Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Revitalizing the Study of Social Movements by Theorizing Social Change

Sat, August 16, 4:30 to 6:10pm, TBA

Abstract

This paper contributes to broader and more engaging research on social movements by grounding analysis in a more sophisticated theory of social change. Most current social movement research relies upon an undeveloped idea of change, identifying movements and their interaction with the social system in often superficial ways. The alternative conception of social change we formulate has three basic components. First, it begins from the understanding that in modern social life change is not antithetical to order but dynamically linked to and constitutive of it. Secondly, we suggest that an explicit critical-normative perspective is necessary in order to both develop an analysis of the current direction of the status quo and to evaluate a movement’s relationship to it. Third, we argue for a non-reductive, wholistic approach, one where society and social change are understood as complex fields of interaction with different social structures, institutional forces, and human actors all shaping the world. This more nuanced conceptualization of social change allows a better grasp of recent contributions to social movement theory including Fligstein and McAdam’s (2011) work on strategic action fields and Andrew Walder’s (2009) call for a more substantive approach. More generally, we suggest that this re-engagement with social change theory would resolve multiple problems with the social movement literature by pushing it toward a broader definition of social movements, a more nuanced, substantive focus on how movements relate to existing social arrangements, what their critiques of contemporary social life are, and what kinds of alternatives they envision.

Authors