1. Tocqueville: Revolution of Rising Expectations--The Old Regime and the French Revolution
2. Marx: Role of the working class and the process by which class consciousness develops--The Communist Manifesto
3. Weber: Charisma and charismatic leaders--Economy and Society
All three of these theories relate social movements to social stratification, although Marx does it the most explicitly.
B. Collective behavior theory, dominant in American sociology in the 1940s and 1950s ( after the Nazi period): an attempt to explain the irrational aspects of social movements
1. Social movements part of a continuum that includes fads, panics, and riots
2. Result of change that is too rapid or too discontinuous and disruptive
3. Social psychology: recruit from individuals who are isolated and/or left out... mass society theory... collective delusions... social movement as a pseudo-community, promoting a pseudo-solution
C. Resource mobilization/political process theory... beginning in the 1960s: difficult to view social movements like civil rights or modern feminism as irrational.
1. Even in modern democracies, some groups do not have equal access to the political system; for such groups, using unconventional (and sometimes even illegal) methods may be rational...
2. Creation and success/failure of social movements more a matter of resources and opportunities than of motivation... e.g., in civil rights, the motivation has been there since well before the American civil war.... so why did the civil rights movement begin to have some major successes only in the period after World War II?
3. Social movements a reflection of underlying changes in social structure (stratification systems, demography and the like) that change the resources and opportunities available to groups that have not had much conventional power int he society.
4. My favorite version of the newer theory: Doug McAdams, Political Process Theory (Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970): 4 key independent variables
a. Organization: role of pre-existing organizations, as well as the role of social movement organizations... leadership important in this context, but can't be effective in the absence of organization...
In civil rights, the key pre-existing organizations were the black churches, black colleges, and the NAACP; key social movement organizations included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
What gave them a strength in the mid-20th century that they hadn't had before?
b. Political opportunities: How did black voters emerge as an important swing vote? What had changed by the late 1940s, compared with earlier periods?
c. Social control: What had begun to limit the ability of the criminal justice system in the south and of vigilante movements (the Ku Klux Klan) to suppress the movement with extreme force?
d. Consciousness: What had given the black community, particularly in the South, the belief that change was possible and perhaps even inevitable?
The interaction of these four variables produces the strength and likely success of a social movement.
Causal Diagram on the blackboard
5. Additional reflections on social movements
a. A high risk strategy
b. Invariably spur a reaction... challenging the distribution of power and privilege in larger or smaller ways
c. Criminal justice system often protects the status quo... the people organizing a movement labeled negatively and viewed as deviant and probably criminal --"not our Negroes," for example