Sword: Self-Governance is Possible,” American Political Science Review 86 (1992):404-417.

68 Herbert Gintis makes the case for game theory in evolutionary models in Game Theory Evolving (Princeton University Press, 2000). In evolutionary biology it is useful to assign a goal to “players,” especially the number of offspring in each generation that is of interest to both researcher and (by extrapolation) subject. In contrast, it is impossible to assign any simple goal to human players and retain much realism.

69 Dennis Chong, Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Rational Lives Chicago, 2000).

70 Heirich et al., 2001; Heirich et al., 2004.

71 Jeff Goldfarb, The Politics of Small Things (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

72 Daniel Cefaï, Pourqoui se Mobilise-t-on? Les Théories de l’Action Collective (La Découverte, 2007). Cefaï’s criticism of McTeam is similar to mine, that they have “lost the sensitivity of ethnography or the archive, moving too quickly to accumulate findings and proliferate hypotheses, instead of wallowing in the evidence and letting ideas emerge at their own pace” (708).

73 Mustafa Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 103 (1997), 287, 292.

74 Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, “Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency,” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994):1411-1454; Emirbayer and Ann Mische, “What Is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103 (1998):962-1023; Emirbayer and Chad Alan Goldberg, “Pragmatism, Bourdieu, and Collective Emotions in Contentious Politics,” Theory and Society (2005) 34: 469-518.

75 Marc W. Steinberg, Fighting Words (Cornell University Press, 1999).

76 See Nicholson, 1990; Taylor and Whitier, 1992; Whittier, 1995. As collective identities fragmented in the GLBT community in turn, it too became a laboratory for theories of identity and culture in movements, such as Gamson, 1995 and 1997, and Bernstein, 1997.

77 One of Arlie Hochschild’s first articles on emotions was about anger in the women’s movement: . Also Sherryl Kleinman, Opposing Ambitions (University of Chicago Press, 1996), Julian McAllister Groves, and Verta Taylor all drew on feminism in examining the emotions of protest. TK. Philosophical works of feminism clearly showed how individuals are embroiled in webs of connections, as in Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (Routledge, 1992), although the same works often dissolve the self again in that web, a risk of postmodernism to which we return in chapters 7 and 8.

78 Jasper, Restless Nation: Starting over in America (University of Chicago Press, 2000):chap. 8.

79 Flacks, Bevington and Dixon.

80 For Ron Aminzade and Doug McAdam, and the process tradition generally, emotions are a mysterious silence: “Emotions and Contentious Politics,” in Aminzade et al., eds., Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

81 Bryan Turner, Regulating Bodies (Routledge, 1992), 36.

82 For instance, see my Nuclear Politics (Princeton University Press, 1990), a work that Hanspeter Kriesi sees as a work in the political-opportunity tradition. [cite]

83 Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach, Remapping Global Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 3.

84 Val Moghadam provides a useful summary in ??.

85 Olson’s other big book, The Rise and Decline of Nations (Yale University Press, 1982), attacked just this kind of institutional encrustation as a constraint on economic growth.

86 Given his own work on abrupt shifts in paradigms, Foucault should have known better. I considered adding a section on Foucault to this chapter, given his influence on how we think about power and resistance to it. Toward the end of his life I think he was groping toward a strategic vision, without quite being able to admit the human subjects such a view would entail. He remained a structuralist of a sort, despite his supposed “post-structuralism.” He was only three years older than Tilly, and their careers have some interesting parallels. They both used history for analytic purposes without being historians; they both were structuralists in that they defined themselves in contrast to phenomenology; and they eventually came to see some cultural and strategic limits to their structural temperament without being able to break fully with it. Foucault’s parallels with Touraine (born a year after Foucault) are just as striking, including an effort to find a liberatory politics outside the French communist party.

87 Douglas Bevington and Chris Dixon seem to think so, in portraying Goodwin’s and my criticism of process theory as requiring a “notably more limited role for social movement theory” because we criticize process theory’s “pretensions to universality.” “Movement-Relevant Theory,” Social Movement Studies 4 (2005), 187. But a mechanisms approach, if anything, should expand the role of theory through a proliferation of concepts.

88 Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies (Harvard University Press, 1998).

89 Sharon Nepstad and Christian Smith show how many women participated in the movement against U.S. intervention in central America despite family obligations in “Rethinking Recruitment to High Risk/Cost Activism,” Mobilization 4 (1999):25-40. Nancy Naples shows how mothers actively incorporated family life into politics in Grassroots Warriors (Routledge, 1998).