Abstract
This review traces how sociologists study movement emergence and participation. Proceeding in a roughly chronological fashion, we begin by reviewing the “structural” approaches to the study of social movements, and specifically discuss resource mobilization theory and political process theory. Then, after outlining the critiques of structural approaches, we consider the “cultural turn” in the study of social movements. We focus on three avenues of inquiry that animate the cultural approach—research on framing and frames, emotion, and collective identity. Before concluding the chapter with a brief assessment of the contributions of sociologists to the study of social movements, we turn our attention to new directions in social movement research. Here, we discuss two areas of research which have attracted a lot of attention over the last decade—the movement-media relationship and social movement strategy—and highlight the contributions of European scholars to sociological understandings of social movements.
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination
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Notes
- 1.
European scholarship on the policing of protest also has increased precipitously over the last decade (see Bosi et al. 2014; Combes and Fillieule 2011; Della Porta 2016; Della Porta and Reiter 1998; Della Porta et al. 2006; Fillieule and Della Porta 2006) as has analyses of contemporary mobilizations in the wake of the Great Recession in 2008. In regard to the latter there seems to be a tentative consensus that some of the “movements of the crisis” are best conceptualized as national-level cycles of contention (Kousis 2016; Nez 2016; Oikonomakis and Roos 2016; Sommier 2016).
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Rohlinger, D.A., Gentile, H. (2017). Sociological Understandings of Social Movements: A North American Perspective. In: Roggeband, C., Klandermans, B. (eds) Handbook of Social Movements Across Disciplines. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57648-0_2
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