Social Movement Theory

Social movement theory is an interdisciplinary study within the social sciences that generally seeks to explain why social mobilization occurs, the forms under which it manifests, as well as potential social, cultural, and political consequences. More recently, the study of social movements has been subsumed under the study of contentious politics.

Read more about Social Movement Theory:  Collective Behavior, Relative Deprivation, Rational Choice, Resource Mobilization, Political Opportunity/Political Process, Framing, Impacts, New Social Movements, Emerging Cultural Perspective

Famous quotes containing the words social movement, social, movement and/or theory:

    Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak.
    Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)

    Throughout the 1980’s, we did hear too much about individual gain and the ethos of selfishness and greed. We did not hear enough about how to be a good member of a community, to define the common good and to repair the social contract. And we also found that while prosperity does not trickle down from the most powerful to the rest of us, all too often indifference and even intolerance do.
    Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1947)

    The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
    Karl Marx (1818–1883)

    ... the first reason for psychology’s failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology’s failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.
    Naomi Weisstein (b. 1939)