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

Introduction: The Future of Social Movement Research

xi Introduction: The Future of Social Movement Research In 2001, Dynamics of Contention appeared. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly made an attempt to synthesize the approaches in the field, to assess where we were and what the major unanswered questions were at that moment. The decade that has passed since the appearance of Dynamics of Contention has been a vigorous one in the social movement academic field and in the activist field. Take the year 2011, which was a major one for social movements: the Arab Spring; precarity demonstrations in southern Europe; the Israeli urban camp demonstrations, culminating in the largest demonstration in the history of the country; and finally, the Occupy movement. What is remarkable, however , is that everything came together in so many parts of the world.1 Are the dynamics of contention changing? Worldwide, we see an increasing number of citizens who stand up against authorities. Although this alludes to a growing demand for protest, such a growing demand would not have materialized had there not been a growing supply of protest opportunities that appealed to people and sophisticated mobilization techniques that brought demand and supply together. In an ever more globalizing world, streams of migration make populations of Western societies increasingly diverse, while the establishment of ever more transnational and supranational political institutions and multinationals has changed contentious politics fundamentally. At the same time, a new social fabric has emerged, and loosely coupled networks have become the prime mode of organization and structure of society, while the Internet, social media, and cell phones have given the world a virtual outlook and facilitated other forms of communication and transnational ties. These societal processes of globalization, individualization–diversification, Jacquelien van Stekelenburg and Conny Roggeband jacquelien van stekelenburg and conny roggeband xii and virtualization imply significant changes in movement dynamics and the context of mobilization that call for a revision of theory. One can see this volume—The Future of Social Movement Research—as an attempt to integrate the efforts of scholars and update assessments of where we are based on these fundamental changes in the political game, which, as has been argued, have made contentious politics more important, while traditional political parties have lost support. In October 2009, a group of American and European sociologists, political scientists, and social psychologists met in Amsterdam to discuss challenges in the future of social movement research. The occasion of Bert Klandermans’s so-called retirement—obviously, he never stopped working!—was seized to bring together an exceptional combination of experts in the field of social movements. In short, the core question of the symposium asked, How are dynamics of contention influenced by the development toward globalization, the diversification of societies, the more diffuse mobilizing structures, and the emergence of new communication techniques? In a unique preparatory trajectory—we will come back to this later—four teams comprising six interdisciplinary scholars from the United States and Europe each developed the state of the art and suggested possible research agendas. This endeavor was motivated by past experiences of fruitful transatlantic cooperation, which were key to significant advances in social movement theory in the 1980s and 1990s. Around 1980, the study of social movements in Europe was completely separated from that in the United States. Both continents attempted to answer the question why social movements in the 1960s had started to grow explosively. In the United States, the question was answered through structural approaches such as resource mobilization, with an emphasis on the extent to which organizations are able to mobilize resources, and the political process approach, which focuses on political conditions. In Europe, the answer lay in cultural approaches, with an emphasis on conflict between lifestyles and identities, the so-called New Social Movements approach. In that setting, Klandermans and Tarrow took the initiative to bring scholars from the United States and Europe together at workshops in Ithaca, New York, in 1985 and in Amsterdam in 1986. These workshops resulted in the volume From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research across Cultures (Klandermans, Kriesi, andTarrow 1988), which by now is a classic in the field. Several conferences and symposia followed, each of which was turned into a book: 1988 in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Frontiers in Social Movement Theory; Morris and Mueller 1992); 1992 in Washington, D.C. (Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements; McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996); 1992 in San introduction xiii Diego, California (Social Movements and Culture; Johnston and Klandermans...