Social Movement Theory Today: Toward a Theory of Action?

Grand theories of social movements, relating them to History or Society, are being dismantled and reevaluated. In their place approaches are emerging that offer a cultural and emotional theory of action, allowing analysts to build from the micro-level to the macro-level in a more empirical way rather than deductively from the top down. Social movements are composed of individuals and their interactions. Rational-choice approaches recognize this, but their version of the calculating individual is too abstract to be realistic or helpful. Pragmatism, feminism, and related traditions are encouraging a rethinking of collective action. I sometimes hear people complain that social movement theory has stagnated. When I press them, it turns out they are usually thinking about the grand theories linking movements to history and to society. For a generation, beginning in the 1960s, research into social movements, resistance, and collective action flourished under the inspiration of several such theories. Two of them, influenced by Marxism, were primarily macrosociological: an American version which emphasized the mobilization of resources and interactions with the state and a French version focused on the historical stage of a programmed or postindustrial society and its characteristic conflict. A third paradigm drew on very different sources, namely the assumptions of microeconomics. One name was especially associated with each of these ambitious approaches: Charles Tilly, Alain Touraine, and Mancur Olson. Each developed a fruitful research paradigm that inspired many others. (For reasons of space, and because relatively few scholars are self-consciously working in his paradigm (cf. McDonald 2006; Pleyers 2010), I do not discuss Touraine in this essay. See Jasper (1997, pp. 69–74) for more discussion of his work, which is subject to most of the criticisms I make of grand theories in this article.) By the start of this millennium these paradigms had reached their limits, for a number of reasons including historical changes, the accumulation of anomalies, the partiality of the approaches’ central metaphors, and simply the dulling of the excitement they had once generated. Tilly and Olson are now dead, and Touraine (1997, 2009) has turned from the study of social movements back to a more general social theory. The passing of these giants from the intellectual stage has left a silence, but hopefully one in which we audience members can continue a more modest conversation among ourselves. Having examined these paradigms at their peaks elsewhere (Jasper 1997), I want to concentrate more on their recent impact or lack of impact, in the hope of discerning some directions that theorists of social movements might now take. In many cases today’s theorists are synthesizing the insights of the older schools while adding dimensions they overlooked. The overall trend, which I would like to embrace, is a bracketing of big structures in favor of a concern for the microfoundations of social and political action. Sociology Compass 4/11 (2010): 965–976, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2010.00329.x a 2010 The Author Sociology Compass a 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The collapse of the ambitious grand theories hardly means the end of social movement theorizing. To the contrary, modest theorizing, interpretive and action-oriented, which was once in the deep shadow of the grand theories, is now coming into its own. (Social movement theory must also contend with a subterranean suspicion about any kind of theory, which arose in the 1960s as a new generation dismissed the ‘armchair theorizing’ of their elders. One strand of this consisted of Tilly’s dense historical research, with its middle-range theoretical generalizations; the other was a symbolic-interactionist faith in grounded theory and the power of the field researcher to see things freshly (Lofland 1993)).