5.2: Defining Social Movements

What are social movements? As you might imagine, many social scientists have studied this. One scholar, Edwin Amenta, defines a social movement in a simple, clear way: “a set of actors and organizations that are seeking to alter power deficits and to effect social transformation through the state by mobilizing regular citizens for sustained political action.”

As the last section showed, when it comes to problems of power, people who want change the most cannot make the change that they want, given the situation as it currently stands. That’s a lack of power. Sometimes people think power is a scary word. But here it only refers to this question about whether ordinary people who want change have the ability to make the change that they want.

Social movements are efforts to solve problems of power. To do that, social movements have to face two challenges. First, how do you get ordinary people involved in sustained political action? Second, how do you translate that political action into the kind of influence or power necessary to make the change that you want to see?

Social movements address these challenges by fundamentally transforming people and their resources. Sometimes people think social movements just bring people together to do something. But there are many examples of bringing people together to do something that we wouldn’t call social movements. For instance, companies try to convince you and many other people to buy ketchup. And many people do buy ketchup of one brand or another, but we don’t call that a social movement, because buying ketchup is not a fundamentally transformative act.

In the 1830s, a French diplomat and historian named Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States. He was trying to understand how American democracy worked. At the time, democracy was a new experiment around the world. No one thought that it would really work. But over in North America, people were trying it out, and de Tocqueville investigated their democracy and observed it from all angles.

One of the strange things that de Tocqueville noticed was that Americans, weirdly, get together to do everything. They get together to drink beer. They get together to garden. They get together to talk about politics. At first, he just dismissed it as a funny little cultural habit that Americans had. But over time, he realized that this habit of coming together was fundamental to the way democracy worked. As he wrote famously in his book Democracy in America, the process of joining with others is fundamentally transformative.

How is it transformative? De Tocqueville argues that joining with others is fundamentally transformative in three ways. First, when people come together, inequality of resources becomes equality of voice. Even though people start with different kinds of resources, they all have an equal voice in the process if they join with others to make change.

Second, he realized, when people join with others, their individual self-interest is transformed into collective interest. In other words, when I first join a group, I might only be thinking about my own desires. For example, I might want to build a garden so that I can have more tomatoes to eat. But then I realize that the garden is not just about my tomatoes. It’s about feeding my entire community. In this way, an individual’s self-interest is transformed and she comes to understand and care about the broader collective interest.

Third, de Tocqueville argues, the process of joining together is transformative because it teaches people how to work with others. We all know that working together is not easy; it requires particular skills, capacities, and even motivations. As students, you have undoubtedly done group projects that made you tear your hair out because it’s so hard to work with others. De Tocqueville points out that the process of learning to work with others transforms people because it forces them to learn how to navigate their differences, speak up for what they believe in, and understand the power of working together.

How does this relate to social movements? Social movements make the political change they want by transforming the individuals who are part of them. And then social movements take those transformed individuals and translate their resources into political voice.

From talking with people about this process of transformation, we know that they’re often skeptical. The first question they ask is, Can social movements really transform people that way? A sociologist named Ziad Munson did a fascinating study of the “pro-life” movement against abortion in the United States. He was trying to understand how the people who are most active in the movement first got involved. Munson did long, 3-to-4-hour interviews with people on the very front lines of the pro-life movement—people who organize pro-life groups in their communities. They not only attend the rallies and the marches, but also spend a lot of time trying to get other people involved. Munson asked them, among other things, what they were doing before they became activists in the pro-life movement.

One of Munson’s most interesting findings undercuts a key assumption about social movements. Usually we assume that people join a movement because they believe strongly in the issue or cause it is centered on. According to that assumption, people would join the pro-life movement because they believe strongly that abortion is wrong. And people would join environmental movements because they are environmentalists—they already believe that it is important to address climate change, conserve resources, protect biodiversity, and preserve wild lands.

However, Munson found that almost half of the people he interviewed were either pro-choice or indifferent to issues of abortion when they first joined. That’s a surprising finding, because we presume that social movements draw in people who already support the cause for which they advocate. But in fact, Munson found that half the people on the front lines of the pro-life movement didn’t get involved because they believed in it. They got involved for a variety of other reasons. Maybe a working woman became a stay-at-home mom and was looking for something to do outside the house. Maybe someone had just moved to a new community and was trying to meet people. Maybe someone had just joined a new church and wanted to get involved in church activities. Or maybe a friend invited me to come to a meeting and I just felt bad saying no.

Figure 5.2.1 This view of the crowd at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, embodies our usual assumptions about what social movements look like. Photograph by US Information Agency, Press and Publications Service. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

In other words, people came into the movement for a wide variety of reasons—often social and biographical reasons having to do with an individual’s particular situation. But then, once they came to that first meeting, something happened that made them want to keep coming back. That’s the process of social transformation. Social movements begin to change people’s minds—not only in terms of what they believe, but also in terms of what they think they have to do because of what they believe. It wasn’t just that those who joined went from being prochoice or indifferent to abortion to being anti-abortion. It was more that they also thought, “Wow, now that I understand these issues, I’ve got to act on them. I’ve got to organize a group in my community. I have to attend these rallies. I have to attend these marches.”

That is how social movements work. They start by transforming the individual, and by transforming the individual, they begin to transform society.

Social movements are not all about marches and protests. Some of you might be thinking, “I’m not really an activist. I’m just a science major. And I’m not sure if I’m the kind of person who can stand up in front of a group of people and attend rallies.” It is easy to assume that social movements are nothing more than the large protests and rallies that we see covered in the media—that only a March on Washington with hundreds of thousands of people counts (Figure 5.2.1). But those of us who study social movements understand them as complex ecosystems. They are constellations of what some scholars would call arenas and players.

Social movements operate in many different arenas. That is, they happen in a variety of places and through a variety of forums—organizations, companies, government bodies, neighborhood associations, schools and universities, and so on. In those arenas, there are a variety of people who all play their own roles. The players might be movement insiders, like the activists whom Munson interviewed in his study, but they can also include the heads of corporations, directors of nonprofit foundations, professors, union leaders, intellectuals, teachers, and journalists.

Teach-ins are an example of the role that teachers and students can play in social movements. Organizers of the first Earth Day, including Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, wanted to plan one day of action— April 22, 1970—to raise awareness about environmental issues. Earth Day has expanded in subsequent years to include marches, tree plantings, and community cleanups, but in those early years, “environmental teach-ins” all over the United States were a big part of it (Figure 5.2.2).

Nowadays, the work of building the environmental movement happens all over, in places that we may not even think about as political. It happens in people’s living rooms as they discuss ways to take action with their neighbors. It happens in churches where religious leaders teach people the importance of being stewards. It happens in educational settings where children learn about the impact of human activity on the natural world. All of these people have a role to play.

In the next three sections of this chapter, we will turn to leadership. All of you climate champions have a role to play as leaders.

Figure 5.2.2 The first Earth Day, in 1970, was a nationwide “teach-in” that involved much more than marches, as this November 1969 issue of Senator Gaylord Nelson’s newsletter shows. Reproduced with permission from the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin.