Social movement theory
These are structural weaknesses in society that put individuals under a certain subjective psychological pressure, such as unemployment, rapid industrialization or urbanization.
[1] Additionally, these approaches have in common that they view participation in contentious politics as unconventional and irrational, because the protests are the result of an emotional and frustrated reaction to grievances rather than a rational attempt to improve their situation.
[2] These psychologically-based theories have largely been rejected by present-day sociologists and political scientists, although many still make a case for the importance (although not centrality) of emotions.
Festinger and colleagues suggested that experiencing deindividuation, especially within a group setting, diminishes typical inhibitions on behavior, leading individuals to engage in actions they might otherwise refrain from, as they feel less directly responsible for their conduct.
[4] Mass society theory emerged in the wake of the fascist and communist movements in the 1930s and 1940s and can be seen as an attempt to explain the rise of extremism abroad.
Characterized by totalitarian rule, nationalist fervor, and racial discrimination, fascist regimes such as those led by Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany imposed authoritarian control and propagated aggressive expansionism.
At this point, people will join movements because their expectations will have outgrown their actual material situation (also called the "J-Curve theory").
The more American-centered structural approaches examined how characteristics of the social and political context enable or hinder protests.
[16] The more European-centered social-constructivist approaches rejected the notion that class-struggle is central to social movements, and emphasized other indicators of a collective identity, like gender, ethnicity or sexuality.
[28] Nevertheless, it has sparked debates on the efficacy of violence,[29] the importance of elite and political allies,[30] and the agency of popular movements in general.
The motivations for movement participation is a form of post-material politics and newly created identities, particularly those from the "new middle class".
In the late 1990s two long books summarized the cultural turn in social-movement studies, Alberto Melucci's Challenging Codes and James M. Jasper's The Art of Moral Protest.
Along with Jeff Goodwin and Francesca Polletta, Jasper organized a conference in New York in 1999 that helped put emotions on the intellectual agenda for many scholars of protest and movements.
In France, Daniel Cefaï arrived at similar conclusions in Pourquoi se mobilise-t-on?, a sweeping history and synthesis of thought on collective action and social movements.
[37][38] While it is a diverse field, the epistemic core argument within postcolonial studies is that the discursive dominance of the Western world/global North has continued after the end of the formal colonization of the global South.
[40] Postcolonialism problematizes the Eurocentricity of contemporary scientific thought and methodology by arguing that it projects misleading theories, based on particular Western facts, on the global South, while also systematically ignoring Southern data for theorizing.
[46][47][48][49][50] It has also been argued that postcolonial social movements studies, despite forwarding some accurate criticism, is at risk of creating its own form of cultural essentialism and a 'new Orientalism'.
[51][52][53] Certain claims activists make on behalf of their social movement "resonate" with audiences including media, elites, sympathetic allies, and potential recruits.
[59] Additionally, cultural factors such as language, history, and social context influence a person's cognitive development.
This theory underscores the role of social interactions in a cultural context in shaping individual understanding and knowledge construction Under rational choice theory, individuals are rational actors who strategically weigh the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action and choose that course of action which is most likely to maximize their utility.
