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Editors' Introduction

Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper

People have complained about the things they dislike throughout history. Sometimes they do more than complain; they band together with others to change things. In modern societies, more than ever before, people have organized themselves to pursue a dizzying array of goals. There are the strikes, pickets, and rallies of the labor movement, aimed at higher wages and union recognition, but also at political goals. In the early nineteenth century the Luddites broke into early British factories and smashed new "labor-saving" machines. There have been dozens of revolutions like those in France, Russia, China, Cuba, and Iran. The women's movement has tried to change family life and gender relations as well as the economic opportunities of women. We have seen Earth Day and organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Animal rights activists have broken into labs and "liberated" experimental animals. There have been plenty of conservative and right-wing movements as well, from Americans opposed to immigrants in the 1840s to those who fought federally mandated busing in the 1970s to those who have bombed abortion clinics in more recent years.

Some of these movements have looked for opportunities to claim new rights, while others have responded to threats or violence. Some have sought political and economic emancipation and gains, while others have promoted (or fought) lifestyle choices they liked (or feared). Some have created formal organizations, others have relied on informal networks, and still others have engaged in more spontaneous actions such as riots. Movements have regularly had to choose between violent and nonviolent activities, illegal and legal ones, disruption and persuasion, extremism and moderation, reform and revolution. Social movements are conscious, concerted, and sustained efforts by ordinary people to change some aspect of their society by using extra-institutional means. Movements are more conscious and organized than fads and fashions. They last longer than a single protest or riot. There is more to them than formal organizations, although such organizations usually play a part. They are composed mainly of ordinary people as opposed to economic elites, army officers, or politicians. They need not be explicitly political, but many are. They are protesting against something, either explicitly as in antiwar movements or implicitly as in the back-to-the-land movement which is disgusted with modern urban and suburban life.

Political or Social Protest

Protest refers to the act of challenging, resisting, or making demands upon authorities, powerholders, and/or cultural beliefs and practices by some individual or group.

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Why study social movements? First, you might be interested in understanding them for their own sake, as a common and dramatic part of the world around you. You might simply wish to better understand protestors and their points of view, perhaps especially when they seem to want things that to you seem undesirable. Why do some people think animals have rights, or others that the United Nations is part of a sinister conspiracy? Understanding social movements is a good way to comprehend the human condition and human diversity.

But there are other reasons for studying social movements, which are windows onto a number of aspects of social life. You might study social movements if you are interested in politics, as movements are a main source of political conflict and, sometimes, change. They are often the first to articulate new political issues and ideas, including new visions of a better world. As people become attuned to a social problem they want solved, they typically form some kind of movement to push for a solution. Established political parties and their leaders are rarely asking the most interesting questions, or raising new issues; bureaucracy sets in, and politicians spend their time in routine tasks. It is typically movements outside the political system that force insiders to recognize new fears and desires.

You might also study social movements because you are interested in human action more generally, or in social theory. Scholars of social movements ask why and how people do the things they do, especially why they do things together: this is also the question that drives sociology in general, especially social theory. Social movements raise the famous Hobbesian problem of social order: why do people cooperate with each other when they might get as many or more benefits by acting selfishly or alone? The study of social movements makes the question more manageable: if we can see why people will voluntarily cooperate in social movements, we can understand why they cooperate in general. Political action is a paradigm of social action that sheds light on action in other spheres of life. It gets to the heart of human motivation. For example, do people act to maximize their material interests? Do they act out rituals that express their beliefs about the world, or simply reaffirm their place in that world? What is the balance between symbolic and "instrumental" (goal-oriented) action? Between selfish and altruistic action?

Social Movement

A social movement is a collective, organized, sustained, and noninstitutional challenge to authorities, powerholders, or cultural beliefs and practices. A revolutionary movement is a social movement that seeks, at minimum, to overthrow the government or state, and perhaps to change the economy and key institutions of the entire society.

You will also benefit from the study of social movements if you are interested in social change. This might be a theoretical interest in why change occurs, or it might be a practical interest in encouraging or preventing change. Social movements are certainly one central source of social transformation. Other sources include those formal organizations, especially corporations, that are out to make a profit: they invent new technologies that change our ways of working and interacting. Corporations are always finding new ways of extracting profits from workers, and inventing new products to market. These changes typically disrupt people's ways of life: a new machine makes people work harder, or toxic wastes have to be disposed of near a school. People react to these changes, and resist them, by forming social movements.

But, while formal organizations are the main source of technical change, they are rarely a source of change in values or in social arrangements. Why? In modern societies with tightly knit political and economic systems, the big bureaucracies demand economic and political control; they prize stability. So they try to routinize everything in order to prevent the unexpected. They resist changes in property relations, for example, which are one of the key components of capitalism.

So innovation in values and political beliefs often arises from the discussions and efforts of social movements. Why don't societies just endlessly reproduce themselves intact? It is often social movements that develop new ways of seeing society and new ways of directing it. They are a central part of what has been called "civil society" or the "public sphere," in which groups and individuals debate their own futures.

If you have a practical interest in spreading democracy or changing society, there are tricks to learn-techniques of organizing, mobilizing, and influencing the media. There have been a lot of social movements around for the last 40 years, and people in those movements have accumulated a lot of know-how about how to run movements. This is not the main focus of this reader, but we hope there are a few practical lessons to be learned from it.

Finally, you might want to study social movements if you have an interest in the moral basis of society. Social movements are a bit like art: they are efforts to express values and sensibilities that have not yet been well articulated, that journalists haven't yet written about, that lawmakers have not yet addressed. We all have moral sensibilities-including unspoken intuitions as well as articulated principles and rules-that guide our action, or at least make us uneasy when they are violated. Social movements are good ways to understand these moral sensibilities.

Social movements play a crucial role in contemporary societies. We learn about the world around us through them. They encourage us to figure out how we feel about government policies, social trends, and new technologies. In some cases, they even inspire the invention of new technologies or new ways of using old technologies. Most of all, they are one means by which we work out our moral visions, transforming vague intuitions into principles and political demands.

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Research on social movements has changed enormously over time. Until the 1960s, most scholars who studied social movements were frightened of them. They saw them as dangerous mobs who acted irrationally, as slaves to their emotions, blindly following demagogues who had sprung up in their midst. In the nineteenth century, the crowds that attracted the most attention were those that periodically appeared in the cities of Europe demanding better conditions for workers, the right to vote, and other rights that we now take for granted. Most elites, including university professors, had little sympathy for them. Crowds were thought to whip up...