Alienated or Rational Social Movement Actors? An Integrated, ‘Neoclassical’ Approach to Occupy Wall Street

• In Event: 40209 - The Drivers and Deterrents of Collective Action

Abstract

Decades ago, sociological social movement scholarship swung dramatically from a focus on strain to agency in accounting for participation in unconventional and disruptive collective action. The classical approach to collective action and social movements tended to psychologize movement participants, treating them as especially alienated and maladjusted, and usually failing to consider disruptive collective action as a rational and potentially strategic means of political engagement (i.e., politics by other means). Explicitly rejecting the classical approach, new social movement scholars asserted the rationality and agency of social movement actors, mostly abandoning structural strain frameworks, especially in combination with social psychological frameworks. But did they lose something vital? I argue that a structured reconciliation of these two broad theoretical approaches can shed light on important features and functions of contemporary movements. Examining the case of Occupy Wall Street, I elaborate how both strain and agency motivated and shaped participants, and shaped and constrained the movement’s internal culture and strategic orientation. Sharing new social movement scholars’ rejection of several core assumptions of the classical approach, I proceed to resurrect some classical frameworks, connecting them to more contemporary sociological research and theory beyond the subfield of sociological social movement studies (e.g., Bourdieu and Habermas). Attempting to forge a ‘neoclassical’ approach, I integrate elements of the two broad theoretical approaches into a framework of four key dimensions of social movements (and four lenses to use to study movements): movements as indicators, popular symbols, fields, and strategic actors.

Author

• Jonathan Matthew Smucker, University of California-Berkeley