The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Processes

10. Changing Mobilization of Individual Activists?

205 10 Changing Mobilization of Individual Activists? Mobilization is the process through which a demand for collective action present in a certain community is met by a supply of collective action events staged by social movements. As participation by individuals is a necessary condition for the existence of social movements and protest, mobilization of participants is key to understanding social movements. The centrality of the mobilization process appears clearly from the existing literature. We see two main distinctions in a large body of work that has tackled mobilization using different concepts, theories, and methods. A first stream focuses on the social movement organizations (SMOs) staging collective action and on how organizations try to reach out beyond their constituencies and try to influence individual-level participation decisions . Mainstream mobilization research, therefore, has focused primarily on the structural preconditions of participation. Probably the strongest and most robust finding emerging from the bulk of scholarly work on mobilization is that network embeddedness increases the chances of being asked to participate (Schussman and Soule 2005). People who are embedded in conducive social networks are more likely to be reached by mobilizing messages, and their participation decision is more likely to meet approval by their peers (McAdam and Paulsen 1993; Passy 2002). The type and flavor of these conducive social networks are a subject of discussion. Formal organization membership, in most studies, emerges as a strong predictor of participation. Members of organizations are sometimes mobilized en bloc, as organizations mobilize their members in a top-down fashion. But also informal, interpersonal ties have been identified as channels of mobilization, whether or not these ties are part of formal structures Stefaan Walgrave stefaan walgrave 206 (McAdam 1988). Hence individuals have the agency to mobilize as well, and not all mobilization is organizational in nature. In sum, structuralists contend that the key aspect of mobilization is what Klandermans and Oegema (1987) have called action mobilization and that inciting people to take part in a concrete movement or event is mainly affected by the structural location of the individual. A second stream of work has dealt with the cultural paths to participation. The basic idea is that people engage not only because they are being asked or targeted but also because they agree with the causes put forward by the movement. The main object of debate among culturalists has been to what extent there is what Klandermans and Oegema (1987) calls consensus mobilization , the consequence of top-down efforts by SMOs, or rather whether there is consensus formation, or autonomous individuals independently attributing meaning to real-world problems. The former take is exemplified by the frame-alignment approach of Snow and colleagues (1986). These scholars state that people participate when SMOs succeed in aligning their messages with the beliefs of potential constituents by adapting their own messages or by changing their constituents’ beliefs. A contradictory version of cultural mobilization sketches a picture of more active individual participants not just embracing the ideas postulated by SMOs but behaving as active attributors of meaning constructing their own ideas and searching for opportunities to put these ideas into practice (Jasper 1998). Summarizing, the existing literature on mobilization can be categorized along two axes: structure versus culture and bottom up (individuals) versus top down (organizations). Naturally, most work recognizes that mobilization is a matter of structure and culture and that both top-down and bottom-up processes are at work. But in practice, most studies have worked within one of these four theoretical approaches of mobilization. This volume addresses the future of social movement research. What is new regarding mobilization? We do not dispose of the necessary longitudinal studies to convincingly show that anything has changed and that mobilization anno 2012 is substantially different from mobilization a few decades ago. It appears that all traditional ways of mobilizing people are still common. For example, in many countries, trade unions are still large organizations that, at times, transform into mobilizing machines that, via formal recruitment, are able to produce protest events with massive attendance; some unions literally drive their constituents to the protest venue, provide lunch packages, negotiate with the employer the day of labor lost, and encapsulate the participants in a strong structure of local trade union representatives. This type of structural, top-down mobilization is still very much in use. What seems to be happening, though, is that structural top-down mobilization is complemented with other changing mobilization of...