Organizations, coalitions, and movements

This article uses empirical evidence on networks of voluntary organizations mobilizing on ethnic minority, environmental, and social exclusion issues in two British cities, to differentiate between social movement processes and other, cognate collective action dynamics. Social movement processes are identified as the building and reproducing of dense informal networks between a multiplicity of actors, sharing a collective identity, and engaged in social and/or political conflict. They are contrasted to coalitional processes, where alliances to achieve specific goals are not backed by significant identity links, and organizational processes, where collective action takes place mostly in reference to specific organizations rather than broader, looser networks. Among his innumerable contributions to the study of social movements, Charles Tilly has provided practitioners with what is probably the most popular definition of their object of analysis: “a sustained series of interactions between power-holders and persons successfully claiming to speak on behalf of a constituency lacking formal representation, in the course of which those persons make publicly visible demands for change in the distribution or exercise of power, and back those demands with public demonstrations of support.”1 Recently, however, the reference to “social movements” has lost centrality in his analytical scheme. The “Dynamics of contention” program (henceforth “Doc”) invokes a reorientation of the social movement research agenda toward the identification of mechanisms, which may be found to operate across highly different episodes and forms of contentious politics.2 Its advocates regard social movements as a particular form of political participation3 or, interchangeably, as broad episodes of contention – along with democratization, nationalism, and revolution – from the analysis of which we can extract specific social mechanisms.4 There are very good reasons not to treat “social movements” as a distinct set of phenomena, or to posit that there should be specific intellectual sub-fields devoted to their exclusive study. Indeed, the whole development of the field reflects recurrent cross-fertilization Theory and Society 33: 281–309, 2004. C © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.