The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (66 page)

train, in bars, at parties, and in today's world over the telephone, by fax, and by e-mail. Much of what goes on in such interactions concerns the formation of

consensus. People tend to validate information by comparing and discussing

their interpretations with significant others, especially when the information

involved is complex ± as is always the case with social and political issues. Social psychological research has shown repeatedly that people prefer to compare their

opinions with those of like-minded individuals. As a rule, the set of individuals interacting in one's social networks ± especially friendship networks ± is relatively homogeneous and composed of people not too different from oneself.

However important interpersonal interaction is for the appropriation of col-

lective beliefs, it is not the only context in which this appropriation occurs.

Collective beliefs can be incorporated and conveyed in persuasive communica-

tion or media discourse, and can be assimilated independently of interpersonal

interaction. Of course, these sources of information are also used in interper-

sonal interaction. In Talking Politics, Gamson (1992b) reports the results of a

study of conversations conducted within groups of friends and acquaintances

whom he asked to discuss such issues as the Israeli±Arab conflict and affirmative action. One of his findings was that in these exchanges people use any kind of

information source available: newspapers, movies, advertisements, novels,

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279

rumors, their own and others' experience, and so on. Gamson distinguishes three

types of sources of information: media discourse, experiential knowledge (direct, from one's own experience, or indirect, derived from other people's experience), and popular wisdom (shared knowledge of what everyone knows). It is through

any of the resources that an individual can learn about the collective action

frame of a social movement or a social movement organization and appropriate

his or her own version of the injustice, identity, and agency frame. Gamson

suggests that the integrated use of all three sources facilitates the development of such frames. Media discourse provides information especially about who is to be

blamed for the situation; the two other sources, it turns out, are crucial for the interpretation and emotional loading of that information.

The Motivation to Participate in Collective Action

Adherence to a collective action frame at best produces the potential to participate. Actual participation requires a supply of activities individuals can take part in. There is a virtually endless variety of activities individuals can take part in: signing petitions, walking on demonstrations, wearing buttons or other symbols,

taking part in meetings or site occupations, taking part in strikes or boycotts, paying money, writing letters to political elites, being an officer of a movement organization, and so on. In order to create some system in this variety several

taxonomies have been proposed: moderate, militant, violent; high versus low

costs or risks; limited versus unlimited in time, etc. I hold that each form of

participation has its own motivational dynamics depending on its specific char-

acteristics. Moreover, individual sympathizers differ in terms of the activities they find attractive. In general, I maintain that social movement participation

must involve not only attractive goals, but attractive activities as well. Therefore, it is in the movement's interest to develop a broad supply of activities that

attracts a variety of sympathizers.

The attractiveness of an activity is dependent on the selective and collective

incentives an individual believes to be associated with that activity. Selective incentives relate to costs and benefits that differentiate between participants and non-participants. You are only spending time or money if you participate, you

only run the risk of being beaten up by the police if you participate, your friends will only blame you for not participating if you stay at home, and so on.

Sometimes movement organizations try to make participation more attractive

by providing selective benefits: a popular music group, a train ticket to the city where the demonstration is held, a T-shirt, etc. Authorities or opponents on their part can try to make participation less attractive by imposing costs upon participants. Collective incentives are related to achievement of the movement's goals and the extent to which participation in a specific activity contributes to goal achievement. Obviously, it is not enough for a goal to be important to a person, what is also needed is some likelihood of success. The problem with collective

action is that it is difficult to know to what extent an activity will have any

influence on authorities. In any event, the chances are low that an activity will have any impact if only a few people participate. Therefore, the likelihood of

280

Bert Klandermans

success is dependent upon the expected behavior of others. If too few people

participate it is unlikely that the activity will make any difference. As a consequence, it has been hypothesized that expectations about the behavior of others

play an important role in the decision to participate. If someone expects that

only a few people will participate his or her motivation to participate will be low.

In a way, the expectation about other people's behavior functions as a self-

fulfilling prophecy: if people believe that only a few will participate they will not be motivated to participate, and will thus make their own expectation true.

The Transformation of Potentiality into Action

Demand ± that is, people who adhere to a collective action frame ± is not

automatically turned into actual participation. Demand and supply must be

brought together. This is in fact what most action mobilization campaigns are

about: targeting potential participants and turning them into actual participants.

Obviously, a campaign will never be 100 percent successful in that regard. In the course of a campaign people may lose their sympathy for the movement. I have

labeled this conversion; a phenomenon that is more likely if countermovements

and/or authorities are mounting countercampaigns. On the other hand, organ-

izers may fail to convert sympathizers into participants because they fail to target or to motivate them. This I have called non-conversion. As the previous section

concentrated on motivating, I now focus on targeting.

Targeting sympathizers implies finding an answer to two strategic questions:

who are the sympathizers, and how can they be reached? These are, by the way,

two questions every attempt to persuade must find an answer to. Indeed,

sophisticated movement organizations such as Greenpeace have learned to

employ many of the strategies that have been developed in advertising. Social

networks are of crucial importance in this regard. Movement organizations have

two options here: they can try to co-opt existing networks or they can build new networks. Both strategies are mobilization efforts in themselves. Co-option is the easier strategy of the two, because it builds on existing commitments to organizations and networks that are part of the movement organization's alliance

system. There are risks, however. The co-opted organization may use the cam-

paign for its own ends or the leadership may for whatever reason decide not to

collaborate. The latter makes it more difficult for the rank and file to cooperate.

Yet co-option of existing networks, such as churches, unions, political parties, youth organizations, and the like, is frequently used, if only because it implies an answer to both strategic questions at the same time. On the one hand, it works

from the assumption that most members of the organization sympathize with the

movement; on the other hand, it is assumed that these sympathizers can be

reached through the organization's networks.

Building new networks implies the recruitment of people who are willing to

spend sometimes considerable amounts of time for a prolonged period as move-

ment activists. It will, therefore, require more effort on the part of the organization than co-option of existing networks, but once established the networks are

more reliable. The recruitment of movement activists is a process which is

Why Social Movements Come into Being

281

determined, on the one hand, by factors that influence who is being asked, and,

on the other hand, by factors that influence who agrees to serve as an activist

when asked. As for the first type of factors, a crucial determinant is someone's position in networks linked to the movement organization, or more specifically

to the movement organizer who is undertaking the recruitment effort. Move-

ment organizers tend to recruit first among the people they know, and often that suffices (Marwell and Oliver, 1993; Klandermans, 1997). After all, they don't

need many. According to Marwell and Oliver (1993), long-term activism is a

typical example of an activity with a decelerating production function. You need a few to maintain the network, but once you have those few the return from

having additional activists diminishes rapidly. Indeed, Marwell and Oliver argue that long-term activism is one of the forms of activism that must cope with free rider behavior. The latter point is of importance for the decision to serve as an activist or not. I maintain that the people who are asked to serve as activists

understand perfectly well that they are giving most of the sympathizers of the

movement a free ride, but they are prepared to do so because they care. Only

people who really care a lot are prepared to sacrifice for the others. In the words of Oliver (1984), they make the effort because they feel that `Ìf [they] don't do it, nobody else will.'' I hold that only people who strongly support the movement's

ideology and who feel responsible for maintaining and proselytizing the move-

ment and its ideology are prepared to make the effort of serving as movement

activists.

Conclusion

Social movements come into being because people who are aggrieved and have

the resources to mobilize seize the political opportunities they perceive. People join social movements because it gives meaning to their lives to fight together

with people they identify with for some social or political change. All these

different aspects are important in order to understand why social movements

come into being and why people join them. Grievances, resources, and oppor-

tunities on the one side, instrumentality, identity, and meaning on the other, are pieces of a puzzle we are only beginning to solve. Each of these concepts can be conceived of as the focal variable of a theoretical framework designed to investigate that variable. Grievance theory attempts to understand the demand side of

political protest; resource mobilization theory the supply side; and opportunity theory the interaction between the resulting social movement activity and its

political environment. Similarly, theories of identity formation and meaning

construction try to understand the generation and appropriation of collective

action frames by individuals; motivation theories the instrumentality of social

movement participation; and mobilization theories how potentiality is turned

into actuality. In this chapter, however, I have taken a synthetic approach and

discussed the ways in which these theories combine in the explanation of social

movements and social movement participation.

20

Social Movement Politics and

Organization

Debra C. Minkoff

In the popular imagination, social movements are conceptualized as dynamic

and dramatic mobilizations oriented toward such objectives as challenging the

state to recognize group rights, seeking public goods to improve the (middle-

class) quality of life, or stemming the tides of progressive social change. Periodic outbursts of activism ± from black civil rights protests in the United States to student democracy movements in China and anti-immigrant campaigns in Western Europe ± lend credence to this view of social movements as spontaneous and

emotional surges of collective action. In contrast, close to three decades of

sociological research on social movements demonstrates the many ways that

movement politics are structured organizationally at the local, national, and

increasingly transnational or global levels.

The juxtaposition of spontaneity and organization has been at the heart of

academic debates about social movements at least since the initiation (and

temporary ascendance) of the resource mobilization paradigm in the 1970s. In

the intervening years, organizational perspectives on social movements have

moved in and out of favor, as the field has embraced a broader turn in the

discipline toward concerns with identity, discourse, and culture. The limitations to such cultural perspectives are evidenced by the fact that, after cumulating

fairly detailed empirical knowledge of both contemporary and historical social

movements, scholars are beginning seriously to revisit the central insight of early resource mobilization theory: that organization matters. This ``return to organization'' makes sense in the context of a central practical reality facing contemporary movement-building and activism: the institutionalization of social

movements in the politics of advanced capitalist societies.

In seeking to understand this tension between social movement spontaneity

and institutionalization, the challenge is to re-establish the importance of organizations in social movement analysis without losing what we have learned about