1. R. Yates.
International Animal Rights Gathering, Poland
2012.

2. “Get a ******* job!!!”

3. “Reason” - the driving force in genuine democracies in
which social movements play a crucial role.

4. “New Social Movements”
• civil rights movement,
• feminist movement,
• animal advocacy movement.

5. Habermas
New social movements are important because they
demand that reasons be given for social decisions…
Social policies critically questioned rather than merely
accepted.

6. Key modern-day orientations…
• Work
• Family
• Career
• Consuming
• [Celeb culture]

7. LIFEWORLD and SYSTEM
• Western capitalism impedes rationalisation processes
• Bureaucracy has developed far more than political
democratic structures
• Science and technological rationality over “moral and
aesthetic reason”
• “Colonisation of the lifeworld” - the system level, based
on instrumental reason, “penetrates” the cultural
lifeworld –
• Contamination of cultural rationality with system
values
• A scientific-technical-administrative power elite

8. 1. Classical
2. New Social Movement Theory
3. Resource Mobilisation Theory
4. Politics of Identity and Social
Commitment

9. Social Movement definitions
•‘any broad social alliance of people who are
associated in seeking to effect or to block an
aspect of social change within a society’ (Jary &
Jary).
•Noun. social movement - a group of people with
a common ideology who try together to achieve
certain general goals (on-line dictionary)

10. • Loosely organized but sustained
campaign in support of a social
goal, typically either the
implementation or the prevention
of a change in society’s structure or
values. Although social
movements differ in size, they are
all essentially collective.

11. Equilibrium mechanisms
• government
• political parties
• trade unions
• associations

12. NO NEED FOR SMs
suggests that the people in social
movements had something wrong with
THEM
protestors were seen as
• ‘exceptional’,
• ‘abnormal’
• people with social and mental
‘difficulties’
SM = outbursts of unreason!

13. 1960s: and now for something completely
different…

14. Della Porta and Diani
The ‘movement’ appears to be neither class
based, nor organised within the framework of
standard national politics; it is not competing for
control of the state, as an alternative potential
ruling group or class, and to some extent it claims
to speak for ‘everyone’, for universal rights and
‘participation’ or ‘liberation’.

15. Alain Touraine
a fully developed movement is successful if it
1. identifies a social group whose interest it serves
2. defines its “enemies”
3. develops a vision of an alternative future

16. Resource Mobilisation Theory
What happens when social movement organisations get
• too big
• too bureaucratic
• too business-like
• too flabby
Greenpeace International/PeTA

17. Politics of Identity and Social Commitment
“little communities”
“tribes”
On the basis of much recent discussion of new
movements, we can characterise their aims
broadly as bringing about social change through
the transformation of values, personal identities
and symbols. Alan Scott (1990) Ideology and the
New Social Movements

18. Scott, 1990: 18
These movements are identity involving
and transforming, they self-consciously
manipulate symbols and they challenged
entrenched values. This can best be
achieved through the creation of
alternative life-styles and the discursive
reformation of individual and collective
wills.

19. Steve Buechler (2000) Social Movements in
Advanced Capitalism
their philosophical or spiritual rejection of the
instrumental rationality of advanced capitalist society and
its systems of control and co-optation... this cultural
emphasis rejects conventional goals, tactics and
strategies in favour of the exploration of new identities,
meanings, signs and symbols. The ability to envision and
symbolically enact new and different ways of organising
social relationships can itself be a potential challenge to
dominant social arrangements (p. 47-8)

20. We are a tribe in far more than name. We have a
collective purpose and a cultural identity as the
nomadic indigenous peoples of Britain - we have
formulated our own customs, mythology, style of
dress, beliefs and are evolving our own language
(“Donga Alex”, in McKay, p. 137)
Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties
(London: Verso, 1996)

21. Richard Gale (1986)
Social Movements and The State
Social movements/countermovements – dyad
Social movements/countermovements/government
agencies – triad
Activity of SMs will increase interaction between
countermovements and the state
Animal rights action = animal welfare reforms