Movements

Abstract

For Alain Touraine, the discipline of sociology could be reconfigured upon the terrain of the study of social movements (Scott, 1990). In a similar vein, Ruggiero and Montagna (2008) suggest that the issues of conflict, movements, and social change, which provide the co-ordinates of social movement scholarship, are precisely co-extensive with the entirety of sociological thought. This variety of appraisal of social movements, it should be noted, is a very recent thing. That is, it wasn’t until the late ’60s that social movement theory really began to expand, in response to the explosion of contestatory mobilizations from that decade — feminism, environmentalism, gay rights, and so on (Orum and Dale, 2009; West, 2004; Ruggiero and Montagna, 2008; Della Porta and Diani, 2006).