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2 Social movement theory and collective identity Tiny flags attached to massive chunks of wood On 15 January 2011, I was involved in a protest against the Greek government’s plan to construct a 12-km, anti-immigration wall along the Turkish border. A group of leftists, anti-racists and migrants gathered to protest against the construction of a barrier that many saw as amplifying the dangers and miseries confronting already vulnerable migrants. By mid-morning around 3,000 protesters had convened outside the Athenian Metro stop at Πανεπιστήμιο (Panepistimio
4 The significance of social movement theory to anarchism Revolutions are brought about by those who think as people of action and act as people of thought. (Emma Goldman) What is social movement theory? Even though anarchism is itself a social theory, anarchism has been underutilized by sociologists developing sociological theories (Williams 2014). Likewise, anarchist movements – themselves the social application and embodiment of anarchist theories – have not been interpreted via sociological social movement theories. Of course, activist theorizing happens
or suppressed by the state. Social movement theory is appropriate in assessing this balance of forces, and this is applied in our analysis in this chapter of labour as a ‘movement’. State facilitation and repression of social movements, for example, is one of several processes that affect how social movements develop or are restrained through any ‘cycle of contention’. The upward swing of protest in a new cycle can only be ended by either reform, repression or, in extreme cases, by revolution. In the ‘mobilisation phase’, or upward swing in the cycle, the main
skirmishes to the ideological currents that seek to dominate entire societies. And at the level of culture, he has shifted attention away from the fringes of cultural fashion to the mainstream. The gap that is left – the empirical detail – comes to be filled by another tradition of scholarship concerned with political action of an increasingly familiar kind, that of social movements. Social movements and popular culture Social movement theory (SMT) has proved very receptive to those who contend that culture has a place in explaining social and political action. The problem
1970s? And, in conceptual and theoretical terms, can social movement theory gain from a consequent inclusion of faith-based political movements into the narrative of radical movements of the long sixties? This chapter seeks to explore these questions and takes transnational and transregional Islamist solidarity in Indonesia as a case in point. The first part of the text addresses the shifts in social
empirical evidence in particular chapters. Thus, the first concern of this chapter is to outline the most suitable theoretical framework for the analysis of environmentalists’ activities and to establish a coherent understanding of technological change. These theoretical underpinnings are then used for the second aim of the chapter – to identify possible implications of CMC use for environmental activists. Understanding political activism Social movement theories explain the formation, nature and workings of social movements, and explore the how and the why of their
New social movement theory defines these movements as ‘new’ for their middle-class support, non-hierarchical organisational structures, direct action tactics and ‘post-materialist’ values, such as self-actualisation, quality of life and moral values. 78 Some argue that these movements ‘challenged old identities and valorised the new ones’, setting up a dichotomy between class and other forms of identity politics. 79 Yet Calhoun rejects this dichotomy, arguing that
starts from an application of social movement theory to the field of Industrial Relations (Kelly, 1998). Mobilization theory – as the application is called – tackles some key topics that the discipline of Industrial Relations and this book share: ‘interest definition’, ‘formation of collectivism’ (collective action), and ‘the acquisition of power resources’ (Kelly, 1998). This study is concerned with mobilization aspects and therefore specifically draws on mobilization theory in answering Varga_WorkerProtests_Text.indd 48 02/04/2014 12:01 A theory of labour strategy
Communism, and the Problem of Workers’ Control’, Radical America 11, no. 6 (November 1977): 100. 15 My argument is influenced by Paula Serafini’s discussion of art activism in relation to social movement theory and the sociological reading of how collective action generates and dissipates through specific strategies, tactics, and tools. See Serafini, Performance Action: The Politics of Art Activism (New York: Routledge, 2018). Also important for my account are
This study seeks to delve beyond the familiar image of Ellen Wilkinson as the leader of the Jarrow Crusade. It has attempted to unearth new evidence to provide a richer understanding of this figure who is remarkable in terms of her achievements, her acquaintances and her witnessing of history’s great turning points. From a humble background, she ascended to the rank of Minister in the 1945 Labour government. Yet she was much more than a conventional Labour politician. She wrote journalism, political theory and novels. She was both a socialist and a feminist; at times, she described herself as a revolutionary. She met Lenin, Trotsky and Gandhi. She visited Soviet Russia, the GM sit-down strikes, the Indian civil disobedience campaign, the Spanish Civil War and the Third Reich. While viewed in the collective imagination as ‘Red Ellen’, whose politics were as red as her hair, her ideas were not static and present a series of puzzles. This study seeks to use transnational and social movement theory perspectives to grabble with the complex itinerary of ideas and her relationship with the movements for social transformation. This research is timely because interest in her life remains. This is in part because her principal concerns—working-class representation, the status of women, capitalist crisis, war, anti-fascism—remain central to contentious politics today.