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The constitution of social movements: biography, relations and collectives

We would all agree that social movements are ‘collective’ ventures, for example, but what makes a venture count as collective? Is it a matter of numbers? If so, how many? Is it a matter of a type of interconnection between people, an organization or network? If so, how is that interconnection itself defined? Does ‘wearing the badge’ and ‘buying the T-shirt’ make one part of a movement or must one attend monthly meetings and engage in protest? And if the latter, what counts as protest? Would wearing the aforementioned badge count as a protest or must one stand in a group of three or more people waving a placard? There can be no decisive answers to these questions.

– Nick Crossley, Making Sense of Social Movements, Pg 2

While Crossley is undoubtedly correct about there being ‘no decisive answers’ to these questions, I like this quote because it delineates the contours of the issue: the social movement (macro), the interconnected networks within it (meso) and the varying forms of individual participation (micro) without which there would be no ‘social movement’ but to which the emergent agent cannot be adequately reduced. This is because the activity dependence of the social movement can best be understood in the past tense i.e. the present characteristics of the social movement are emergent from the past (inter)actions of those participating in it. It’s this introduction of temporality, as well as seeing collective agents as ontologically stratified, which precludes the collapse into a structurationist affirmation of social movements being constituted and reconstituted through the activity of the individuals within it.

What really interests me is the possibility of understanding social movements in a way which can incorporate the macro, meso and micro within the same frame of reference: so its nature as a ‘collective venture’ is explained in terms of the ‘interconnections between people’ and the activities which the people so interconnected engage in over time and the variable meanings they attach to this activity. So I guess my broader point is to try and advocate an approach to the ontology of collectives which builds from the ‘bottom up’, understanding the biographical patterns which lead people into patterned interaction towards shared ends but also how past cycles of such interaction led to the emergence of  constraints and enablements on the present interaction of participating individuals.

I confess to not having read more than the initial few pages of Crossley’s book (the first chapter is available for free online here) and, given the themes he addresses in his later work on relational sociology, I suspect there’s a lot which I’ll find useful in developing this line of thought. This is a literature I’m still largely unfamiliar with so I found Crossley’s overview of  two key strands very useful. Though it’s important to note that Crossley observes that the literature is more complex and differentiated than I’m making it sound by quoting these two paragraphs in isolation:

Contemporary retrospective accounts of what the collective behaviour approach entailed tend towards a gruesome caricature, reducing the model to little more than a foil for the newer theories . I do not subscribe to this straw model but it has uses so I will briefly outline it. According to many contemporary accounts (e.g. Oberschall 1973; Tilly
1978; McAdam 1982; Jenkins 1983; McAdam et al. 1988), the collective behaviour approach:

• portrays movement emergence as a reflex response to ‘grievances’, deprivations’, ‘anomie’, ‘structural strains’ or other such forms of hardship. The stereotypical collective behaviour theorist believes that objective hardships are both a necessary and a sufficient cause of protest and movement formation;

• portrays the protests and movements triggered by these hardships as irrational psychological responses; manifestations of ‘mob psychology’ or collective hysteria;

• portrays those who become involved in these ‘mobs’ as (previously) isolated individuals who are often not very well integrated into society;

• lumps social movements together with other assorted forms of ‘collective behaviour’, such as fashions, crazes and panics, without any due consideration for their distinctness and properly ‘political’ nature.

[…]

The emergence of the new replacement paradigm has come in a number of stages. Early developments tended to centre upon two key elements. First, a rational actor model of the social agent was appropriated, along with an economistic focus upon exchange relations in social life and the effects of the movement of resources between agents. Second, a structural ‘network’ model of social relations and social life was adopted. With these elements movement theorists from within the ‘resource mobilization’ approach were able to examine the balance of costs, rewards and incentives that provided agents with the motivation to become involved in struggle, and they were able to focus upon the block mobilization of whole communities. Many features of this resource mobilization approach have persisted in American movement analysis but by the 1980s they had been added to by a consideration of the ways in which political systems and processes variously open up and close down opportunities for protest, thereby affecting the flow of activism itself. Rational actors, it was argued, will tend to act when the opportunities for doing so effectively are greatest.

Each seems to be a prime example of what Margaret Archer (2007) calls the ‘two-stage model’ where subjective properties are imputed to agents as a ‘dummy for real and efficacious human subjectivity’. I’m reading Castells at the moment and his recent work could be construed as a much sophisticated instance of the same generic mistake: bringing subjective concerns (‘outrage’ and ‘hope’) into the account but doing so in an excessively psychologistic fashion.

Two-stage model:

  1. Structural and/or cultural properties objectively shape the situations that agents confront involuntarily and exercise powers of constraint and enablement in relation to –
  2. Subjective properties imputed to agents and assumed to govern their actions:
  • promotion of vested interests (critical realism)
  • instrumental rationality (rational choice theory)
  • habitus/induced repertoires (Bourdieu / discourse theory)

Three-stage model:

  1. Structural and cultural properties objectively shape the situations that agents confront involuntarily, and inter alia, possess generative powers of constraint and enablement in relation to –

  2. Subjects’ own constellations of concerns, as subjectively defined in relation to the three orders of natural reality: nature, practice and the social.

  3. Courses of action are produced through the reflexive deliberations of subjects who subjectively determine their practical projects in relation to their objective circumstances.

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