Conflictual and Consensual Collective Action

It is not rare to witness broad coalitions of charities and other voluntary associations mobilizing on solidarity issues, for example on social exclusion on domestic politics, or on development or human rights issues in an international perspective, and to refer to them as social movements. In many cases, however, they might be best characterized as “consensus movements.” In both social movement and consensus movement dynamics, actors share solidarity and an interpretation of the world, enabling them to link specific acts and events in a longer time perspective. However, in the latter, sustained collective action does not take a conflictual  element. Collective goods are often produced through cooperative efforts that neither imply nor require the identification of specific adversaries, trying to reduce the assests and opportunities of one’s group or preventing chances to expand them. Prospected solutions do not imply redistribution of neither power nor alterations in social structure, but focus instead on service delivery, self-help, personal and community empowerment. Likewise, the practice and promotion of alternative lifestyles does not require the presence of opponents defined in social and political terms. Collective actors may fight ethereal adversaries, ranging from bad or conventional taste, in the case of artistic and style-oriented movements, to “the inner enemy” in the case of some religious movements, without necessarily blaming any social actors for the state of things they intend to modify. However, insisting on the presence of conflict as a distinctive trait of movement need not force social movement analysts away from the investigation of those instances of collective action where a conflict is difficult to identify, such as those oriented to personal change (e.g.the so called “human potential movement,” or many countercultural, alternative lifestyle networks) and those focusing on the delivery of some kind of help or assistance to an aggrieved collectivity (e.g., the so called “solidarity movement”: Giugni and Passy 2001).

Social Movements, Events, and Coalitions

We have a social movement dynamic going on when single episodes of collective action are perceived as components of a longer lasting action, rather than discrete events; and when those who are engaged in them feel linked by ties of solidarity and of ideal communion with protagonists of other analogous mobilizations. The course of movement for the control of toxic waste in the United States provides a good example of this dynamic. From a series of initiatives which developed from a local base and in relation to specific goals such as blocking the construction of waste disposal plants in particular areas, the movement gradually developed into a collective force with a national base, concerned with numerous aspects of the relationship between nature and society, and with a much more sophisticated cultural elaboration (Szasz 1994:69-99). Identity building also means that a sense of collective belonging can be maintained even after a specific initiative or a particular campaign has come to an end. The persistence of these feelings will have at least two important consequences. First, it will make the revival of mobilization in relation to the same goals easier, whenever favorable conditions recur. Movements often oscillate between brief phase of intense public activity and long “latent” periods (Melluci 1984b; Taylor 1989), in which self -reflection and cultural production prevail. Second, representations of the world and collective identities which developed in a certain can also facilitate, through a gradual transformation, the development of new movements and new solidarities. For example, the close relationship existing in several countries between movements of the new left of the early 1970s and successive political ecology movements has been noted on a number of occasions (Dalton 1994; Diani 1995a; Duyvendak 1995). Coalition is an example of informal networks of collective action which illustrates why collective identity is a crucial feature of social movements. In coalition dynamics, collective actors are densely connected to each other in terms of alliances, and identify explicit opponents, but those links are not necessarily backed by strong identity links. The networks between actors mobilizing on a common goal take a purely contingent and instrumental nature. Resource mobilization and campaigning is then conducted mainly through exchanges and pooling of resources between distinct groups and organizations. The latter rather than the network are the main source of participants’ identities and loyalties. Actorsa instrumentally share resources in order to achieve specific goals, yet do not develop any particular sense of belonging and of a common future during the process.