History of Social Movements

Benjamin E. Lind, Ph.D.

National Research University-Higher School of Economics

Module IV, 2016

http://slides.com/lind_benjamin/histsocmov2016

Course Expecations

If you would like a link to the form

http://goo.gl/forms/SOgvIC4xmk

Introductions

About the Instructor

About the Course

About the Students

A Brief History of Social Movement Theory

A Brief Introduction to Historical Data and Methods

Discursive Fields and Cultural Schemata

Required Reading

Movements and Framing

What does framing refer to?

In the social sciences, framing comprises a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies, organize, perceive, and communicate about reality.

- Wikipedia

What does this definition mean?

Frame Alignment Processes

Snow et al. (1986)

  • Frame Bridging: links unconnected ideologies
  • Frame Amplification: clarifies and enlivens ideas
  • Frame Extension: widen pool of ideas
  • Frame Transformation: shift from one set of ideas to another

Synthesizes social-psychological and structural/organizational movement explanations.

Links individual perceptions to movement organizations' interpretations

Core Framing Tasks

Snow and Benford (2000)

  • Diagnostic Framing
  • Prognostic Framing
  • Motivational Framing

Methodological Issues

  • What types of historical data contain frames?
  • Where can we find it?
  • How can we measure the types of frames discussed?

Movements and Collective Identity

Collective Identity

Conceptual Understanding (Snow 2001)

a shared sense of ‘one-ness’ or ‘we-ness’ anchored in real or imagined shared attributes and experiences among those who comprise the collectivity and in relation or contrast to one or more actual or imagined sets of ‘others.’

Collective Identity

Further Conceptual Understandings (Polletta & Jasper 2001:284)

an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connections with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. It is a perception of a shared status or relation, which may be imagined rather than experienced directly, and it is distinct from personal identities, although it may form part of a personal identity. A collective identity may have been first constructed by outsiders (for example, as in the case of ‘‘Hispanics’’ in this country), who may still enforce it, but it depends on some acceptance by those to whom it is applied. Collective identities are expressed in cultural materials – names, narratives, symbols, verbal styles, rituals, clothing, and so on – but not all cultural materials express collective identities. Collective identity does not imply the rational calculus for evaluating choices that ‘‘interest’’ does. And unlike ideology, collective identity carries with it positive feelings for other members of the group.

Collective Identity

  • Contrast with individual identity
  • An interactive process, not an attribute
  • Contested and orients conflict
  • Primordial, structural, and constructivist approaches

Collective Identity

Key Questions (Snow 2001:2216-8)

  • How is it created? Expressed? Sustained? Modified?
  • How is it aligned with individual identities?
  • How is it bounded?

Movements and Culture

Movements and Culture

As Context, Toolkit, Target, and Outcome

Movements and Culture

How do we approach culture as an object to study?

Five-Pointed "Star" (Rhys 2004)

  • As an Object
  • Producers
  • Consumers/Receivers
  • Institutional Context
    • E.g., social settings
  • Field or Environment
    • E.g., norms, values, discourses, understandings

Laboratory

Case Selection, Source Materials, Content Analysis, and Recent Advances

Case Selection

  • Bound one or more cases by time and space
  • Logic of cross-case selection strategies
    • Theoretical reasons
      • Typical, Diverse, Extreme, Deviant, Crucial test, Pathway, Most-similar, Most-different
    • Practical reasons
      • Language, Data availability, Theoretical background

General Approach

  • Conceptualization
  • Locate evidence
  • Evaluate evidence
  • Organize evidence
  • Synthesize findings
  • Narrative

After selecting a case, how do we find materials?

  • Establish general familiarity first
    • Read newspaper articles, Wikipedia entries, secondary historical sources
  • Narrow the research focus, search citations for more primary and secondary sources
    • Repeat step for secondary sources
    • Access "adjacent" primary sources, repeat
  • Record citation information
  • Scrutinize materials, then code, then write-up

Practical Tips

  • Retain as many materials as possible
  • Look widely, keep an open mind, and browse related materials
  • Over-organize
  • Leverage open source and public domain materials
    • Copyright laws
    • Proxy servers
  • Ask for help
  • Be willing to pay money for services, archival trips, etc.

Content Analysis

Content Analysis Collects Data from "Texts"

  • What could a "text" be?
  • Advantages?
    • "Dead"
    • Reliable
    • Replicable
  • Disadvantages?

Content Analysis Steps

Krippendorff (2004:83)

  • Unitizing
  • Sampling
  • Recording/Coding
  • Reduce Data
  • Infer Context
  • Narration

Recent Advances

Thank you, computer scientists!

Exploratory Application

Let's find some data related to an historical social movement.

Name an historical social movement.

E.g., Knights of Labor

Exploratory Application

Look for representative information. Evaluate primary and secondary sources. Convenient places to start:

E.g., Knights of Labor. 1878. Record of proceedings of the General Assembly of the Knights of Labor. Reading, Pa: The Assembly.

Exploratory Application

Some Possible Questions to Ask

  • Does the text include tables?
    • E.g., p. 4
  • Does the text include proper nouns?
    • E.g., p. 26
  • Does the text include organizational features?
    • E.g., p. 29-38
  • Does the text include text that represents the movement's identity?
    • E.g., Preamble, p. 28-29

Exploratory Application

How can we automate the data extraction process?

  • Cleaning tables
    • Object character recognition
    • Regular expressions: find and replace
    • Save as a delimited text file
  • Cleaning text
    • Remove "noise"
    • Unitize
    • Organize
  • Advanced software

Exploratory Application

  1. Break into groups
  2. Apply the above steps to a movement organization of your choosing
  3. Report your findings to the class

 

Movements and the Media

Problems Receiving Scholarly Attention

  • Data
  • Movement Outcomes
  • Media Work
  • Technology

News Media as Data

  • Counting Protest
  • Bias
    • Description
    • Selection (e.g., Oliver and Maney 2000, Myers and Caniglia 2004)
      • E.g., legislation, size, police involvement, day of week, counterdemonstrations, amplification, holidays and annual events, distance from news outlet, city population size
  • Protest Forms

News Media Coverage as Movement Outcomes

News Media as Movement Work

  • Resource mobilization
    • Movements actively work to gain coverage
    • News media preferences (Andrews and Caren 2010)
      • Likes: large, professional groups; advocacy tactics; overlapping interests with newspaper
      • Ambivalent: confrontational tactics, volunteer-based, novel issues

Social Media and Movements

  • Movement tool (Bennett and Segerberg 2012)
  • Discursive venue (Roscigno and Danaher 2001, DiGrazia et al. 2013)
  • Social laboratory (Golder and Macy 2014)
    • Potential issues
      • ​Privacy
      • Measurement
      • Parallel Universe
      • Methods, Skills, Training

Exploratory Application

Ways to Collect Online Data

Easiest to Hardest

  1. Copy/paste/download
    1. E.g., Google Trends, Ngram Viewer, CrunchBase
  2. API
    1. Service, e.g., TwitterFaces, Timeu, Netlytic, or VKMiner
    2. Create an account and make "requests."
      1. Twitter, NYT, Yahoo!, Reddit, DBPedia, CrunchBase, etc.
  3. Web scraping
    1. Service, e.g., Kimono or Import IO
    2. Code your own scraper, e.g., BeautifulSoup

Politics, Opportunities, and Macroprocesses

Protest Cycles

Mobilization/Demobilization

Tarrow (1989)

Mobilization

  • More conflict
  • New frames
  • New & improved organizations
  • More information flow and interaction

Demobilization

  • Exhaustion and factions
  • Institutionalization and violence
  • State facilitation and repression

Political Opportunity

A Collection of Contextual Factors

Affecting (Meyer 2004:126)

  • Mobilization
  • Advancing claims
  • Alliances
  • Tactics and strategies
  • Politics and policy

Political Opportunity

Opportunity and Threat

  • Consider which external factors which can encourage or discourage collective (in)action.
  • Consider which external factors can increase or diminish the costs associated with collective (in)action.

Political Opportunity

Conceptualizing Opportunity (McAdam 1996)

  • Greater access to political system
  • Elite schisms
  • Allying with elites
  • Reduced repression

Political Opportunity

  • Structures vs. Signals
  • Issue-Specific vs. General Opportunities

(Meyer and Minkoff 2004)

Political Beneficiaries and Outcomes

  • Outcomes vs "Success"
  • Recipients of outcomes
  • Inclusion vs "Acceptance"
  • Do movements actually matter?
    • Often, but contingent upon political conditions. No "recipe" for success.
    • Political mediation model: political actors benefitting from movement support.

Amenta et al. (2010)

World's first illegal fishing treaty comes into force

Campaigners say first-ever global treaty to stop illegal fishing is a welcome step, but not enough.

Application

Considerations for Measurement

  • Unit of analysis
    • Longitudinal?
    • Cross-sectional?
    • Aggregate data
  • Cross-national political research

Popular Sources

Open Government Data

Non-Political, Contextual Data

  • Polling, values, attitudes, identity
  • Cultural (e.g., religion, art, language, fashion, music)
  • Education (e.g., opportunity, level, quality, practices)
  • Economic, agricultural, and resource management
  • Ecological and environmental

Task for your Case

  • Find at least one indicator of mobilization as well as relevant political opportunity and/or threat indicators.
    • Data needs >= 5 observation points
    • Needs structure, signaling, issue-specific, and general
  • Identify multiple aggregate units with variability that can speak to these observation points. They must share a common time, location, or both.
  • Time permitting, create a bivariate visualization.
  • Is the scale appropriate and meaningful? What are the data's strengths and weaknesses?

Organizations, Networks, and Participation

Resource Mobilization

Movements as Organizational Phenomena

  • Social movements as organizations
  • Social movements targeting organizations
    • States
    • Businesses
    • Education
    • Religion
  • Social movements depending on organizations

Resource Mobilization

McCarthy and Zald (1977)

  • Business Metaphor
    1. Social Movement Organizations (SMOs)
    2. Social Movement Industries (SMIs)
    3. Social Movement Sector (SMS)
  • Competition
  • Resources include money, personnel, capital

Multi-Stage Participation

Klandermans and Oegema (1987)

  1. Mobilization potential: agreement
  2. Targeted by movement: network interaction
    1. Shared time, space
    2. Overlapping organizations
  3. Motivated to join
    1. Selective incentives
    2. Sanctions
  4. Overcoming barriers
    1. Biographical availability
    2. Socio-demographics
    3. Age, period, cohort effects

Social Movements as Networks

Traditional Themes

  • Recruitment
  • Protest diffusion
  • Coalitions and overlapping
    • Members
    • Events
    • Issues
    • Tactics
  • Implications for collective identity
  • Other implications?
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