The Politics of Social Movement Research

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Notes

¹ Eduardo Canel, “New Social Movement Theory and Resource Mobilization Theory: The Need for Integration,” in Michael Kaufman and Haroldo Dilla Alfonso (eds), Community Power and Grassroots Democracy: The Transformation of Social Life (London: Zed Books, 1997), p. 189, < http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-54446-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html>.

² For a discussion of how this transition took place see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New “True Socialism,” revised ed. (London, New York: Verso, 1998).

³ See, for example, Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006). According to the publisher's description Tilly and Tarrow lay out a “set of analytical tools and procedures” for studying “revolutions, social movements, religious and ethnic conflict, nationalism and civil rights, and transnational movements,” < http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID = 131235>. The methods they develop might well be seen as the basis for the research in the two collections under review here.

⁴ The notion of frames and framing will be discussed below. For the moment it is interesting to note that the frame of “democracy” in the context of Eastern and Central European movements and even, perhaps in present movements in the Middle East usually involves an uncritical identification of electoral democracy with “free market” liberalism, that is, capitalism.

⁵ The term “political movement” is hardly within the lexicon of most of the material examined here. If it issued largely from political scientists it would be immediately subject to the criticism of being, like the old pluralist literature, “non political.” See Charles A. McCoy and John Playford (eds), Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967).

⁶ Jurgen Gerhards and Dieter Ruch, “Mesomobilization: Organizing and Framing in Two Protest Campaigns in West Germany,” American Journal of Sociology 105 (1992), pp. 555–595.

⁷ Citing Nella Van Dyke, “Crossing Movement Boundaries: Factors That Facilitate Coalition Protest by American College Students, 1930–1990,” Social Outcomes 50 (2003), pp. 226–250.

⁸ Citing David Strang and John W. Meyer, “Institutional Conditions and Social Movements: From Hybrid Corn to Poison Pills,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998), pp. 265–290.

⁹ Some readers of New Political Science might be dismayed by the fact that one of the contributions to the Givan et al. volume is devoted to arguing that the movement to ban genetically-modified crops is based on a frame that is inconsistent with the facts. This is a strange way to think about an empirical approach to social movements. See Ronald Herring, “Framing the GMO: Epistemic Brokers, Authoritative Knowledge, and Diffusion of Opposition to Biotechnology,” pp. 78–98. It seems that some social movements are bad and others good, that some frames are simply “inaccurate” statements of the real issues. It may be fortunate in the circumstances in which I am writing, including the massive nuclear accident in Japan, that the authors did not include discussion of the framing of the issue of nuclear power. This is a case in which the “official” frame is all too familiar to those of us who participated in the anti-nuclear movement. The anti-nuclear movement has always faced arguments such as those presented by Herring. “Science” itself is often used as a frame to defeat movements that challenge status quo understandings of proper social policy.

¹⁰ David Snow and Robert Benford, “Clarifying the Relationship between Framing and Ideology,” in Hank Johnston and John A. Noakes (eds), Frames of Protest: Social Movements and the Framing Perspective (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 205–212. Johnston and Noakes is a good starting point for those who are interested in a clarifying study of the concept of frames and framing. These terms are now so ubiquitous not only in social science but also in journalism, advertising and law that they have a tendency to lose clear meaning. Snow and Benford are major players in trying to clarify the concept and are especially concerned with distinguishing them from “ideology.”

¹¹ For a recent examination of Gramsci's significance for contemporary politics see Marcus Green (ed.), Rethinking Gramsci (New York: Routledge, 2011).