Module 6 : Social Protests and Social Movements              

Lecture 2 : Social Movements: Causes and Stages

 

Source: Aberle (1966)

Causes of Social Movements

The social movements that have been evolved till date are because of the discrimination, exploitation, unlawful activities and so on. There is a direct link between dissatisfaction and movement emergence. It stands as a restriction towards the evil things existed and for further social change. Social movements tend to crate identities, ideas and even ideals. Identity crisis is one of the most important issues for what people come out to street to protest and to get their identity in all sphere of life. Formally the identity consists of social, economic, political, cultural and so on, on which they were always been oppressed.

The act of social movements can be divided into three parts:

 General Social Movements

In the form of general social movements, they have only a general direction, towards which they move in a slow, halting, yet persistent fashion. These types of movements are characterized by a literature, but the literature is as varied and ill-defined as the movement itself. The main general social movements are labor movement, the youth movement, the women’s movement and the peace movement.

Specific Social Movements

The outstanding instances of this type of movement are reform movements and revolutionary movements. It is on with a well defined objective or goal and to achieve this goal it develops an organization and structure, making it essentially a society. The morale of this type of movement is that, what is evil, unjust, improper, and wrong will be eradicated with the success of the movement. Mechanisms of such type of movement are grouped under five headings: (a) agitation, (b) development of esprit de corps, (c) development of morale, (d) the formation of an ideology, and (e) the development of operating tactics.

Expressive Movements

The main characteristic feature of expressive movements is that, they do not seek to change the institutions of the social order or its objective character. It want to show its existence and want to be stagnant it the present structure and social order. The very standing examples of expressive social movement are religious movement and fashion movement.

Stages of Social Movements

Blumer (1969), Mauss (1975) and Tilly (1978) have described different stages social movements often pass through. Movements emerge for a variety of reasons (see the theories below), coalesce, and generally bureaucratize. At that point, they can take a number of paths, including: finding some form of movement success, failure, co-optation of leaders, repression by larger groups (e.g., government), or even the establishment of the movement within the mainstream.

Whether these paths will result in movement decline or not varies from movement to movement. In fact, one of the difficulties in studying social movements is that movement success is often ill-defined because movement goals can change. This makes the actual stages the movement has passed through difficult to discern.

Social movements are not spontaneous events. According to Bill Moyer, successful social movements follow eight stages. His schema helps us not only to plan social movements, it helps to overcome a sense of failure and powerlessness that we often feel — the sense that we are always losing.