Social Movements

To get a proper introduction to the subject, I want to introduce my topic “Social Movements” by stating that the social movement is a study in connection with the social sciences that is generally trying to explain why these group actions occure, the forms under which they manifest, as well as potential social, cultural and political consequences. More recently, the study of social movements has been subsumed under the study of contentious politics.

“Contentious politics” means episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims.

A historical aspect that is worth mentioning is the figures that were involved in the action. During the early and middle-1900s, sociologists, and in my belief, the general masses thought that these social movements were random reactions of people who were trying to emotionally react to situations that overwhelm their possibilities. The “mass society” hypotheses suggested that the ones who were participating in these movements were the people who didn’t totally fit into general society. These psychologically-based theories have been rejected by political scientists, although many still count because of the emotions. There are several works of Neil Smelser or William Kornhauser who have made studies on this theory.

One of the facts that influences the beginning of a social movement is relative deprivation. In these cases, the participants of the movement, have inequality reasons, particularly in relation to their expectations and to other participants. Firstly, there are the participants who see others having more power, resources, or a higher status and try to acquire the same things for themselves. Secondly, people are most likely to rebel when an improving situation, economically, stops and takes a turn for the worse. In situations like these, people will join movements because their expectations will have passed their actual material situation (also called the “J-Curve theory”). Other studies by James Davies or Denton Morisson were carried out in order to analyze these reactions of people and their reasons when joining a social movement.

Another fact that influences the participation to a social movement is rational choice. People are rational actors who strategically measure the costs and benefits of their actions and choose the course which is most likely to maximize their utility.

In Theories of Political Protest and Social Movements, Karl-Dieter Opp incorporates a number of cultural concepts in his version of rational choice theory, as well as showing that several other approaches surreptitiously rely on rational-choice assumptions without admitting it.

As we know, any movement that includes the participation of people needs organizations. Organizations can acquire resources and then use them properly to achieve their well-defined goals. Some versions of this theory of resource mobilization see movements operate similar to capitalist enterprises that make efficient use of available resources. Scholars have suggested a typology of five types of resources: material (money and physical capital); moral (solidarity, support for the movement’s goals); socialorganizational (social networks); human (volunteers, staff, leaders); cultural (understanding of the issues, know how to enrole in a collective action, etc.). Of course, it is important in what political contexts those social movements happen. These environments may favor or disfavor specific social movements. We have here some examples: increased access to political decision making power; access to elite allies (who can help a movement in its struggle).

The impact that a social movement has on society is the next step to consider. What factors might have led to those impacts? The effects of social movements can resonate on individuals, institutions, cultures or political systems. While political impacts have been studied the most by researchers, effects on other levels can be counted at least as important as the others. Because Impact Theory has many methodological issues, it is one of the last studies of the major branches of Social Movement Theory. Neverthless, it has sparked debates on violence, the importance of elite and political allies and the agency of popular movements in general.

A new well-known social movement from the United States of America is OWS (Occupy Wall Street) which is presently spreading in the USA and the Tea Party which is known in the media debates as fake-populist. Occupy Wall street is a major social movement in which people want to occupy public spaces in solidarity with one another. This movement is solidifying into a serious social movement, one of the most important since the civil rights era. Things that make OWS powerful are the fact that it is independent of the corruption that increasingly defines the major parties and it also changes the political-cultural values for the masses on a more general level. As most of the social movements should do, OWS expresses the sense that something has gone fundamentally wrong in the USA and that fundamental changes are required to restore the balance, which is one of the major reasons why social movements occure. Again, this movement appeals to a rising stream of Americans who feel that “the system no longer works for them” and who complain that they are getting nowhere despite playing by all the rules and working hard.

In conclusion, all of these theories and studies that are made on social movements, help to develop the sense of this concept and to bring it to another level. The fact that social movements such as OWS are getting attention and continually gather participants, shows us that people are observing the leaderships’s misconduct and are gathering in order to accomplish their goals.

In my opinion, I think that these social movements are important because they represent us, even those of us who prefer to watch these movements taking place on the TV. We have to understand that these actions are the ones that might be decisive in decision making, in some situations when other structures could not be applied in order to accomplish our goals and needs within a society.