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Where the Action Is

Social change can be initiated at all three levels of social reality. At the macro level, increases in the valences of the forces driving the macro realm generate selection pressures on individuals and corporate units. For example, if a population grows, entrepreneurs in key institutional domains will need to create new kinds of corporate units and often new cultures attached to these units. If new productive technologies are invented, then the structure and culture of corporate units in the economy will change. As these change, so will corporate units in other institutional domains; and, potentially, so will the distribution of resources evident in the stratification system. Or, if problems of regulation increase because the level of inequality and stratification rises, new kinds of social control corporate units will be created to deal with protests and with social movement organizations (SMOs) demanding changes in the distribution of resources. Thus, anytime that selection pressures push for the development of new kinds of corporate units and their cultures, all other macro-level sociocultural formations may also be forced to change.

At the micro level of reality, change will occur when individuals cannot meet transactional needs and cannot comfortably status-make and take, role-take and make, and culture-take and make (normatize) in encounters embedded in corporate and categoric units. When these kinds of micro-level difficulties emerge, individuals will experience negative emotions, and if these emotions are aroused consistently among sufficient numbers of person, they will begin to push for social change, often by mobilizing for widespread conflict against organizations in various institutional domains. Hence, any time relatively large numbers of persons experience negative emotions and begin to feel aggrieved by the corporate and categoric-unit structures and their cultures, the potential for mobilization for change will increase.

At the meso level, individuals can become angry over their placement in devalued categoric units that are subject to discrimination that denies them access to valued resources. As a result, they begin to push for change at the micro level, or they can begin to organize at the meso level. As they do so, they begin to question meta-ideologies legitimating stratification as well as prejudicial stereotypes and status beliefs that have stigmatized their categoric units. Pressures for change can also emerge from corporate units that cannot secure resources in a given niche, that resent domination by other corporate units, that feel that exchanges of resources with other corporate units are unfair, or any other state of tension with other corporate units in institutional domains.

Whether change originates at the micro, meso, or macro levels, the actions bringing about this change will be carried out at the meso level of social organization. Individuals begin to organize into corporate units, whether confronting macro-level selection pressures, problems of integration with other corporate units, or arousal of negative emotions in encounters. Or there can be a mixture of change-generating situations, as is the case when increased stratification leads to escalated efforts at social control through domination or ideological mobilization by government that only escalates individuals’ sense of injustice at the micro level of encounters, thereby causing them to create or join an SMO or organizations that, if successful, force changes in corporate and categoric units and, potentially, key institutional domains or the stratification system. Whatever the origins of change, it is initially played out at the meso level as individuals become mobilized in groups and then organizations to pursue change, even if this pursuit brings conflict with members of categoric units or with incumbents of corporate units in various institutional domains.

Social Movements and Organizational Dynamics

I have relied on a number of useful reviews of the social movement literature, including Snow and Soule (2010), Snow et al. (2004), Lofland (1996), McAdam et al. (2001), Gamson (1990), Killian (1964), and Klandermans and de Weerd (2000).

I have perhaps overemphasized the similarity between organizational foundings and other dynamics, on the one side, and social movements on the other. But they all must survive in resource niches [see, e.g., McCarthy and Zald (1977, 2001), Tilly (1978), Edwards and McCarthy (2004), Curtis and Zucker (1973), Clemens and Minkoff (2004), Davis et al. (2008), Zald and McCarthy (1987)], and these niches are created by structural and cultural fields, just as they are for organizations as I emphasized in Chap. 6.

The Dynamics of Organizational Foundings and SMOs

The forces causing change in organizations within institutional domains are very similar to those pressures that cause the formation of SMOs. If change comes from selection pressures, then entrepreneurs mobilize resources to begin building a new kind of corporate unit, perhaps first a group that grows into an organization. The resources that entrepreneurs use in creating corporate units are in niches that have been created by structural and cultural fields that already exist at the macro and micro levels of social organization, as I examined in Chap. 6 on organizations. Of particular importance is the need for entrepreneurs to draw from cultural resource niches those systems of symbols capable of legitimating the new organizational form that is being created. The most effective frames in these efforts are those that can draw from existing cultural values, ideologies, and meta-ideologies and yet assemble these cultural symbols in a way that draws attention to the organization’s goals, while at the same time, signaling how the movement ideology meets the precepts of both the macro- and micro-level cultural fields.

All of these processes involved in creating new kinds of organizations within institutional domains also operate in the formation of SMOs (Davis et al. 2008). Selection pressures are what set off organizational innovation; the equivalent process for social movements’ formation is grievances that have been accumulating at the micro level of social reality. Grievances and the emotions that charge up grievances and prompt people to take action are like selection pressures because they push actors to develop new organizational formations. The constraints on social movements are also similar to those during the process of organizational foundings that drive the dynamics of institutional domains (see Chaps. 2, 3, and 6). And, as noted above, these fields are the fountainhead of resource in niches that those seeking to start a social movement must access if they are to be successful. These social movement entrepreneurs will, like anyone creating an organization, seek out resources of various kinds, including material (money and capital), demographic (people), technological (knowledge about manipulating environments), organizational (templates for building social structures), and cultural (symbols systems for organizing and legitimating). These resources are part of the structural and cultural fields of any corporate unit. As organizations draw resources from niches and use them to build up SMOs, these SMOs and their cultures and structures become part of the structural and cultural fields of other organizations. And so, as an SMO or a set of such organizations begin to emerge, their success will depend upon the resources that they can secure from various niches, and if successful, these SMOs then become part of the fields of not only other SMOs but all organizations within potentially all institutional domains. Particularly important are cultural resources that leaders use to frame the emerging SMO. Again, if possible, it is always better to draw from existing cultural fields of evaluative codes and use these to frame the goals of the SMO in ways that draw commitments from potential members of the movement, while at the same time legitimating these goals and their pursuit in the eyes of larger publics. Of course, more revolutionary movements may need to construct entirely new moral codes, or antiestablishment moral codes, but even here, reference to the failures of existing institutions to adhere to the moral codes of the society represents a better strategy than rejecting all of the moral codes that have historically legitimated the institutional order and the stratification system.

The Emotional Energy Behind Social Movements

The concept of collective behavior covers a wide range of phenomena from fads and fashions through various types of crowds and riots to larger-scale social movements and revolutions. At the meso level of social reality, the key processes revolve around the formation of SMO’s—as I have emphasized above. Such corporate units can be small and rather poorly organized, large and highly organized, or even part of a network of organizations pursuing more or less the same goals. Even when more spontaneous events like riots occur, where collective organization is minimal, they are often offshoots of frustrations over the lack of success of existing SMOs, and/or they are the first actions that will evolve into an SMO or a set of SMOs. Even a revolution can be considered a SMO willing to use violence to achieve its goals. Thus, by focusing on the dynamics of SMOs, we position ourselves conceptually to understand why and how change can occur at the meso level of social reality and, then, beyond to the macro and micro levels of reality.

The energy driving a social movement is always the negative emotional arousal of individuals at the micro-level of reality (Turner 2008; Goodwin et al. 2001, 2004; Goodwin and Jasper 2006). This arousal occurs in response to some condition in the society that individuals believe is problematic. Most often, the problematic condition is macro level, revolving around grievances targeting key actors and corporate units in institutional domains, societies, or system of societies. At times, social movements can be more localized, focusing on conditions in particular corporate units, and yet, since corporate units are embedded in communities and institutional domains, there is often a more macro level set of condition-generating grievances at the meso level. Indeed, many social movements start at the meso level in a corporate unit in a particular community or in protests over treatment of members of a categoric unit, and from this localized starting point, the movement spreads, especially when the grievances that initiated the movement are widely shared across a society and, potentially, a system of societies. Such is particularly likely to be the case when there are structural and cultural equivalences among organizations; once protest begins in one, it will generally resonate with individuals of other structurally and culturally equivalent organizations, leading individuals in these equivalent organizations to mount their own protests. For example, it is not a coincidence that prison riots in one location often spread to other prisons, until crushed by the forces of social control. Similarly, the urban riots of the 1960s in the United States spread across the nation because their participants—urban African Americans living in impoverished ghettos and subject to discrimination and exclusion from resource-distributing organizations—were in structural and culturally in equivalent positions. Or the student-led anti-Vietnam war movement spread across college campuses because of structural, cultural, and demographic equivalences among their participants. In all of these acts of collective protest that spread and, eventually, led to formation of SMOs, the cultural and structural fields were roughly the same, and once the negative emotions aroused in micro-level encounters had built up to the point where collective outbreaks would occur in one corporate unit, these fields will impose similar constraints, while creating similar resources niches that SMO leaders would seek to mine.

Emotions can run high among participants of all social movements; indeed, the more intense are the emotions aroused, the more motivated are individuals “to do something” about their grievances. But some conditions generate more emotions than others in the emergence of social movements. As a rough generalization, conditions that deny large numbers of individuals’ access to valued resources are likely to generate more intense emotions than conditions that do not affect people’s perceived ability to secure valued resources. True, the environmental movement, for instance, is often framed as trying to protect people’s rights to secure a most valued resource (the natural environment), but the emotions aroused are not as intense as is the case when people have experienced high levels of discrimination and, thereby, lack basic resources like jobs, education, health care, and housing to sustain a normal lifestyle. Thus, social movements arising from the consequences of inequality and stratification will, as they emerge, be more emotional and potentially volatile. Even social movements that arise out of revolutionary protest, such as the protests that swept across a number of Middle Eastern countries in 2011, were ultimately a protest against the lack of access to jobs, political rights, and education—that is, the symbolic media of money, power, and learning, at a minimum. Add to these sources of increased emotion the coercive practices of repressive states to maintain order, and it is easy to see how the emotional intensity of participants can reach very high levels. Since organizations within institutional domains distribute resources unequally, they generally become the target of mobilized individuals, especially if an SMO has begun to frame and thus channel attributions for the emotional arousal and grievances of participants.

When discrimination denies individuals in various categoric units access to key resource-distributing organizations in economy, polity, law, and education, this exclusion increases the level of negative emotional energy because individuals cannot verify identities, receive profits in exchanges, or experience group inclusion, nor can they status-make, role-may, or culture-make in organizations providing the most valuable resources (Turner 2002a, b, 2008, 2010b). The anger that arises from exclusion is compounded by the escalating sense of relative deprivation when the comparison points for making judgments about justice and fairness are those categories of others who have access to the organization that have been denied to members of devalued categoric units (Jasso 2001; Turner 2010c).

The same dynamic operates when there is consolidation of locations in the divisions of labor (usually lower-ranking positions) with devalued categoric-unit memberships. Negative emotions escalate when those in higher-ranking positions are used as a comparison point for calculating the resources received by those confined to lower-ranking positions. These emotional experiences circulate across encounters with fellow categoric-unit members both inside and outside the organizations involved (in neighborhoods and other corporate units such as churches, clubs, gangs). What initially emerges are diffuse and somewhat chaotic generalized beliefs about the causes of individuals’ distress and anger (Smelser 1962). As emphasized above, these generalized beliefs can be sharpened by framing activities of leaders of emerging SMOs, but long before framing occurs, individuals have developed beliefs and have made attributions about why they have been discriminated against, and even more importantly, who or what is discriminating.

As with all emotional experiences, then, individuals are making attributions. These already have a distal bias, fueled by people’s desire not to blame self for their fate or arouse the anger of others in local encounters (Lawler 2001; Turner 2008). But in the case of SMOs, it is not difficult to make an external attribution when one has been a clear target of discrimination by an organization. Thus, a key part of generalized beliefs and framing is the attribution process where negative emotional experiences are likely to be blamed on targets outside of local encounters. Thus, the corporate unit as whole may be blamed, perhaps alongside blame meted out to members of categoric units who have actually done the discriminating. And if there is consistency across organizations in diverse domains about the categoric-unit memberships of those who are discriminating, then counter-prejudicial beliefs among the victims of discrimination will arise toward members of these categoric units, and these prejudicial beliefs will be incorporated into generalized beliefs and framing activities by SMO leaders. If the discrimination is chronic and persistent, then attributions may even go to the macro-structural level, targeting key institutional domains, the stratification system, the whole society, and, at times, intersocietal systems.

The same process unfolds for other grievances, but not to the same extent as grievances over stratification, particularly when class memberships are consolidated with non-class-based categoric-unit memberships. Thus, inequalities become the source of the most intense and volatile social movements, often punctuated by violent conflict as generalized beliefs are forming and even more so when leaders are sharpening generalized beliefs through framing. There is intense emotional arousal without the controls of fully formed SMOs that, eventually, will organize participants for more strategic action. Individuals have already made some attributions, and a “precipitating event” (Smelser 1962) can set off an episode of anger-driven and violent collective behavior. It is the intermediate phase in a social movement, then, that collective violence is most likely can occur because intense anger, especially anger fueled by shame and humiliation, can arouse emotions to the point that individuals are willing to incur the risks and costs of violent protests against centers of power and authority. Later, as the SMO gains structure and as framing focuses beliefs and attributions toward specific targets, protest will take a decidedly tactical turn.

And, as emphasized above, SMOs formed to fight a cause not associated with stratification tend to be less violent. The environmental movement, for instance, has been less violent than those driven by emotions fueled by inequality and discrimination. Part of this is that the intensity of emotions aroused is not so great, nor are identities such as social identities or even core identities as implicated in the movement. Moreover, whatever their effects on inequalities in the distribution of resources, this aspect of a set of organizational activities is the target of grievances; rather, harm to the environment is what is driving the movement. Only when identities become tied up in the movement and when the actions of movement members become highly moralized and charged with negative emotions will violence occur, and in most cases, this violence is from breakaway groups from the larger SMOs that have framed the causes of environment degradation and the changes that need to occur. More typically, however, SMOs remain within accepted boundaries of “legitimate” protests. Indeed, all over the world but especially in democratic countries, these organizations have been quite successful in securing material, organizational, demographic, technological, and, eventually, cultural resources that keep them operating within the arenas of politics and law.

Mobilization Against Centers of Authority

Social movements can begin in many locations in a society: communities and neighborhoods (e.g., ghettos), particular organizations (universities, schools, prisons, and churches), organizations with conflicts of interests (oil companies, Sierra Club), and members of categoric units consolidated with stratification (e.g., gender, ethnicity, age, and religious affiliation). The greater is the underlying anger and frustration of individuals and the more their grievances have been moralized by initial generalized beliefs and, then, reframed by SMO leaders, the more likely will an SMO be able to secure resources in demographic, material, organizational, cultural, and if necessary technological resource niches; and hence, the more effective will such SMOs be, at least in the short run.

A social movement almost always targets a center of dominance within institutional domains—for example, polity, economy, law, religion, and education. Virtually every domain, except perhaps kinship in modern societies, has core organizations or sets of organizations that exert disproportionate power and authority that enable them to control, to varying degrees, (a) the flow of resources in an institutional domain and (b) the formation of ideologies and meta-ideologies. As grievances build up at the micro level, generalized beliefs and, later, frames lead individuals to target organizations in these centers of authority (Snow and Soule 2010; McAdam et al. 2001; Tarrow 1998; Turner and Killian 1987).

Social movements thus represent challenges to existing structures and their cultures that have, over time, increased negative emotional energy at the level of encounters. The greater is the negative emotional arousal of individuals, and the more and the longer these individuals have been distressed, then the more likely are existing conditions and/or actions of corporate units in institutional domains to set in motion the articulation of emotionally charged grievances that provide motivational energy for individuals to join or form an SMO.

Grievances and Mobilization

Whatever the perceived source of grievances, these grievances represent a consolidation of many types and levels of negative emotions that cause the formation of generalized beliefs that, in turn, target centers of authority that are perceived to be problematic. Even before much organization of the aggrieved has actually taken place, individuals normally will have to construct the necessary generalized beliefs, which, in essence, provide the early attributions for who or what is responsible for their negative emotions and grievances. Generalized beliefs are, however, just that: generalized. These beliefs are fueled by diffuse negative emotions that consolidate into grievances that initially bring into focus potential targets of external attributions. As I have emphasized, the negative emotions pushing individuals to make feel aggrieved and to make external attributions for these emotions are typically a bit diffuse and unfocused. Grievances become more focused through the framing process.Footnote 1 Leaders of emerging SMOs begin to give more articulate expression of grievances and to add more detail and direction to generalized beliefs. At a minimum, framing involves (a) denoting the problematic conditions; (b) targeting the key organizations (and individuals or members of categoric units in these organizations) that are seen as the causes of ­problematic conditions; (c) challenging their authority and/or right of organizations to engage in activities that are defined as problematic; (d) portraying these actions of organizations in negative moral terms, such as being unjust, unfair, harmful, corrupt, and other negative characterizations; (e) couching such portrayals in even more moral terms by, if possible, invoking generalized symbolic media (for discourse) and existing values, ideologies, and meta-ideologies as the moral percepts in making this portrayal; and (f) further moralizing the goals of the SMO as in the “best interests” of all individuals (except the “evil” leaders and incumbents in the “demonized” organizations) and the society (if not world) as a whole. This last element of framing is important because it can pull individuals into the SMO and, if successful, can make meeting needs to verify role, social, and perhaps even core identities dependent on participation in the SMO. Typically, only the leaders of SMO go this far in investing the verification of identities in the SMO, but if only a part of an identity of a member becomes vested in the SMO, and even if only for a delimited amount of time, these investments of identities go a long way in building up the SMO.Footnote 2 And if highly visible persons (e.g., celebrities and politicians) join the SMO, they increase its legitimacy in the eyes of larger publics. Even as framing increases the emotions driving the SMO, it also channels these emotions in more strategic directions which, in turn, reduces the likelihood of violence and gives further legitimacy to the social movement.

Incentives, Recruitment, and Social Control in SMOs

Incentive Systems.

It is clear from the large literature on SMOs that, even among aggrieved individuals, participation in social movements is relatively low and that, among those who do participate, this participation is rarely long term (Snow and Soule 2010: 110–115). Like any organization, an SMO must offer incentives revolving around (a) normative and moral commitments and (b) utilitarian calculations of costs/investments relative to rewards.

As the discussion incentive processes in organizations in Chap. 6 outlines, an emphasis on normative, utilitarian, or coercive incentives, are difficult to balance, and in the case of SMOs, the utilitarian system is weak because most incumbents are not paid for their participation and coercive incentives are typically not considered legitimate for a voluntary organization. Thus, a great burden is placed upon the capacity of an SMO to (a) charge up emotional commitments to the moralized goals of the organization, which can represent one type of non-monetary reward, and (b) create group solidarities within the SMO, which provide additional non-monetary rewards. As I emphasized in Chap. 6, organizations that can generate strong commitments to their cultures will also likely generate non-monetary private goods (Olsen 1965; Hechter 1987) that can become highly valuable to individuals—goods such as the emotions attached to solidarity among participants. The more an SMO can generate this kind of emotional response among its participants in iterated encounters, the more likely will the emerging SMO be able to recruit and retain members, as long as these members perceive that the SMO is being effective in pursuing its moralized agenda.

However, the costs to receive these rewards can become high and, indeed, can be increased, the more involved participants become in the SMO’s activities. First, SMO activities can be time-consuming and reduce the time available for other rewarding activities, whether or not money is involved. Second, there can be direct costs to participants (e.g., travel expenses, childcare, and loss of time at work). Third, there can be risks of physical harm as a result of coercive responses from those resisting the social movement or social/psychological harms from surveillance by centers of power and authority (Kahneman and Tversky 1979; McAdam 1988; Nepstadt and Smith 1999; Taylor and Raeburn 1995; Snow and Soule 2010: 114–115). The higher these costs, the more difficult will it be to retain participants in the long run, unless additional incentives can be offered by the SMO.

One additional incentive is the rewards that come from verification of self, and thus, the more individuals’ role, group, and core identities are dependent upon the reinforcement from individuals who are also participants in an SMO, the higher will be the rewards for participants, and hence, the less likely will their defection become, even under conditions of high costs (Gecas 2000). It is for these reasons that SMOs built around grievances among members of categoric units are often more enduring; the goal of the organization is inexorably tied to the social identities of its members and participants, thereby making participation in the SMO an automatic source of identity verification.

Moreover, once one identity is vested in an SMO, other identities may follow. If the social identity revolving around categoric-unit membership is reinforced by participation in a movement organization and if additional identities—role, group, and core identities—lodged in this social identity attached to categoric-unit membership, then individuals can increase their rewards in relation to costs. They now have added another group identity—the SMO—attached to the social identity of being a member of a categoric unit. Thus, a participant increases the number of identities (member of categoric-unit membership  +  member of a social movement), which provides not only for the verification of self but other transactional needs, like group inclusion and increased payoffs in utilitarian calculations. The reward increases even further because the SMO offers consistent reinforcement and verification of what is often perceived by others outside the SMO as a stigmatized social identity.

Another additional incentive comes from participants’ relations in the structural environment of an SMO. If participants are also embedded in communities and networks that overlap with the SMO, the rewards of ­members and participants will be higher because they come from within and outside of the SMO, and if identities in communities, groups, and dense networks outside the organization are reinforced by participation in the SMO, a very powerful incentive is added to the mix of reinforcers, with individuals becoming willing to incur higher costs to receive these rewards.

Yet another incentive for accelerating and extending reinforcement processes that come from networks in communities is the extension of communities in cyberspace. Communication technologies, as Durkheim (1893) recognized long before cell phones or computers were invented, increase material and moral density. These dense cyber networks provide a constant source of reinforcement for SMO participation at very low costs (simply turning on communication devices), and yet, they provide an additional level of reward beyond that inhering in reinforcement through direct face-to-face interactions in networks not mediated by information technologies. Another non-monetary reinforcement is participants’ increased sense of efficacy, which always increases the level of positive emotions experienced. Members of an SMO perceive that they are, as I noted earlier, “doing something” about their grievances when they participate in an SMO, and when a sense of efficacy occurs in joint activities (like those in an SMO), the more likely are the positive emotions aroused to increase commitments to the SMO (Lawler 2001; Lawler et al. 2009).

Recruitment.

To some extent, recruitment of members (i.e., access to demographic niches) will increase as the rewards exceed costs and investments of participation. Yet, for an individual who has not yet joined the SMO, knowledge about the psychological value of additional reinforces may not exist. Yet, some of the costs may be already known because many are clearly visible, thereby tipping the utilitarian calculation against joining SMO (McAdam 1986; Nepstadt and Smith 1999; Schussman and Soule 2005; Snow and Soule 2010:114). There are several strategies that can overcome, at least some of the time, these calculations.

One is the reward value of acting on one’s moral beliefs, and if the leaders of an SMO can frame the goals of the organization and moralize them by drawing from symbols in the SMO’s cultural fields and niches, they may be able to find the right members in demographic niches and entice them to join. For example, I had never been involved in an SMO in high school during the 1950s or even during my early college years, but I became a participant in SMOs in the civil rights social movement sector (SMS) in the mid-1960s because of the gratification of doing “something right” about an injustice that my parents had emphasized during my entire childhood. Only as I was trained did I learn of the dangers, but by that time, solidarity with my fellow members of the SMO was sufficiently rewarding for me to discount these dangers. It also helped that I was young, and indeed, the young in general are less likely to be as risk aversive as older age cohorts.

Younger age cohorts are generally more daring, and thus, their members will generally underestimate the costs of what, for example, awaited me: clubbing by “smokey bear” sheriffs in the American south and bites from German Shepherd dogs that had been released to “control” demonstrators (German Shepherds are still, nonetheless, my favorite breed; smokey bear sheriffs are not, however, my favorite brand of sheriff). Yet, the solidarity that I felt with my fellow protestors, even as we were symbolically marched to jail, easily mitigated my fear.

Another strategy for recruitment is to have potential members join a relatively safe collective action by an SMO. The larger the number of individuals in such actions and the more its leaders articulate the SMO’s framed message, the more will what Durkheim (1984[1912]) termed emotional “effervescence” emerge from the collective action. The power of people chanting in unison and marching toward a goal (usually a location within a community) is emotionally engulfing. Acting crowds mobilize emotions, enhance commitments to ideologies, and activate a sense of transcendent power, as Durkheim and even Gustove Le bon (1960[1895]) recognized a hundred years ago. This effervescence can have a longer emotional half-life if individuals are invited to come to the SMOs’ headquarters after collective actions that have generated Durkheimian effervescence; they can now experience direct interpersonal solidarities inside the organization itself. As Durkheim also recognized, totems or symbols toward which emotionally charged rituals are given also become important in recruitment and in “holding the lines” in collective protests. For example, the oversized United Farm Worker’s flag in the early days of Cesar Chavez’s early protest marches in the agricultural fields of California was a powerful totem that symbolized the goals, ideologies, and solidarities of members (Jenkins and Perrow 1977), and it led to the institutionalization of an SMO (United Farm Workers) into a union. Indeed, organizations of any type employ this “Durkheimian strategy,” especially when risks, fears, and costs are high and need to be mitigated by collective solidarity. For instance, the recruiting pitches by the army and marines in the United States document focus on group solidarity more than the dangers of being killed in combat (note: the air force does not need to make the same pitch because the danger is less and the incentives of acquiring an marketable skill—piloting and airplane repair—are high).

Overlaps of SMOs with communities and social networks also operate to help recruiting because there will be positive reinforcement (from friends, family, and other members of local networks) for decisions to join the movement (Diani and McAdam 2003, 2004; Dixon and Roseigno 2003). These sources of reinforcement are often just enough tip calculations of risks, costs, and rewards in favor of joining or participating in an SMO. The more dense are these networks and the more they overlap with community (neighborhood) structures, the greater will be the force of the social networks on decisions; and the more likely will individuals in these dense networks be recruited successfully.

Framing of social movement goals and moral mandates is also critical in recruiting (Snow and Benford 1998, 1992). Often SMOs will need to reframe their beliefs and ideology until these resonate with a pool of potential members in a demographic niche. In the environmental movement sector, for example, organizations, such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Environmental Defense Fund, and Nature Conservancy, all reframed their ideologies to penetrate particular demographic and material resource niches. Each pitched a somewhat different variant of this generalized belief, and during their early days of mobilization, this framing and reframing was very evident, especially as each environmental SMO sought not only members but their membership fees (a material niche tied to a demographic one). The key point is that framing focuses the general message of SMOs by moralizing the cause and its goals, and as this framing occurs, especially in media-dominated societies, the moral beliefs of potential recruits take on more focus and emotional energy, thereby making it easier to recruit members.

Recruitment also works with the targeting of diverse categoric-unit memberships as potential recruits. Older people such as I are asked for money because we have not much left of our bodies to throw into protests; younger age cohorts typically become the “shock troops” of protests. Movements that revolve around righting injustices of members in certain categoric units—for example, women, gays and lesbians, and ethnic minorities—always frame the goals of the SMO for specific demographic niches. For examples, the Black Panther Party in Oakland sought angry young African-American males (Austin 2006); the Weather Underground recruited angry college students (Braungard and Braungart 1992; Jacobs 1997); the gay/lesbian (later adding transgender) sought individuals in these categories, plus “straight” sympathizers; the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference sought black members, but in order to garner more resources—both demographic and material—they recruited non-blacks to participate in joint SMO activities (Andrews 2004; McAdam 1982, 1988; Morris 1984, 1992). Thus, framing is tailored to demographic niches, and often to additional niches, and for each of these niches, a certain amount of reframing occurs depending upon the nature of the resources sought. Reframing intensifies the emotions driving generalized beliefs and focuses these beliefs for different constituencies, arousing emotions of these constituencies to the point where they will participate in some manner in the SMO’s activities. Thus, the more successful is an SMO in drawing symbols from cultural fields and resource niches to include in its framing of ideologies to diverse constituencies in demographic and material resource niches, the more likely will this SMO endure.

Social Control.

In any organization where there is team collaboration, free-riding can occur (Olsen 1965; Hechter 1987), where some incumbents do not contribute their share of work while enjoying the rewards that come through the efforts of others. In organizations where social control is achieved by normative means revolving around commitments to the goals and culture of the organization, free-riding can be reduced if individuals informally monitor and sanction each other for inadequate effort and participation. As SMOs grow, they will generally begin to employ a staff, with money as the main compensation, although commitments to SMO goals and group solidarities can also be part of the intrinsic “pay package.” But still, the larger an SMO becomes, the more will it routinize charisma by creating a rational-legal bureaucracy for meeting organizational goals (Weber 1968[1922]), and once this process ensures, problems of free-riding will increase. Still, if incumbents gain additional rewards (beyond money) for verifying role, social, group, and even core identities in work groups within the organization and if they derive extra rewards from a sense of efficacy in realizing moralized goals, then the normative social control system will still dominate, with low-cost informal monitoring of free-riding and sanctioning operating as powerful mechanisms of social control. And if incumbents are rewarded by private joint goods ­generated from group inclusion and solidarity (Hecther 1987) and if these joint goods become highly rewarding and not easily gained in other ­organizations, then social control will be that much easier and even more powerful.

Because SMOs are in the moralizing business as they frame and articulate ideologies drawn from cultural fields and niches, they are biased toward normative over utilitarian or coercive control (see Chap. 6, pp. 213 to 302). Yet, once the organization becomes larger, the vertical division of labor will also grow, and as expansion of the vertical division of labor built around differences in authority occurs, free-riding may increase, and if it does, then more emphasis will be placed upon formal monitoring by positions in the vertical division of labor. Moreover, hierarchies inevitably create tensions, turf wars, resentments, and counter-authority cultures among some incumbents, thereby forcing evermore formal monitoring and sanctioning by punishments and incentives. And, as these processes ensue, the SMO loses much of its charismatic character and fervor as leaders become part of the vertical division of labor and as formal monitoring and sanctioning increase as a proportion of all mechanisms of social control. It is at this point that an SMO morphs into a regular organization, operating like those analyzed in Chap. 6. And the more successful an organization has been in achieving its goals, the more likely will it have become bureaucratized and, hence, the less will it be able to sustain the moral framing that allowed it to grow and be successful. It will become, in essence, one more organization in a particular resource niche, and it will under the same competitive pressures of other organizations in a niche where density in the population of organizations has increased competition for resources. It will have lost much of its brim and fire, and as memberships within the SMO decline, and the proportion of paid administrative staff to volunteers increases. The result is that overhead costs relative to material resource flows into the organization may, in the end, decline or lead to the death of the organization’s resource niche.

Environments, Fields, and Niches of SMOs

Cultural and structural fields constrain the actions of those being mobilized, along several dimensions. First, many of the resources that SMOs require inhere in the niches generated by structural and cultural fields of SMOs. Organizational, material, and demographic resources are located in niches created by structural fields and their modes of integration, whereas cultural resource niches are formed by the dynamics of cultural fields. Thus, the nature and levels of resources that can be mined by an emerging SMO reside in the resource niches that, in large part, are organized by macro-level fields.

Second, macro-level fields also provide structural and cultural templates that, on the one hand, are a resource but, on the other, operate as a field that constantly imposes constraints on how an SMO becomes organized and on what strategies and tactics this SMO can pursue. Thus, much like organizations of any kind, SMOs are organizations that operate in fields and that seek resources generated by these fields. The success of any SMO depends upon its ability to use constraints imposed by fields in developing goals and ideologies that appeal to sufficiently large numbers of persons in a society, and upon their ability to extract resources from material, demographic, organizational, and cultural niches. Let me first begin with the constraints and resources imposed and posed by cultural fields.

Cultural Fields of SMOs

The cultural field of any given SMO consists of (1) macro-level texts, values, ideologies, meta-ideologies, and institutional norms; (2) micro-level emotionally charged generalized beliefs that have formed as a result of individuals’ experiences in (a) meeting transactional needs and (b) seeking to “take” and “make” status, roles, and cultural norms, while navigating through situational ecology and demography within corporate units; and (3) the systems of culture built up by (a) corporate units and (b) categoric units.

Macro-level Cultural Fields.

As with organizations, the degree of consistency among and integration of texts, values, ideologies, meta-ideologies, and institutional norms establishes the basic cultural field for all corporate units, including SMOs. When value premises are consistent and when their general moral premises are then pulled into ideologies and meta-ideologies that are internally consistent, this combination of consistency and embedding of the system of moral codes in a society represents a highly restrictive cultural field. If there is widespread consensus over the elements of this restrictive field, the options for leaders in SMOs to frame their movement ideology are limited. The best they can do is to use the elements of this cultural field and reframe them into a movement ideology that appears to follow from the moral codes of a society. As a tactic, this kind of framing is most likely to resonate with potential participant of the movement, even if it is not highly radical. For example, the civil rights movement in the United States was eventually successful because it did not articulate new moral premises; rather, it was able to frame the movement ideology in terms of living up to the existing system of moral codes in a society. In contrast, the Black Panther SMO eventually failed because it was more radical and attacked core ideologies in American society.

Yet, even with a relatively consistent and integrated set of moral premises, as is evident in the United States, it may take time for leaders to frame the movement ideology so that it resonates with these codes. The feminist, gay-lesbian-transgender, and environmental movements were for many decades viewed with hostility by various sectors of the society, and such is still the case even today. But, with reframing the ideology as SMOs in these SMSs, the movement ideologies of these SMOs have been able to use American culture to their advantage, and while these movements still arouse hostility and even countermovements, there is much more agreement by the broader public with the ideologies than three decades ago. Indeed, these movements are now past their charismatic stage and are well routinized and, in some cases such as the women’s movement, so successful that they are now somewhat diminished in their visibility and power, and indeed, the entire SMS for the women’s movement is depleted.

When moral codes are not consistent, nor well integrated through embedding in each other, there are many more options for movement leaders when they frame their movement ideology. However, it is less likely that there will be consensus over inconsistent and poorly integrated moral codes; the result is that framing of a movement ideology will not resonate with everyone in a society, and hence, the movement ideology will have to make appeals for resources in narrow resource niches. Moreover, once articulated, the movement ideology will likely violate the interpretation of moral codes of larger segments of the population. Ironically, this potentially hostile juxtaposition of movement ideologies and the beliefs of individuals and corporate units in various domains creates a complementary opposition that sustains the intensity of emotions backing up these two sets of ideologies.

Indeed, it is the tension between moral codes of the society and the relevant ideologies that can enable SMOs to secure resources, albeit in somewhat narrower niches. In fact, some SMOs have been successful in pursuing this counter-ideological strategy, at least for a time, in even well-integrated cultures. For instance, the Black Panthers and Black Muslim movements gained a following among the targeted categoric units (African Americans) by virtue of articulating a threatening ideology. But confrontational framings of movement ideologies invite not only counter-movement but also interventions by the power of the state which, if sufficient, can thwart movement goals, as was the case with the Black Panthers (most of whose leaders died in violence or were sent to jail) and less so for Black Muslims who, even with the death of their charismatic leader (Mallcom X), have survived and long ago moved into the routinization phase of a social movement (indeed, the largest demographic segment of Muslims in the United States is, by far, “Black” Muslims). This routinization was facilitated by American cultural codes stipulating religious freedom, coupled with an in-place set of moral codes of Islam as well as a centuries-old organizational template for organizing places of worship. Thus, SMOs that articulate moral codes that are deviant from the mainstream of a society will require highly specialized resource niches in which to secure material, demographic, organizational, and cultural resources, and if they can do so, they will endure, albeit at the margins of the institutional domains in which they operate. In contrast, SMOs that seek significant change will need to gather resources more broadly by drawing from accepted cultural fields, while seeking resources from many diverse resource niches (created by fields).

Micro-level Cultural Fields.

Beliefs emerge from interactions in encounters where individuals have similar experiences in meeting transactional needs, in normatizing, in status-making and taking, in role-making and taking, and in navigating situational ecology and demography. These experiences can occur among incumbents in one particular corporate unit, thereby generating local beliefs about sets of groupings within the divisions of labor of a particular organization and/or district(s) in a given community. The beliefs that emerge specify grievances and make attributions as to the cause of these grievances, but it is the organization that is the target of the attributions. These beliefs can lead to alienation of incumbents and even to the formation of an anti-organizational culture fed by solidarity among dissatisfied incumbents—as was outlined in Chap. 6.

SMOs do not arise from discontents in a single organization, however, but from more general discontents across organizations in diverse institutional domains. When organizations or communities are structurally and culturally equivalent, with counter-organizational cultures developing at the same locations in their divisions of labor, this larger playing field can fill up with SMOs, once the generalized beliefs, charged with negative emotions, move out from a single organization or community. Of course, most SMOs are created by leaders who recognize these structural and cultural equivalences and who, with this knowledge, begin to frame the SMOs’ goals in ways that resonate with the micro culture of discontent across organizations in particular niches. And the greater is the number of individuals at structurally equivalent positions in organizations or communities, the more potential there is for a successful SMO formation.

If this discontent is consolidated with memberships in categoric units—for example, ethnicity, gender, class, and age—then there is both a ­meso-level culture (that associated with categoric-unit status beliefs) and micro-level culture (of discontent and grievances) on which leaders of SMOs can draw. Thus, consolidation of parameters marking categoric units with either (a) exclusions from resource-distributing corporate units (typically organizations and communities) or (b) confinement to certain lower-level positional locations in divisions of labor within corporate units operates like a supercharger in arousing negative emotions. These emotions push individuals in their encounters to begin forming generalized beliefs that articulate grievances and make initial attributions for the causes of these grievances.

Large-scale movements in a SMS, such as the union movement in the United States, came from the structural and cultural equivalence of workers in organizations within various industries; the civil rights movement came from a combination of highly prejudicial stereotypes and status beliefs, backed up by split labor markets (created to mollify white workers threatened by desperate black labor willing to work for less), exclusion from many corporate units in almost all institutional domains, low and highly visible ceilings restricting mobility for those blacks who managed to find positions in divisions of labor, and partitioning of neighborhoods in communities by “race”; the women’s movement was fueled by equivalences in status and roles, and status beliefs legitimating these, in groups like families and work groups inside of organizations in many institutional domains.

There was, to extend Neil Smelser’s notion of “structural conduciveness,” cultural conduciveness increasing the likelihood of SMO formation generated in encounters (embedded in meso-level structures and their cultures). These micro cultures of discontent generated in micro-level encounters constitute a very large cultural niche that can be exploited by leaders of SMOs who can frame generalized beliefs in this culture in ways that appeal to individuals, to other sectors of the society as a whole, and, if the framing is really successful, to institutional actors like those in polity and law that have the power to change institutional arrangements. Thus, while the micro culture is the source of much of the emotional energy that fuels an SMO or set of SMOs in SMS niches, it is through framing and reframingFootnote 3 of generalized beliefs in a micro-level field that channels this energy into an SMO.

Meso-level Cultural Fields.

As I emphasized above, categoric-unit ­cultures represent one important mesolevel field constraining SMOs. This culture is a mix of prejudicial and stigmatizing status beliefs targeting devalued categoric units—for example, lower classes, ethnic minorities, even women, non-Christians, the aged—that have been drawn from meta-ideologies legitimating stratification and from the culture generated by members of more valued categoric units. For example, one cultural field is composed of the status beliefs about members of the lower class, coupled with the culture that has emerged by virtue of their resource shares, segregation in neighborhoods, high rates of interaction, and endogamy in marriage and reproduction. This culture is both the field and resource niche of SMOs that want to focus on class issues, as would have been the case in Europe, whereas Americans have tended to avoid cultural framings that invoke beliefs about class and reframe them into questions of disadvantage, especially disadvantages that are not individuals’ fault (just bad luck) or that are the consequence of unfair discrimination. For example, the short-lived but highly effective War on Poverty in the United States was a combination of pressure from SMOs in various sectors, but mostly class and minority categoric units (primarily African Americans but others as well) that were able to reframe the issue as one of poverty and the harms to society and individuals touched by poverty. In this way, more volatile issues like “race” and “class” were sidestepped, allowing SMOs to exert political pressure by moralizing in a new frame such issues of social class and ethnic discrimination. When reframed in this way, the costs of the War on Poverty could be legitimated because they resonated with values and ideologies emphasizing equality of opportunity.

Similarly, the union movement in the United States was framed in terms of the exploitation of labor by “greedy capitalists.” This frame was not initially successful, and the episodic violence of the SMOs (early unions) also worked against achieving a successful frame that could be accepted by the population at large. Yet, violence always threatens polity, and over several decades, the implicit threat of political instability, coupled with fine-tuning of frames around issues of fairness and justice (“fair pay for a day’s work”), gave the unionization movement more cultural traction, and then, as core and powerful players in the economy began to negotiate with labor unions to secure some stability in their labor markets, unions were able to secure laws supporting their rights. Thus, the eventual success of the union movement depended upon reframing of the ideologies of economic organizations in response to (a) mass mobilizations and threats of violence by white workers (blacks were brought in as strike breakers in many northeast factories, thereby escalating violence against former slaves, which only increased the threat to polity) and to (b) reframing of the goals of unions in terms that were more resonant with macro-level culture and yet supportive of the micro-level culture of discontent that has arisen among workers, vast sectors of whom were structurally and culturally equivalent. Thus, the more an SMO can frame and reframe so that meso-level cultures are reconciled with macro-level cultures, while being resonant with the emotionally charged micro-level cultures of those being mobilized, the more powerful will an SMO ideology become and the more likely will it be copied by other SMOs in an SMS or set of related niches, as well as the general population and key organizational actors in institutional domains.

Structural Fields of SMOs

Macro-level Structural Fields.

The configuration of mechanisms involved in integrating institutional domains constitutes the most important field of an SMO because the operations of these mechanisms increase or decrease the opportunities for SMO mobilization. When segmentation dominates as an integrative mechanism, as it often does within resource niches of an SMO, the structural template of successful SMOs in a SMS is most likely to be adopted by new SMOs. Yet, as density in the SMS increases, escalating competition and selection make it likely that some will fade away as their members are attracted to other SMOs in the niche, while other SMOs may adopt new strategies to secure resources such as specialization or movement to a new niche.

When domination is the primary mechanism of integration, social movements are less likely to emerge because of the reproduction of dominance–subordinate relations among organizations in each institutional domain. Any mobilization will be viewed as a threat to the system of hierarchal control. If polity is highly centralized and able to use coercive force and its administrative base of power to monitor and sanction the activities of wayward organizations and potential SMOs, then the political opportunity structure will close up the niches of resources available for SMO formation.Footnote 4

Even if a society is less hierarchical with diminished direct control by polity, powerful core organizations can limit SMO mobilization. They will be able to dominant discourse using the generalized symbolic medium of a domain and the eventual formation of ideologies and meta-ideologies legitimating activities and, thereby, placing an SMO at a great disadvantage in seeking cultural resources to frame its movement ideology. These powerful organizations are likely to form counter-SMO organizations because of their high levels of material, organizational, technological, and demographic resources. For example, economic organizations involved in environmental pollution could resist for decades the first SMOs like the Sierra Club or even Greenpeace along most fronts—legal, political, and ideological—because of their vast resources. They can still do so, but it is clear that the SMOs of the environmental movement have gained the upper hand ideologically, but this has taken decades to get to the point where the cultural field now favors the SMOs more than their targets. And, in recent times, these SMOs have been able to use these resources to influence political decision-making and court rulings in a democratic polity and positivistic legal system. Still, the power of polluters is great, and even with an ecological disaster like the blown up oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, resistance by British Petroleum has not been futile.

If, however, the practices of organizations in core institutions consistently are at odds with values, ideologies, and meta-ideologies in the cultural field, and the more widespread are the negative emotions about such inconsistencies, the less will be overt resistance by targeted organizations, and the more likely will SMO be able to highlight these inconsistencies in its framing of the SMO culture and goals. For example, the civil rights movement could be successful in the United States because the long-running inconsistencies between blatant discrimination in a society valuing equality of opportunity and freedom could be used in the SMOs’ framing of the ideology legitimating the social movement. And, even though powerful and central actors in polity, economy, and education, particularly in the American south but elsewhere as well, had great authority and, for a long time, had been able to subvert the civil rights movement, the movement slowly gained more legitimacy with key legal decisions in courts and the willingness to the federal government to finally enforce laws. The media also had a large effect on the movements because for the first time the atrocities of those resisting the movement could be shown across the nation on television, thereby garnering sympathy for those who had been long-term victims of discrimination. Thus, the micro-cultural field that had evolved over centuries of discrimination in the United States among members of categoric units, coupled with emotions of early participants in the movement during the 1950s and 1960s, was relatively successful because a series of SMOs in an SMS could secure resources and become organized around cultural frames that turned American values against those individuals and corporate units that still discriminated in virtually all institutional domains for many decades. As important as the legal system and polity were in protecting incumbents in these SMOs, it was their moral suasion and their effective use of cultural resources that allowed these SMOs to pull in material and demographic resources that enabled mass mobilizations of individuals from all categoric units in the society.

These same dynamics began to play themselves out in the Middle East in 2011. Powerful political actors were confronted by the movement of those who wanted freedom and opportunity, and these protests could be relatively effective, despite coercive repression by centers of power, because they could use information technologies to communicate and mobilize, thereby spreading generalized beliefs and even initiating the framing process. In some cases, they could draw from the culture of power and point out the inconsistencies between grand legal pronouncements and day-to-day reality; at other times, they could use generalized ideologies about democracy built up in the West. Still, the success of these social movements has been mixed, depending upon the degree to which the military has been loyal to oppressive leaders and its capacity to bring coercive power against those engaged in the protests. Indeed, protestors have few critical resources beyond those they could extract from niches in cultural fields of their own and other societies, although these resources could be used to recruit demographic resources and in some cases material resources from outside the society. Like many social movements that are revolutionary, the failure of initial efforts to dislodge leaders of political authority can eventually morph into a civil war, where incipient SMOs retreat to strongholds and become better organized, even drawing organizational, technological, and material resources from foreign governments to better organize their demographic resources, fighters and followers, and thereby create an army capable of fighting the coercive forces of the state. There will be violence, but this will be more organized and strategic violence, compared to the violence that can erupt in the early phases of a revolutionary movement.

A number of scholars have conceptualized a political opportunity curve like that in Fig. 8.1 (Snow and Soule 2010:69). Early work on political opportunities occurred in the comparative analysis of cities (e.g., Lipsky 1970; Eisinger 1973), but I prefer to emphasize more macro-level mechanisms of integration and their relation to the use of power in a society. Thus, the political opportunity curve can be portrayed at its extremes as (1) very open democratic societies where markets are a primary mechanism of integration or (2) very closed despotic societies where domination is the primary mechanism of integration. Both ends of this continuum will, it is hypothesized, reveal low rates of SMO formation, but for different reasons. In the open system, polity can absorb the problems fueling grievances and make “binding decisions,” to use Luhmann’s (1982) vocabulary, that reduce the intensity of grievances, and the positivistic legal system can mandate new, less problematic actions by, and relations among, organizations that have aroused grievances. In the closed system, polity and its allied core organizations in institutional domains can simply crush resistance through a combination of coercive force, intrusive monitoring by administrative power, and counter-ideological mobilization because they control the discourse using generalized symbolic media and disproportionately control the formation of the tenets in ideologies and meta-ideologies.

Fig. 8.1
figure 1

Zones of political opportunities

Full size image

Yet there is something wrong with picture presented in Fig. 8.1 because some of the most influential social movements have occurred in open societies because polity and law did not adequately respond to grievances. Thus, when the unit of analysis shifts to the more macro level, perhaps earlier hypotheses about cities no longer apply. Moreover, as is evident in the Middle East in 2011, highly closed systems are being challenged by SMOs seeking to topple the leaders of highly centralized and repressive polities and corrupt as well as unresponsive legal systems. True, the unrest and protests occur in cities, but the protest is more than a city phenomenon; it is a society-wide uprising that is most visible in central cities, but it is a revolt against political authority at the level of the nation state. Just what will be the long-term outcome of this unrest is not clear because some centralized polities have successfully repressed the uprisings, while others have not.

Thus, there are more forces in play than merely open and closed political systems, and these forces determine the success of social movements in either the open or closed political systems. The middle portions of the curve are hypothesized to be fertile area for SMO because polity and law are more likely to be seen as not responsive, while the capacity and willingness to use coercive force are limited. It may be that the open system is never as open as portrayed in this curve because even in highly democratic systems, powerful core actors in all institutional domains still exert more control over ideological discourse and decision-making in polity and law. That is, the open system is an ideal type that never becomes institutionalized in the real world because there are always networks of resource flows among core organizations that give them great power to frame the ideological debate and to enlist polity and law to support their interests. Moreover, even in market-driven systems, there are always networks of power and control as well as alignments among powerful actors in polity, law, and economy, and sometimes religion, and these networks of resource exchanges, along with the political alignments that these exchanges create, tend to close up opportunity structures for SMOs. So, the reality may be that no society is sufficiently democratic that polity and law can absorb all grievances and make binding decisions that resolve these grievances.

And, as we can see in the Middle East and as I would predict in relatively closed polities like that in China in the future, the political domination is never so tight that there are not opportunity spaces for SMO mobilization. And, in an information world where communication within and between individuals and organizations in different societies is possible, polity cannot fully close down the flow of information, and moreover, as is now evident in China, the “great firewall of Chinese of cyberspace” that blocks information has, itself, become a grievance that can throw fuel on protest movements, which are coming in the next two decades. So, the two endpoints of the curve are more like idealizations, while the various points in between these endpoints provide a great deal of space in which SMOs can operate.

SMOs must be able to read the political opportunities that open up, for a variety of reasons: shifting alignments, transformations wrought by changing technology, weakness in the control capacity of the state, fiscal crises, holes in networks, and perhaps most importantly, tensions generated by stratification, and especially if class locations are consolidated with particular types of nominal categoric units such as those based upon ethnicity and religious affiliation. This last weakness is a tension-generating machine in all societies, generating (a) a large reservoir of grievances, (b) a ready-to-mobilize subpopulation defined by categoric-unit memberships, (c) a cultural resource base that can be used to point out the contradiction between high degrees of stratification and cultural ideals stated in values and ideologies, especially in more open systems, and (d) a series of material and organizational resource niches, whose resources can readily flow through dense networks among ethnics or members of religious organizations, and potential for allies to emerge once an social movement begins. There are, then, cracks and fault lines in even the most democratic or repressive society that represent opportunities for SMOs, if their leaders can see them and frame the ideology of the SMO so that it generates wider appeal.

The modes of structural integration at the meso level are important in exposing opportunities and, once taken, in providing resources for emerging SMOs. Networks and alliances among organizations, organizational templates in these organizations, and material resources that can be drawn from memberships and passed up the organizational structure and then across networks are almost always present in a society, even in the most repressive society. And, once the SMO begins to mobilize and is able to attract the initial resources, it begins to create its own cultural, material, organizational, and demographic niches that were not evident or that did not even exist until the SMO had some initial success.

There is also an ecological dynamic in play that affects political opportunities (Lipsky 1970; Goffman 1963, 1971). Today, this dynamic operates at two levels: (1) the physical space to carry out collective protests and (2) the cyberspace in which to develop networks, articulate generalized beliefs, recruit members to the movement, and coordinate collective actions in (1). If a society where SMOs are forming is urbanized and has large open public spaces, these represent real opportunities for SMOs. And if a society has a communication infrastructure to support social networking technologies, cell phones, and wireless internet connections, these also expand the ecology of cyberspace. However, if the society also has the capacity to shut down this communication infrastructure, these infrastructures will be less effective in movement mobilizations, and yet, the very act of shutting off communications by centers of power will further enrage publics who see such censorship as yet one more abuse. And increasingly, tech-savvy youth who are almost always at the vanguard of social movements can often find ways to get around these efforts at censorship, and even more so if they have backing from outside supporters that have technological resources.

Cracks in repressive control often appear in how physical space is used, and how rapidly SMO participants can adjust to efforts by centers of authority to control this space. For example, many years ago before Poland was free of Soviet Union control, I was by chance in Warsaw on May Day. The communist state was clearly concerned about protests by Solidarity, and so they cluttered the very large plaza in the center of town, where my hotel was located, with K-rails (for separating coming and going traffic on of freeways) to prevent large numbers of individuals from assembling as a collective mass. On the side streets feeding into this plaza were caravans of water cannons followed by water trucks and busloads of soldiers brought into Warsaw from outlying and less restive areas. On each street corner in at intersections near the central plaza stood a very young and nervous soldier with a Uzi rifle, who to my great surprise was constantly accosted verbally by Warsaw’s residents (something I thought was rather brave: yelling a hormone-driven teen holding a machine gun!). The K-rails and the presence of such force prevented a mass rally in the central plaza from taking place, but all over Warsaw, other protests by Solidarity erupted, and one could see smoke from the fires that had been set. Thus, even with a grand show of force, other ecological spaces opened up and could be usurped for protests.

If these protestors of the 1980s could have had communication of the present day, they could have more effectively coordinated movements and done so far more rapidly than water cannons, tanker trucks, and busloads of young soldiers could be moved. Even with little technology, the protesters were making, in essence, “flash demonstrations” of assembling rapidly and then moving away as the forces of social control eventually rumbled in. Thus, as Durkheim (1893) argued over 100 years ago, communication technologies increase moral density, and moreover, these technologies can also be used strategically to increase physical density in space, as has been evident in recent protests in the Middle East and even in highly repressive places like Syria and Iran. Thus, technology provides more opportunities for SMOs to get their message out, to frame movement ideologies, and to tactically move people about space and derive the benefits of collective protests by masses of participants. And once this Durkheimian (1984[1912]) effervescence of these mass demonstrations takes hold, protestors become less fearful, even with the ultimate coercive act by the state of killing individuals, which only delegitimates political regimes further as pictures from cell phones move around a society and the world.

Thus, just as ecology is important in structuring focused and unfocused encounters at the micro level, it can be essential at the meso level as members of SMOs seek to change macro-level structures and cultures by collective mobilizations. These mobilizations charge up the symbols of the movement, increasing the emotional involvements of individuals in the activities of the SMO, and in so doing, they often open up new resource niches for securing material, demographic, organizational, and even cultural resources to frame the movement ideology.

Resource Niches and SMOs Strategies, Tactics, and Effectiveness

As emphasized, niches provide the resources necessary to create and sustain SMOs. Once an SMO acts, these actions can potentially open up additional niches. For example, the civil rights movement grew dramatically and nationally by peaceful protests that drew organizations of repressive state and local governments (state police and sheriff’s departments) into acting aggressively, and at the same time, other organizations such as the KKK were exposed for what they were. With newsreel (something not seen today), national television coverage by news departments (that had only really begun to be part of regular television in the late 1950s and early 1960s), dramatic pictures taken by national news services, newspapers, long-gone pictorial magazines (like Life, Look, or Colliers disappeared), and extensive coverage in news magazines like Time and Newsweek (which struggle in the new media world), the entire citizenry of the society was drawn into the movement at least vicariously, but the important consequence is that material, demographic, organizational, and even cultural resource niches were being created by these media. Donations of money to SMOs increased; new kinds of participants were drawn to the SMOs (mostly white [college] youth, prominent celebrities, and many older Americans who had long harbored anger at discrimination); organizational expertise from sympathetic corporate, union, and, most importantly, church sponsors was supplied; and new ways to frame the protests as an effort to achieve “freedom and equalities of opportunity” in the face of lingering Jim Crow practices and state oppression could be developed to widen the appeal of the movement. Thus, resource niches do not remain constant; they can expand if the SMO is successful, and, of course, they can contract when the SMO is not able to frame its ideology in a manner that widens its appeal.

Other factors also affect resource mobilization. One is the discretionary resources that masses and elite have to spend on funding SMOs. Another is the existence of an SMS where organizational templates can be copied and networks formed among SMOs in the SMS. Yet, another is what have been called “conscience constituents” or a pool of sympathetic individuals who can potentially join or at least offer material support to SMOs (Snow and Soule 2010:119). Still another resource is built into movement constituents where their incumbency in existing organizations becomes a natural tie-in to an SMO (e.g., industrial workers for a union movement; churches for justice-oriented movements; universities and their students for anti-draft movements). And final resource is the cultural field that reveals general values and ideologies that are contradicted by practices of core actors, thus giving SMO’s room to frame and reframe the movement in moral codes acceptable to a large portion of the population. When these broader resource niches exist, the options and opportunities for SMOs increase dramatically.

There can be, however, ironic consequences when SMOs draw from the external resource niches; the charismatic leaders and early followers may need to alter their tactics if they are to attract resources from far outside their core constituency. They will, in essence, lose some control of the movement in exchange for more resources from broader segments of the public. It is likely that movements that draw from broader resource niches will become less violent because violence threatens more than attracts resources from the larger publics and more establishment organizations. And these less violent SMOs will be more likely to use mass mobilizations as a political tactic in the institutionalized arena of politics to make polity responsive to grievances and to force the legal system to respond, if it can, to eliminating harmful, discriminatory, and abusive practices by polity and core organizations in various institutional domains. For example, as noted earlier, the Black Panthers never had a broad series of resource niches from which to draw, and as a result, the radical ideology and violence that sometimes persisted led, in the end, to the collapse of the SMO, whereas the NAACP had always been an SMO oriented to larger constituencies and broader resource niches, thereby avoiding violence or, if violence occurred, it was violence against members of the NAACP. However, had by the time of the final push in the 1960s for civil rights began, the NAACP was often perceived as not sufficiently aggressive in public places. To compensate, it appears, other SMOs in the civil rights SMS that were more assertive in public protests joined the NACP in nonviolent protests, which were quite successful in that the protestors remained nonviolent and the agents of social control often became violent—thereby exposing their racism. Yet, during these times, there were “riots” in African-American ghettos all over the country, but these were more spontaneous expression of anger over long-held grievances and, hence, were not so much orchestrated by SMOs as by individuals and groups of angry persons lashing out. The key to success of the movement at this time in the 1960s was white violence against civil right’s protestors, coupled with fears of black violence that might spread beyond the ghettos of urban America.

The properties of niches and the configurations of resources secured by SMOs have large effects on the tactics, effectiveness, public perceptions, and viability of the SMO and even the SMS. Niche density may increase competition as much as collaboration of SMOs in a SMS, with the result that the broader social movement becomes factionalized and, in the end, less effective as density in the niche declines. Some SMOs die off, while the appeal of the remaining SMO to individuals and organizations in other niches may have declined as a result of the turmoil produced by factionalism. Such is often the case in protests and revolutionary actions that topple authority, but then, in the aftermath the movement’s apparent success, SMOs begin to fight among themselves, thus causing fears and loss of legitimacy at the very time that they need a reservoir of diffuse legitimacy from broader publics.

As noted above, tactics are very much related to the breadth and depth of resource niches. Violent SMOs generally draw from narrow resource niches, while less violent ones secure resources from a broader array of niches. At times, violence can allow an SMO to expand its resource base if the violence is seen as tactical and, more importantly, effective to challenging centers of authority that have failed to respond to widespread grievances. Yet, as it grows, the tactics may move to less violence, but as the decades of violence in Northern Ireland, or the violence propagated by al-Qaida, and (until recently) Basque bombings by separatists, and other violent SMOs attest, such may not be the case. Yet, even though the resource base of these terrorist SMOs has expanded, it is still rather narrow, which may account for the continued violence. Indeed, terrorist organizations seek to remain small and secret because they are not trying to appeal to general publics but to a narrower constituent base.

SMOs that remain highly centralized and dependent upon a charismatic leader will generally be less bureaucratized than larger movements, and as a result, their goals and tactics may be less predictable. They may be violent, then more accommodating, and then more violent again. Without the constraints that come by securing resources in a broader array of niches, these types of SMOs often see unpredictability of actions as an effective strategy for furthering the goals of the SMO.

The size of the constituency niche is also important in how SMOs operate. A narrow constituency is likely to keep the SMO small and not able to secure other kinds of resources. It is, therefore, more likely to remain centralized, collaborative, and lead by a charismatic leader. The result is that its tactics will often revolve around drawing attention to itself, but if violence is used, it will close the doors to a broader array of resource niches.

Broader public perceptions of an SMO are critical to its ability to attract resources. If the SMO is threatening because it employs violence as a tactic and because its ideology is framed in ways that repudiate core cultural elements like values and ideologies over which there is some consensus in the broader public, the SMO may be driven underground, which makes it even more threatening to publics and centers of power. If, however, the SMO seeks to remain within the broader arena of politics and employ more legitimate means of protest, then it may remain threatening but, in a political democracy, still be seen as legitimate. If the public considers an SMO working “within the system” of politics and if it does not employ violent tactics, then it will be generally be considered legitimate, and if it frames its goals and ideology in ways that resonate with the broader cultural field over which there is some consensus, then it will have access to more resources in diverse niches. It may, however, be seen as “too establishment” and lead to “spin-off” SMOs that are willing to employ more radical ideological frames and more aggressive tactics, which can have two consequences: one is to make the establishment SMO seem safer and, ironically, often able to expand its access to resources; another is to reduce the resources available to the splinter SMO. However, if the splinter SMO can reframe its movement ideology, if the grievances that it posits are widely felt by large segments of the population, and if it is cautious in its use of violence, it may begin to increase access to new niches, especially if the larger more establishment SMOs are seen as ineffective. The civil rights movement in the United States experienced both these outcomes. More radical SMOs such as the Black Panthers and Black Muslim SMOs actually helped the NAACP which, as noted, had come to be perceived as too staid and as ineffective as an SMO, while at the same time pushing the NAACP to form alliances with more aggressive SMOs in the civil rights SMS; the result was a coalition of SMOs that were more assertive, without generating widespread fear. And so the movement moved beyond it primary demographic resource base of oppressed categoric units and its organizational base of churches and legal challenges to discriminatory laws and practices. The movement ideology was broadened to appeal to members of many more diverse categoric units (especially white, European-origin Americans), and as it did so, it gained access to a larger set of resource niches and, as result, became capable of generating mass demonstrations, largely peaceful but still assertive in their advocacy, that made the movement much more effective.

Elementary Principles of Meso-level Change Dynamics

I am now in a position to offer a few elementary principles on the dynamics of change caused by SMOs or sets of SMOs in a SMS. I am being somewhat selective, but the following propositions offer a general theory of SMO dynamics.

  1. 32.

    The likelihood of an SMO or set of SMOs emerging in a society is a positive function of the level of negative emotional arousal among subpopulations in a society, with the intensity of emotion increasing with:

    1. A.

      The intensity of grievances among members of a subpopulation, which in turn increases with:

      1. 1.

        The level of stratification in a society

      2. 2.

        The degree of discrimination against members of devalued categoric units and the consolidation of membership in these units with incumbency in lower-ranking class positions in the stratification system

      3. 3.

        The degree to which generalized beliefs articulating grievances and making initial external attributions for their causes of grievances have emerged among victims of discrimination

      4. 4.

        The degree to which leaders have emerged to frame and reframe generalized beliefs with respect to:

        1. a.

          Moralizing and focusing grievances, which increase with:

          1. (1)

            The capacity to use existing macro-level cultural fields to moralize grievances

          2. (2)

            The level of consistency among, and integration of, moral codes in macro-level cultural fields

          3. (3)

            The degree to which moral frames draw upon moral codes about justice and fairness in macro-level cultural fields

        2. b.

          Making external attributions to key organizations and their leaders in relevant institutional domains as the cause of grievances

        3. c.

          Challenging the authority of organizations that are targets of attributions

    2. B.

      The pervasiveness of intense grievances among population which, in turn, is a positive function of:

      1. 1.

        The size of the subpopulations subject to discrimination and the degree of consolidation of their memberships in categoric units with lower ranks in the stratification system

      2. 2.

        The extent to which victims of discrimination are culturally and structurally equivalent in their rates of exclusion from key resource-giving corporate units and in their locations in the divisions of labor in organizations where they are permitted to hold positions

      3. 3.

        The density of networks among those victims of discrimination who are structurally and culturally equivalent

      4. 4.

        The level of development of technologies for social networking and communicating

    3. C.

      The degree to which modes of structural integration generate opportunities for mobilization of an SMO or a set of SMOs, which is a negative function of the extent to which domination is the principal mode of structural integration, while being a positive function of the extent to which structural interdependencies formed by markets and regulated by positivistic law and democratic polity are the principal modes of institutional integration

  2. 33.

    The viability of an SMO or a set of SMOs is a positive function of their access to key resource niches which, in turn, is a function of the availability of resources in:

    1. A.

      Material resource niche, which is a function of the level of economic development and pervasiveness of money and market mechanisms

    2. B.

      Cultural resource niche, which is, in turn, an additive function of:

      1. 1.

        The consistency among, consensus over, and integration of the moral codes in macro-level cultural fields in a society

      2. 2.

        The emergence of generalized beliefs articulating grievances

      3. 3.

        The availability of leaders to frame and reframe generalized beliefs along the lines listed under 32-A-4(a, b, and c) above

    3. C.

      Organizational resources niche, which is a function of level of organizational expertise and differentiation of organizational formations in a society

    4. D.

      Technological resource niche, which is a function of economic development and reliance on markets for distribution of technologies, especially communication technologies

    5. E.

      Demographic resource niche, which is an additive function of:

      1. 1.

        The size of the subpopulation experiencing grievances in encounters within organizations and communities

      2. 2.

        The age cohorts that are recruited, with the size of younger cohorts being a key demographic niche

      3. 3.

        The degree of overlap and density of networks among those in the SMO with networks in communities and organizations outside of the SMO

      4. 4.

        The capacity to provide trial protest action for potential recruits

      5. 5.

        The pervasiveness of communications and social networking technology among potential recruits

      6. 6.

        The level of inequality and stratification in a society, especially when there is a high degree of:

        1. a.

          Consolidation of categoric-unit memberships of aggrieved individuals with lower-ranking class locations in the stratification system

        2. b.

          The extent to which the goals of the SMO are aligned with the grievances of members in devalued categoric units

      7. 7.

        The degree to which members of demographic resource niches can or are willing to invest identities in an SMO and to value identity verification in encounters within the SMO

  3. 34.

    The persistence and success of an SMO or a set of SMOs is a positive function of:

    1. A.

      The conditions listed under 33-A, 33-B, 33-C, 33-D, and 33-E above, while being a negative function of the level of density and competition for resources in an SMO’s niches

    2. B.

      The extent to which incentives for SMO membership and/or participation consistently exceed the costs and risks of membership and/or participation, with the incentives relative to cost/risks increasing with:

      1. 1.

        The degree to which moralized SMO goals and solidarities generated by membership and participation generate a jointly produced private good that is highly valued by members and only available from the SMO

      2. 2.

        The degree to which members and participants of an SMO invest one or more identities in the SMO and seek verification by members of the SMO of these identities

      3. 3.

        The degree to which identity investments produce for members of an SMO a sense of group inclusion

      4. 4.

        The degree to which community organizations and networks, where at least social and group identities and potentially role and core identities are verified, overlap with the structure of the SMO, thereby making identity verification in communities also dependent on verification within the SMO

      5. 5.

        The extent of use by SMO members of communication and social networking technologies for meeting transactional needs, especially identity verification and group inclusion but also for trust

    3. C.

      The extent to which social control of members and participants in an SMO relies upon informal monitoring and sanctioning, and especially positive sanctioning for conformity to expectations for realizing SMO goals

    4. D.

      The extent to which social control of members and participants in an SMO depends upon the production of a private joint good built from the emotions of solidarity

    5. E.

      The extent to which, even with SMO growth, the vertical division of labor remains truncated and does not involve expanding levels of vertical authority and formal monitoring and negative sanctioning of member and participant activities

  4. 35.

    The longer an SMO persists, the more likely is it to be transformed into a routinized bureaucratic formation, and the more likely are earlier charismatic leaders to be replaced over time by bureaucrats in a formal and more vertical division of labor that loses some of its moral zeal and framing and that seeks resources in material resource niches and in fee- or membership-paying, older age cohorts.

  5. 36.

    The more an SMO is converted into a rational legal bureaucracy, the less frequent are mass public protest activities, and the more likely is the SMO to operate in the arena of politics and law within a society.

Conclusions

This chapter completes my analysis not only of meso dynamics but of macrodynamics and micro dynamics as well. All that is now required is a last chapter listing all of the principles that I have developed on meso dynamics. I have no illusions that these are exhaustive and even correct in all cases, but they are principles that, in principle, can be tested and assessed against existing data. And if we took all three sets of principles from volumes 1–3 of Theoretical Principles of Sociology, we would have an even more comprehensive theory.

Recall that I do not advocate a true nomothetic or an axiomatic theory of social reality. Virtually no science can hold itself to this high, and perhaps this standard is unrealistic. Moreover, maybe it is the wrong standard of what constitutes good theory—something pushed on scientists by philosophers of science. My view is that principles about different levels of social reality will overlap, but they will not constitute a tight deductive scheme by any formal logic. The principles highlight what I see as the key operative dynamics of the social universe, and they are to be used as a resource, often in ad hoc ways. Depending upon what one is trying to explain, the principles are invoked to help that explanation; they are not deduced from higher-order laws or axioms. Rather, they are all couched at about the same level of abstraction, and their structure reveals how the values in the variables change. If the principles explain a phenomenon of interest—say, the concentration of power in polity or the formation of an SMO—they have been useful. As I have emphasized, there are relatively few generic and universal properties of the entire social universe, and relatively few forces are in play. Thus, our theorizing should not have to be exceeding complex.

Yet, if I have a reservation to what I have done in these three volumes, it is that I have outlined principles which are too complex and long. I could certainly shorten them and, thus, increase the total number of principles. At this point, I opted to make them long and robust, but comparatively few in total number—less than 100 for all of the macro, meso, and micro realms of social reality. Perhaps this was the wrong strategy, but it is easily corrected. The goal that I set out for myself several years ago was to demonstrate that the phenomena studied by sociologists are not unique—as so many in sociology proclaim. Rather, the social universe is just like the biotic, physicochemical, and psychological universes; their dynamics can be explained by scientific theory. None of these universes are more or less amenable to scientific theory. I have at least demonstrated that we can develop abstract and testable principles about the generic properties and dynamics of the social universe. If I have something wrong, this can be corrected; if I have left something important out, this too can be corrected. I am sure, of course, that those who simply refuse to believe that there can be a “natural science of society,” to use Radcliffe-Brown’s famous phrase. These critics will find these principles in volumes 1–3 of Theoretical Principles of Sociology flawed in some way.

I often have been told that it is “arrogant” of me to think that the properties of the social universe can be theorized like those in any other science. I have always thought it the height of arrogance to pronounce that such is the case. I have been told these principles are too abstract and remote from specific empirical and historical cases to be interesting. Fair enough, such a critic is simply not interested in scientific theory. I certainly have no problem with people being more interested in collecting and analyzing data and, perhaps, constructing historical explanations that are very different from what I have tried to do in these three volumes. There are multiple epistemologies that we can all use to understand the world; I just think that science takes the discipline further than the alternatives. We can look at the social universe from diverse standpoints. Too much of sociology, however, revolves around a kind of dismissive dogmatism that, in essence, proclaims that science is not possible, and so why try.

I think that it is important to try to develop scientific theory, but I do not dismiss alternative ways of looking at the world, as do so many critics. Still, after 45 years as a professional sociologist, the consistent drumbeat against scientific approaches to explanation continues. I do not know if this is a loud minority or the majority of sociologists—someone should hand out a questionnaire on the matter—but I do know that sociology has become somewhat polarized over the issue of science vs. some-other-kind-of epistemology. Most of these antiscience critics simply assert that we cannot develop universal principles on the operative dynamics of the social universe, and stop there, smug in their conviction. In this book and many other works over the last 4 decades, I have sought to demonstrate that we can develop abstract explanatory principles of all realms of the social universe. The critics will, of course, never be silenced since, it appears, epistemology is like religion: each scholar has epistemological faith and, with this faith, comes a kind of theological dogmatism. But sociology needs to produce useful knowledge, and in my view, it is the knowledge produced by science that will be the most useful.