Institutional Movement Logics in the U.S. Social Movement Field, 1960–1995

• In Event: 325 - Regular Session. Social Movements III

Abstract

We extend the institutional movement logics (IML) approach to analyze the social movement field in the United States from 1960 to 1995, a pivotal period in its history. We examine the implications, as they relate to the IML approach, of two influential contemporary macrolevel approaches in movement theory today: Armstrong and Bernstein’s (2008) “multi-institutional politics” (MIP) perspective and Meyer and Tarrow’s (1998) “social movement society” (SMS) thesis. We apply multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to event data taken from the Dynamics of Collective Action dataset to elicit the most salient combinations of issues, tactics, and targets characteristic of the field in three subperiods: 1960-1972, 1973-1987, and 1988-1995. This analysis reveals six dominant IMLs structuring the field across the three subperiods. Consistent with the MIP argument, these logics are not state-centric, being distributed across a wide-variety of targets and feature a wide variety of issues beyond those explicitly oriented to policy change. Contradicting the SMS predictions, we find very little movement towards the emergence of state-centric logics combining disruptive and nondisruptive tactics. Finally, our analysis uncovers an IML that is explicitly organized around a “racial formation” project of white supremacist violence persisting through the entire period. This is a development that is not accounted by any of the major macrolevel theories in contemporary movement scholarship. We close by outlining the substantive and theoretical implications of our results and provide suggestions for further research on the structuration of contention in social movement fields beyond the U.S. context.

Author

• Jeff A. Larson