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

3. Social Movement Participation in the Global Society: Identity, Networks, and Emotions

37 3 Social Movement Participation in the Global Society: Identity, Networks, and Emotions Research interest in the social psychology and motivational dynamics of social movements has changed dramatically over the last thirty years. The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of the resource mobilization and political process perspectives . These approaches shifted attention away from the social psychological and group processes involved in collective action that had concerned collective behavior theorists and toward structural, political, and organizational analyses that stressed the similarity and links between movements and more routine forms of organizational and political life. As a result, questions pertaining to the emergence of shared beliefs, solidarity, group consciousness, and micromobilization were given short shrift by social movement researchers. This began to change in the mid- to late 1980s, when some scholars in the United States began to ask whether resource mobilization and political process approaches had gone too far in abandoning social psychological analyses of movements (Ferree and Miller 1985; Snow et al. 1986; Gamson 1992a, 1992b). About the same time, European scholars loosely grouped under the rubric “new social movement” theorists (Cohen 1985; Klandermans 1985; Melucci 1985;Touraine 1985) proposed the concept of collective identity as a way of understanding people’s motivations to act collectively, and some sociologists sympathetic to mobilization and process theory began to use collective identity to explain how “structural inequality gets translated into structural discontent” (Taylor and Whittier 1992, 104; also Morris and Mueller 1992). Attention to the social and psychological dynamics of collective action has increased over the past decade (Van Zomeren and Iyer 2009). Bert Klandermans (chapter 1), arguably the leading social psychologist of collective Verta Taylor verta taylor 38 action, recently joined scholars (Melucci 1989; Giddens 1991; Castells 1997; Taylor 2000a; Chryssochoou 2010) who have suggested that structural and cultural processes may be transforming the repertoires and dynamics of contentious politics in Western societies, specifically, the transnational nature of political and economic institutions; the diversification of group identities that has resulted from immigration and shifting demographics; the network structure or “liquidity”(Bauman 2000; Roggeband and Duyvendak, chapter 5) of relationships in modern Western societies; and the rise of new media, especially the Internet. In this essay, I offer some preliminary observations about how these changes might affect key social psychological processes related to mobilization . Specifically, I focus on the importance of collective identity theory for understanding how shared grievances and identities are politicized and deployed in contentious politics in the modern world. I begin by discussing my conception of collective identity as dynamic, interactive, and socially constructed. The analysis focuses on the performative aspects of identity and the importance of tactics for the construction of a politicized collective identity. The core of my argument is that attention to the social psychological dynamics of the politicization of collective identity provides insight into how social movement tactics and performances, if not repertoires, diffuse, vary, and change. Next, I discuss my view of social movements as discursive communities , highlighting the significance of network ties, multiple identities, and contentious performances or protest for the construction of collective identity. Finally, I examine the role emotions play in the politicization of grievances. I highlight the significance of emotions in public performances of protest and argue that social movements have played an important role in redefining emotion norms and expression rules, which may contribute to the ubiquity of social movements in Western societies. Collective Identity, Contentious Performances, and Repertoires Constructing, maintaining, and renegotiating collective identity is an essential social psychological dynamic of mobilization that affects all aspects of social movement activity from emergence to outcomes (Melucci 1989; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Gamson 1992a; Klandermans 1992, 1994; Polletta and Jasper 2001; Bernstein 2005; Reger, Myers, and Einwohner 2008). Over the past fifteen years, scholars of social movements have used the concept of collective identity to respond to the limitations of resource mobilization and political process approaches that treated status (class, race, gender, nationality) or structurally based interests as the basis of collective grievances and relied upon rational choice models to explain protest participation and the tactical choices social movement participation in the global society 39 of social movement actors. Elsewhere, I have defined collective identity as the shared definition of a group that derives from members’ common interests and solidarity (Taylor 1989). Polletta and Jasper’s (2001, 285) definition as “an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community , category, practice, or institution” emphasizes...