Social Movement Theory - Emerging Cultural Perspective

Emerging Cultural Perspective

In the late 1990s two long books summarized the cultural turn in social-movement studies, Alberto Melucci’s Challenging Codes and James M. Jasper’s The Art of Moral Protest. Melucci focused on the creation of collective identities as the purpose of social movements, especially the “new social movements,” whereas Jasper argued that movements allow participants a chance to elaborate and articulate their moral intuitions and principles. Both recognized the importance of emotions in social movements, although Jasper developed this idea more systematically. Along with Jeff Goodwin and Francesca Polletta, Jasper organized a conference in New York in 1999 that helped put emotions on the intellectual agenda for many scholars of protest and movements. He has continued to write about the emotional dynamics of protest in the years since.

In 1999, Goodwin and Jasper published a critique of the then-dominant political opportunity paradigm, using Jasper’s cultural approach to show that political opportunity was too structural as a concept, leaving out meanings, emotions, and agency. Charles Tilly and a number of other scholars responded, often vituperatively.

In The Art of Moral Protest Jasper also argued that strategic interaction had an important logic that was independent of both culture and structure, and in 2006 he followed up on this claim with Getting Your Way, which developed a vocabulary for studying strategic engagement in a cultural, emotional, and agentic way. By then, his theory of action had moved closer to Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism. In the same period, Wisconsin social theorist Mustafa Emirbayer had begun writing in a similar fashion about emotions and social movements, but more explicitly deriving his ideas from the history of sociological thought. In France, Daniel Cefaï arrived at similar conclusions in Pourquoi se mobilise-t-on?, a sweeping history and synthesis of thought on collective action and social movements.