Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action (review

"The structural research program on social movements has produced several consistent empirical findings. However, the meaning of these findings, and more importantly, the actual social processes that account for them remain opaque." So says Doug McAdam in his concluding essay to this rich and rewarding volume that brings together 13 original papers in an effort to integrate more systematically the parallel work of social movement scholars with that of the broader community of structuralist social network researchers. The empirical regularities to which McAdam refers include the centrality of network connections between persons, positions, and organizations to individual recruitment to movements and collective mobilization as well as to the diffusion of movement processes across social and geographical space.

The opaqueness of the social processes underlying movement network regularities, however, is a more general problem characteristic of much of the work done by researchers in the broader social network research community. Information, influence, resources, and affect are thought to flow through dyadic network ties and then outward through the more extensive aggregate grids of relationships within which they are embedded. Yet many network structuralists—no matter their substantive focus, be it, for instance, corporate interlocks, ties between nations, or common attendance at feminist conferences—also ignore the actual content of network connections. Without systematic knowledge of that content, underlying social processes remain partially obscure. As a consequence, network scholars must depend heavily upon a sophisticated theoretical superstructure in order to make sense of the regularities that link patterns of network connections to individual and collective behavior. And what is the case in general of structural network analyses is also true of many of the papers in this volume.

In spite of the theoretical robustness of the network paradigm, efforts to apply it to social movement processes, mirroring the broader social network literature, have tended to either narrow into deep analyses of the network connections of individual participants or to broaden toward consideration of the structural complexity of expanded network structures. The former approach provides rich detail about network connections while remaining mostly blind to the structural complexities of the larger network structures within which they are embedded. The strong chapters by Florence Passey, who analyzes individual participation by members of the Bern Declaration and the World Wildlife Fund, and by Ann Mische, who explores conversational mechanisms employed by Brazilian activists as they negotiate their complex social networks, illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of a deep analysis of network connections.

The latter approach, mapping the elaborate structure of interconnections between multiple network nodes, whether individuals, institutional actors, or collective actors, is the one taken by the authors of the other substantive chapters in this volume. These include Maryjane Osa's mapping of the structure of Polish dissident organization's interconnections through the overlapping memberships of individual activists during protest waves in the late 1960s and late 1970s, Helmut Anheier's demonstration of the important role of local activists' network embeddedness for early organizational development of the German National Socialist Party, and Christopher Ansell's analysis of the collaborative structure of relations between contemporary environmental organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. And while each of these papers makes a strong contribution to understanding how the structure of networks of activists and their organizations are patterned, the nature of the network ties they study remain, for the most part, opaque.

The typical analytic tradeoff between a deep focus upon network connections and a comprehensive look at network structure is, of course, importantly the result of research design choices. Gathering data on far-flung networks of activists and social movement organizations as well as the ties that bind them together is severely constrained by prohibitive costs, so it is not surprising that such studies are rare. Mario Diani's widely ignored gem, Green Networks (Edinburgh University Press), is a singular exception.

Another, less costly, analytic strategy for maximizing both scope and depth in accounting for network regularities in social...