Hank Johnston - What is a Social Movement? (What is Sociology?)

Table of Contents

What is Sociology?

Copyright Hank Johnston 2014

The right of Hank Johnston to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

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What is a Social Movement?

Social movements are key forces of social change in the modern world. Although not all social change emanates from them technological innovation, climate change, natural disasters, and wars also are causes social movements are unique because they are guided purposively and strategically by the people who join them. Another key characteristic is that they mobilize and do their business mostly outside established political and institutional channels. This makes questions of their origin and growth especially compelling for the social scientist. Some social movements represent efforts by citizens to collectively create a more just and equitable world. Other movements are motivated by compelling grievances that push their adherents out of their ordinary daily routines. Social movements are typically resisted by forces that favor the status quo, which imparts a fundamental contentiousness to movement actions. But the defining characteristic of all movements, big and small, is that they move history along, sometimes in significant ways. Knowing what they are and how social scientists study them are important tasks if we are to understand contemporary society and where it is headed.

In 2011, Time magazine selected the protester as its person of the year. This was partly because movements in opposition to repressive regimes exploded that year in North Africa and the Middle East. In both Egypt and Tunisia, the Mubarak and the Ben-Ali regimes were brought down by unexpected mass movements of political opposition. In Syria, a similar opposition movement took a different course. It spiraled into a civil war with casualties over 100,000 and a flow of refugees approaching 1.5 million. Many social movements voice wide-ranging demands for political change in these cases, demands for the overthrow of the old regime and the ushering in of a new, more democratic system.

Also that year, another wave of protests occurred in several Western countries in the form of the Occupy movement in the US, the 15-M (for May 15) movement in Spain, and large anti-austerity protests in the UK, Ireland, and Greece. These protests shared common themes that grew out of the global economic collapse, the complicity of political elites, and their failures regarding economic policy. These movements were less successful in achieving their immediate goals, but they did create networks of activists, linked by the new social media, which serve as the basis for continued social-change activism. They also elaborated new tactics of site occupations of central squares and plazas and radical participatory democracy that will have strategic effects in other future movements.

In addition, a huge but less bounded cultural shift is occurring in North America and Europe, again precipitated by a social movement. I have in mind the gay rights movement, a network of organizations and groups that are less in the headlines than the above two examples, but which have worked for decades to fight discrimination, promote equality, and change attitudes about homosexuality and marriage. In the US just twenty years earlier, the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned gay marriage at the federal level, was passed by the Clinton administration with little congressional opposition. Today, a majority of US citizens are not opposed to gay marriage. Ex-President Clinton (and his wife perhaps a future president) both publicly affirm that the Defense of Marriage Act was a mistake. While gay marriage still remains a contentious issue, it is fair to say that this shift in public opinion would not have occurred without the various campaigns of the gay rights movement.

These are different kinds of movements. Those that occurred as part of the Arab Spring were obviously political, and protesters risked a great deal taking action against repressive states. In democratic polities such as Spain and the United States, social movements are quite common, and at any given time the analyst finds numerous movements mobilizing on a wide variety of issues and claims. They are an important part of the political landscape whereby diverse groups and organizations promote their interests, make demands, and articulate their visions of change. The gay rights movement has political dimensions as it fights for marriage equality, which means that it must fight against legislation such as the Defense of Marriage Act and against the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in my home state of California. But it also has a cultural dimension in changing ideas about marriage, sexuality, and gendered performances that may be less apparent but no less important in the scope of social change. Numerous groups and organizations in the GLBT (for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) movement have contributed to this effort over the years in different ways.

It is a large undertaking to navigate the complexity of these political, cultural, and organizational elements in a research project, and the analyst must make decisions about where to begin, which groups to include and which not to, what to focus on and what to place aside. Moreover, every social researcher knows how essential it is to define one's terms precisely. A good starting place for this book is to clarify those decisions about how we come to know about a social movement its boundaries regarding which groups, ideas, and actions are included and which ones are not.