Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and the State (review)

David Meyer begins this edited volume by pointing out that "the essays in this volume represent a concerted effort to build bridges among people researching collective action and social movements and to encourage the construction of comprehensive and synthetic approaches to the study of social movements." To achieve these goals, Meyer and his coeditors have enlisted the efforts of social movement scholars who focus on a variety of topics in this extensive collection. The book is broken down into three sections: States and Policies; Organizations and Strategies; and Collective Identities, Discourse, and Culture. Most of the chapters are case studies. The purpose is to explore the mesolevel of research on collective action and social movements. In other words, this volume is focused on the social processes that take place between the micro and macro levels of society. Suzanne Staggenborg's contribution to the volume (chapter 7) provides a very good review of the social movement scholarship that focuses on the mesolevel and calls for the kinds of research that is included in the volume.

The fourteen chapters of these sections are rather uneven — coming from multiple theoretical perspectives and focusing on very different scales of analysis. Even though Whittier identifies this diversity as an additional benefit, it is confusing for the reader and detracts from the overall depth of the case studies. The section on states and policies, for example, includes five chapters with very different research foci: one compares movements in Burma, Indonesia, and the Philippines; one looks at the National Union of Mineworkers' attempt to organize miners in the South African gold mines; one looks at women's movements in India; one looks at the development of the lesbian and gay movement in Vermont; and one looks at the civil rights movement in the U.S. Although these chapters all explore the ways that movements interact with the state and represent different scales of analysis the relationship among these very different cases is not laid out strongly enough. The sections on organizations and strategies and collective identities, discourse, and culture provide similar levels of variety that make it difficult to keep track of the focus of the book. Nonetheless, the chapters from these sections provide rich case studies about social movements around the world.

In the conclusion, Nancy Whittier states that the chapters in the book "outline a new theoretical approach to social movements, which, in this view, are not self-contained. State structures, dominant cultures, and civil society shape movements, and, in turn, movements can reshape states, policies, civil societies, and cultures within which they operate" (289). Without a doubt, this approach is very useful and important, and Whittier lays out a functional approach to such mesolevel research. Unfortunately, the strength of this approach gets lost in the sixteen chapters. Rebecca Klatch, however, contributes a particularly useful example of this type of research in her chapter on identity and consciousness among movements of the left and right (chapter 11). This chapter is consistent with the framework laid out by Whittier, exploring the effects of internal and external factors on movements of the left and right in the 1960s. This volume will be very useful for advanced undergraduate classes that are studying social movements. With its impressive breadth, students will be able to get a taste of much of what research in social movements has to offer.