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Political Sociology and Social Movements ANRV381-SO35-19 ARI 2 June 2009 7:44 Political Sociology and Social Movements Andrew G. Walder Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-2047, email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2009. 35:393–412 Key Words First published online as a Review in Advance on contentious politics, mobilization, collective action April 6, 2009 The Annual Review of Sociology is online at Abstract soc.annualreviews.org Until the 1970s, the study of social movements was firmly within a di- This article’s doi: verse sociological tradition that explored the relationship between social 10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-120035 structure and political behavior, and was preoccupied with explaining Copyright c 2009 by Annual Reviews. variation in the political orientation of movements: their ideologies, All rights reserved aims, motivations, or propensities for violence. Subsequently, a break- 0360-0572/09/0811-0393$20.00 away tradition redefined the central problem, radically narrowing the scope of interest to the process of mobilization—how social groups, whoever they are and whatever their aims, marshal resources, recruit adherents, and navigate political environments in order to grow and Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2009.35:393-412. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org succeed. Critics would later insist that the construction of meaning, the by Stanford University - Main Campus Green Library on 07/27/09. For personal use only. formation of collective identities, and the stimulation and amplification of emotions play vital and neglected roles in mobilization, but these alternatives did not challenge the narrowed construction of the prob- lem itself. The resulting subfield has largely abandoned the quest to explain variation in the political orientation of movements. Researchers in related fields—on revolution, unions, and ethnic mobilization—have retained an interest in explaining political orientation, although they of- ten view it primarily as a by-product of mobilization. Reviving theories about the impact of social structure on movement political orientation will require integrating insights from research on related but widely scattered subjects. 393 ANRV381-SO35-19 ARI 2 June 2009 7:44 INTRODUCTION THE ARCHEOLOGY From its inception the field of political sociol- OF A RUPTURE ogy was about the relationship between political Todaythe problem of mobilization is so central phenomena and social structure. Social struc- to the study of contentious politics and social ture meant very different things in the hands movements that few appear able to conceive of of different theorists, and this served to define a different question or ask why the field took theoretical camps: economic organization, class the shape it did. Before the rise of current ap- and status, community organization and social proaches, research on political movements was ties, formal organization and bureaucracy, or driven by three broad traditions, all of which small-group interaction. In their consideration were deeply curious about the relationship be- of social movements, political sociologists were tween social structure and politics. The oldest preoccupied with explaining their orientations tradition was class analysis, ultimately Marxist by reference to the experiences of the subpopu- in origin, and was committed to understand- lations from which movements drew members. ing the roots of radical politics in class conflicts The core intellectual puzzles were why politi- inherent in different modes of production. A cal movements were reformist or revolutionary, second tradition was based on the variety of secular or religious, pragmatic or ideological, role theory exemplified by Robert Merton and nationalist or communist, peaceful or violent. others, which usually took the form of explana- These were the central questions that motivated tions based on role strain, status inconsistency, research on the subject through the 1970s. The and relative deprivation. A third tradition, ul- process of mobilization, if acknowledged at all, timately Durkheimian in origin, was rooted in was usually an afterthought. the structural-functionalism of Talcott Parsons This changed more than three decades ago and his students. when the core problem was restated: Given cer- An early exemplar of class analysis is tain motives (or grievances) in a subpopula- Seymour Martin Lipset’s first book, Agrarian tion, under what conditions and through what Socialism (1950), which sought to explain the processes are these motives translated into ef- anomalous rise of a rural political movement fective group action? This was an important with ostensibly socialist aims in the Canadian and neglected problem in influential theories wheat belt. The analysis looked closely at that traced movements variously to frustra- the characteristics of wheat agriculture on the tions born of relative deprivation, class conflict North American prairie, the close-knit nature anchored in modes of production, or socially of rural communities, and the inherent con- and psychologically marginalized subpopula- flict between producers and middlemen in com- tions. The new agenda began with a focus on mercialized smallholding agriculture. Lipset a subpopulation’s organizational capacity and wanted to understand why radical politics was Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2009.35:393-412. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org the resources it could command. It later ex- so rare in North America by studying this de- by Stanford University - Main Campus Green Library on 07/27/09. For personal use only. panded to incorporate macropolitical circum- viant case, and he closely analyzed the reasons stances, or political opportunity structures, and why this radical, seemingly anticapitalist move- then to claims about the perceptions of partic- ment moderated its ideology and policies once ipants and the framing of appeals, the sources it achieved regional political power and nation- of collective identities, or the amplification of alized key commercial sectors. participants’ emotions. The increasing variety A later exemplar in this tradition is Jef- of ideas about mobilization and the perennial fery Paige’s Agrarian Revolution (1975), which controversies within the subfield has created was ultimately motivated to explain the origins a false sense of intellectual breadth, obscur- of the tenacious revolutionary movement in ing the enduring narrowness of the focus on Vietnam that so preoccupied American politics mobilization. at that time. Building on Stinchcombe’s (1961) 394 Walder ANRV381-SO35-19 ARI 2 June 2009 7:44 typology of rural enterprise, Paige offered an temperance movement as a form of status pol- elegant theory that linked variations in the ide- itics, and Lipset’s (1959a,b, 1960) later essays ologies and aims of rural political movements— on right-wing extremism and working-class whether they were reformist or radical, so- authoritarianism. cialist or nationalist—to the varied features of The core idea of the Parsonian tradition was agricultural enterprise in regions that exported the familiar Durkheimian notion that a well- products on world markets. Both Lipset and integrated and stable society is ultimately based Paige had something to say about the organi- on a moral order in which normative expec- zational capacity of the groups involved, but tations, based on widely held values, are in a their primary interest was in explaining not state of equilibrium with the existing division of how these groups mobilized, but why these labor. As societies grow and change, social movements adopted varied aims and ideologies. structures become more differentiated and Other examples of work in this tradition include specialized, necessitating adaptive changes in Calhoun (1982), McNall (1988), Schwartz norms and laws that regulate the inevitable con- (1976), and Scott (1976), all of which traced flict that change brings. Rapidly changing so- degrees of political radicalism to features of eco- cieties are singularly prone to disruption, and nomic organization and communities in histor- the individuals who are most affected by rapid ical context. change experience forms of social and psy- Davies (1962) and Gurr (1970) exemplified chological strain that make them more likely the relative deprivation tradition. The core idea to join radical movements, whether secular or is that it is not overall levels of hardship that religious. One emblematic contribution to this drive groups to engage in rebellion, but their tradition was Smelser’s(1959) study of working- deprivation relative to socially conditioned ex- class radicalism in the English industrial revo- pectations. Although rarely explicit, this tradi- lution, which attributed it (contra Marx) to the tion was ultimately rooted in conceptions de- disruption of working-class families. His later rived from role theory, which viewed social theory of collective behavior (Smelser 1962) structures as constellations of overlapping, so- traced qualitative variations in the aims and ide- cially constructed roles with assigned statuses, ologies of social movements to the extent to normative expectations, and varying degrees of which a society’s moral order was disrupted by socially structured role strain (Merton 1968a,b). change. The idea spread widely in the form of One version of the theory is that individuals modernization theory into the field of compar- who experience status inconsistency or frus- ative politics, where it became central to expla- trated upward mobility are the most likely to nations of
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