Culture and Movements

Scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of culture in social movements’ emergence, trajectories, and impacts. Culture is no longer conceptualized as a subjective lens through which people perceive objective structures, but rather as a key dimension of those structures. This has allowed researchers to shed new light onwhy certain areas of social life come to be contestedwhen they do, aswell as to understand the limitations on activists’ ability to act strategically, and the sometimes surprising ways in which movements have influence. We focus on one vein of research: the role of institutional schemas in spurring mobilization and accounting for its effects. Schemas are accepted ways of doing things—doing business, obstetrics, race relations, or Internet protest. Research has investigated both the conditions in which institutionalized schemas become vulnerable to challenge and whether winning the acceptance of a new institutional schema counts as movement success. Why do social movements emerge when they do? What makes movements successful, variously, in recruiting members, securing support, and surviving organizationally? Moreover, when are social movements able to win the changes they seek—changes in legislation, policy, and the norms of everyday life? These questions have long animated the study of social movements. The analysis of cultural processes in movements has provided new and compelling answers to them. OLD AND NEW APPROACHES TO CULTURE Until fairly recently, answers to questions about movements’ emergence, internal dynamics, and outcomes were mainly structuralist. For example, to account for why movements emerged when they did, scholars assumed that grievances were ubiquitous. Groups were able to act on their grievances when political shifts created new opportunities for protest to have an impact and when groups’ indigenous structures were strong enough to mobilize people for collective action. Similarly, in accounting for internal movement dynamics, scholars focused on structural conditions. Features Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Kosslyn. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.