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Methodological Approaches to Movement Waves and the Making of History

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Book cover The Palgrave Handbook of Social Movements, Revolution, and Social Transformation

Abstract

Popular uprisings, revolutions, and other major movement waves are often explained as mechanistic or even spontaneous responses to new political openings or perceived threats. Yet while such explanations may account for when movements rise up, they are less useful for explaining why and how they rise up, and furthermore, what will occur in the course of a rising wave. To arrive at such explanations, I argue, social movement scholars must attend to those who do the work of movement building. We need research methods that understand activists as conscious producers both of movements and of knowledge about the movements they produce. Building from recent publications that argue for a scholarship of movements that at once assumes social complexity and valorizes agency, I show how bringing familiar approaches to social movement studies into constructive engagement with a longstanding scholarship of revolutions and praxis allows us to better explain where movement waves come from and what they produce. To do this, I specify movement elements, movement waves, periods, and terrains of struggle; theorize movement building across dimensions of struggle; and articulate how these concepts may be used to analyze movement building as a process that produces history. As a demonstration of this method, I share findings from a study of the movement building process that produced the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011. I conclude with the observation that different sets of operative assumptions make various aspects of movements more or less visible, and that the advance of activist-centered scholarship is helpful in making movement building and other processes available for empirical research. I propose a series of methods made practicable by the epistemological approach advocated here and argue for a wider engagement by social movement scholars with an ontology of praxis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Richard Flacks, “Envisioning Another World: Port Huron’s Continuing Relevance,” in Draft for Forthcoming Book, 2013.

  2. 2.

    “Spontaneous uprising” appeared at least three times as often as “planned uprising” in English language books, 1960–2008; source: Google NGram, accessed April 15, 2018. Archival searches of the social movements journal Social Movement Studies (156 vs. 37) and ProQuest’s Social Sciences database (681 vs. 204) show similar results.

  3. 3.

    Cristina Flesher Fominaya, “Debunking Spontaneity: Spain’s 15-M/Indignados as Autonomous Movement,” Social Movement Studies 14, no. 2 (March 4, 2015), pp.142–163.

  4. 4.

    Nancy Whitter, “Message from the Chair,” Critical Mass Bulletin (Fall 2013). http://cbsm-asa.org/2013/11/message-from-the-chair-fall-2013/.

  5. 5.

    Debra C. Minkoff, “The Sequencing of Social Movements,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 5 (October 1997); David S. Meyer and Suzanne Staggenborg, “Movements, Countermovements and the Structure of Political Opportunity,” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 6 (May 1996), pp.1628–1660.

  6. 6.

    Michelle Smirnova and Melissa Wooten, “Take 2: Where Did Capitalism Go?,” Critical Mass Bulletin 37, no. 2 (Fall 2012), pp. 2–5.

  7. 7.

    Richard Flacks, “The Question of Relevance in Social Movement Studies,” in David Croteau, William Hoynes, and Charlotte Ryan (eds.), Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics, and Social Movement Scholarship (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 3–19; Steven Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism: The Political Economy and Cultural Construction of Social Activism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, “Caught in a Winding, Snarling Vine: The Structural Bias of Political Process Theory,” in Sociological Forum, vol. 14 (Springer, 1999), pp. 27–54.

  8. 8.

    Colin Barker et al. (eds.), Marxism and Social Movements (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).

  9. 9.

    John Krinsky, “Marxism and the Politics of Possibility: Beyond Academic Boundaries,” in Marxism and Social Movements (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).

  10. 10.

    Edwin Amenta and Drew Halfmann, “Opportunity Knocks: The Trouble with Political Opportunity and What You Can Do about It,” in Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper (eds.), Contention in Context: Political Opportunities and the Emergence of Protest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 227–239; Jeff Goodwin, “Are Protestors Opportunists? Fifty Tests,” in Goodwin and Jasper, Contention in Context, pp. 277–302; James Jasper, “From Political Opportunity to Strategic Interaction,” in Goodwin and Jasper, Contention in Context, pp. 1–36; Verta Taylor, “Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest,” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 6 (May 2002), pp. 1619–21.

  11. 11.

    Colin Barker, Revolutionary Rehearsals (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008); Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Richard Flacks, Making History: The American Left and the American Mind (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1988).

  12. 12.

    Douglas Bevington and Chris Dixon, “Movement-Relevant Theory: Rethinking Social Movement Scholarship and Activism,” Social Movement Studies 4, no. 3 (December 2005), pp. 185–208.; Laurence Cox, “Movements Making Knowledge: A New Wave of Inspiration for Sociology?” Sociology 48, no. 5 (October 2014), pp. 954–971.

  13. 13.

    Richard Healey and Sandra Hinson, “Movement Strategy for Organizers,” in Croteau, Hoynes, and Ryan, Rhyming Hope and History, pp. 57–78.

  14. 14.

    Ana Avendaño and Jonathan Hiatt, “Worker Self-Organization in the New Economy: The AFL-CIO’s Experience in Movement Building with Community-Labour Partnerships,” Labour, Capital and Society/Travail, Capital et Société (2012), pp. 66–95; Tamara Kay, “Legal Transnationalism: The Relationship between Transnational Social Movement Building and International Law,” Law & Social Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2011), pp. 419–454; Charlotte Ryan and William A. Gamson, “The Art of Reframing Political Debates,” Contexts 5, no. 1 (2006), pp. 13–18.

  15. 15.

    Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1984).

  16. 16.

    Kenneth Andrews, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  17. 17.

    Jeffrey S. Juris et al., “Movement Building and the United States Social Forum,” Social Movement Studies 13, no. 3 (July 3, 2014), pp. 328–348.

  18. 18.

    John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977), pp. 1212–41; Mayer N Zald, “Looking Backward to Look Forward: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of the Resource Mobilization Research Program,” in Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 326–348.

  19. 19.

    Marshall Ganz, “Resources and Resourcefulness: Strategic Capacity in the Unionization of California Agriculture, 1959–1966,” American Journal of Sociology (2000), pp. 1003–1062; Hahrie Han, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations & Leadership in the 21st Century (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  20. 20.

    Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945–1960s (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987); Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, “Analytical Approaches to Social Movement Culture: The Culture of the Women’s Movement,” in Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans (eds.), Social Movements and Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 163–87; Verta Taylor, “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance,” American Sociological Review 54, no. 5 (October 1989), p. 761.

  21. 21.

    Sebastian Haunss and Darcy K. Leach, “5 Social Movement Scenes,” Civil Societies and Social Movements (2007), p. 71.

  22. 22.

    Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  23. 23.

    Scott A. Hunt and Robert D. Benford, “Collective Identity, Solidarity, and Commitment,” in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 433–548; Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities: Lesbian Feminist Mobilization,” in Morris and McClurg Mueller, Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, pp. 104–29.

  24. 24.

    Cristina Flesher Fominaya, “Collective Identity in Social Movements: Central Concepts and Debates: Collective Identity in Social Movements,” Sociology Compass 4, no. 6 (June 4, 2010), pp. 393–404; Francesca Polletta and James M. Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology (2001), pp. 283–305.

  25. 25.

    Jennifer Earl, “The Cultural Consequences of Social Movements,” in Snow, Soule, and Kriesi, The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, pp. 508–530; David A. Snow, Anna E. Tan, and Peter B. Owens, “Social Movements, Framing Processes, and Cultural Revitalization and Fabrication,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2013), pp. 225–242.

  26. 26.

    Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Ann Swidley, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (April 1986), pp. 273–286; Charles Tilly, “Repertoires of Contention in America and Britain, 1750–1830,” Center for Research on Social Organization Working Papers, no. 151 (1977).

  27. 27.

    Nancy Whittier, “The Consequences of Social Movements for Each Other,” in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 531–552; Sarah A Soule, “Diffusion Processes within and across Movements,” in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 294–310.

  28. 28.

    Francesca Polletta, “Culture and Movements,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 619, no. 1 (September 1, 2008), pp. 78–96, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716208320042.

  29. 29.

    John Foran, “Beyond Insurgency to Radical Social Change: The New Situation,” Studies in Social Justice 8, no. 1 (2014), p. 5; Aldon Morris and Naomi Braine, “Social Movements and Oppositional Consciousness,” in Jane Mansbridge and Aldon Morris (eds.), Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 20–37.

  30. 30.

    David A. Snow and Dana M. Moss, “Protest on the Fly: Toward a Theory of Spontaneity in the Dynamics of Protest and Social Movements,” American Sociological Review (2014); Jaime Kucinskas, “Spontaneity: An Important and Neglected Topic in Social Movements,” Mobilizing Ideas (February 5, 2015); Darcy K. Leach, “Culture and the Structure of Tyrannylessness,” The Sociological Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Spring 2013), pp. 181–91.

  31. 31.

    Hahrie Han, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations & Leadership in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2014).

  32. 32.

    Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader—Selected Writings, 1916–1935 (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2000).

  33. 33.

    Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2014); Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).

  34. 34.

    Doug McAdam, “The Biographical Consequences of Activism,” American Sociological Review 54, no. 5 (October 1989), p. 744; Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930–1970 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks, Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989).

  35. 35.

    Colin Barker and John Krinsky, “Theorising Movement Waves and the Making of Collective Subjects” (Alternative Futures and Popular Protest Conference, Manchester, UK, 2016).

  36. 36.

    Ruud Koopmans, “Protest in Time and Space: The Evolution of Waves of Contention,” in Snow and Soule, The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, pp. 19–46; Doug McAdam et al., “Dynamics of Contention,” Mobilization 8, no. 1 (February 2003), pp. 109–141; David S. Meyer and Suzanne Staggenborg, “Movements, Countermovements and the Structure of Political Opportunity,” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 6 (May 1996), pp. 1628–160; David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest,” in Morris and Mueller, Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, pp. 133–155; Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Collective Action, Social Movements and Politics, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  37. 37.

    Sidney Tarrow, “Cycles of Contention: Between Moments of Madness and the Repertoire of Contention,” Social Science History 17, no. 2 (1993).

  38. 38.

    Tarrow, Power in Movement.

  39. 39.

    Hank Johnston, Enrique Laraña, and Joseph Gusfield, “Identities, Grievances and New Social Movement,” in Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield, New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), pp. 3–35; Verta Taylor, “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance.”

  40. 40.

    Barker and Krinsky, “Theorising Movement Waves and the Making of Collective Subjects.”

  41. 41.

    Gerald Marwell and Pamela Oliver, “Collective Action Theory in Social Movements Research,” Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change 7, no. 27 (1984), p. 1988; Pamela E. Oliver, “Bringing the Crowd Back in: The Nonorganizational Elements of Social Movements,” Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change 11, no. 1989 (1989), pp. 1–30; Pamela Oliver and Hank Johnston, “What a Good Idea! Ideologies and Frames in Social Movement Research,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2000), pp. 37–54.

  42. 42.

    Rosa Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), p. 141.

  43. 43.

    Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, p. 133.

  44. 44.

    Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci Reader, p. 201.

  45. 45.

    Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam, “Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields,” Sociological Theory 29, no. 1 (2011), pp. 1–26.

  46. 46.

    Jasper, “From Political Opportunity to Strategic Interaction,” in Goodwin and Jasper, Contention in Context.

  47. 47.

    Birgitta Nedelmann, “Individuals and Parties—Changes in Processes of Political Mobilization,” European Sociological Review 3, no. 3 (December 1987); Desmond C. Ong, Jamil Zaki, and Noah D. Goodman, “Affective Cognition: Exploring Lay Theories of Emotion,” Cognition 143 (October 2015).

  48. 48.

    Margaret Archer, “Realism and the Problem of Agency,” Alethia 5, no. 1 (July 15, 2002), pp. 11–20; Margaret Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Martin E. P. Seligman et al., Homo Prospectus (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  49. 49.

    Thomas R. Rochon, Culture Moves: Ideas, Activism, and Changing Values (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

  50. 50.

    Lev Semyonovitch Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, p. 73 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

  51. 51.

    Steven Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism; Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity?’” The Centennial Review 36, no. 3 (1992), pp. 437–470; Sandra Harding, “A Socially Relevant Philosophy of Science? Resources from Standpoint Theory’s Controversiality,” Hypatia 19, no. 1 (2004), pp. 25–47; Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1976).

  52. 52.

    Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1963), p.15. The full sentence is, of course, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Here I choose to place a different emphasis on this passage than is commonly applied; sometimes the first clauses are cited on their own in ways that seem oblivious to historical class agency.

  53. 53.

    Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1979); Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984).

  54. 54.

    Margaret Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  55. 55.

    Dave Elder-Vass, The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 108.

  56. 56.

    Alex Callinicos, The Resources of Critique (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), p. 189.

  57. 57.

    Christopher Hardnack, “Framing Neoliberalism: The Counter-Hegemonic Framing of the Global Justice, Antiwar, and Immigrant Rights Movements” (University of Oregon, 2015).

  58. 58.

    Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, p. 134.

  59. 59.

    Cox and Nilsen, We Make Our Own History.

  60. 60.

    Colin Barker, “Class Struggle and Social Movements,” in Marxism and Social Movements (New York, NY: Haymarket Books, 2014), p. 43.

  61. 61.

    Laurence Cox, “Movements Making Knowledge: A New Wave of Inspiration for Sociology?”; Geoffrey Pleyers, “From Local Ethnographies to Global Movement,” in Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography and the Political, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

  62. 62.

    Cox and Nilsen, We Make Our Own History.

  63. 63.

    Eyerman and Jamison, Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach; Flacks, Making History.

  64. 64.

    Barker, “Class Struggle and Social Movements.”

  65. 65.

    Paul Y. Chang, Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970–1979 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).

  66. 66.

    John E. Peck, Interview with John E. Peck, Jr., executive director of Family Farm Defenders, interview by Ben Manski, May 2016.

  67. 67.

    V. I. Lenin, “The Struggle of the Proletariat and the Servility of the Bourgeoisie,” trans. R Cymbala, Proletary, no. 6 (July 3, 1905); Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, trans. Matthew Carmody (Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1847).

  68. 68.

    For those wishing to explore the underlying logics of such an approach I recommend a critical realist epistemology. Berth Danermark et al., Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2002); Alf Gunvald Nilsen, “Exploring the Relevance of Critical Realism for Social Movement Research” (Working Paper, 2004); Douglas V. Porpora, Reconstructing Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

  69. 69.

    These have appeared in various journals, book chapters, and conference papers. See www.BenManski.com for a full list of publications.

  70. 70.

    I have presented my Wisconsin analysis in various stages at different conferences. As per above, see www.BenManski.com to contact me or to see recent publications.

  71. 71.

    Ben Manski and Sarah Manski, “It Started in Wisconsin,” Jacobin, March 2018.

  72. 72.

    As this book went to press, Matthew Kearney published two serious academic analyses of the escalation of the Wisconsin Uprising; neither of these deals with its origins however (Kearney 2018a, b).

  73. 73.

    Ben Manski, “What We Gain by Centering Agency in Social Movement Epistemology” (World Congress of Sociology, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2018).

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Ben Manski

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    Berch Berberoglu

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Manski, B. (2019). Methodological Approaches to Movement Waves and the Making of History. In: Berberoglu, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Social Movements, Revolution, and Social Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92354-3_3

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