Global Social Movements: a summary of Della Porta and Diani's "Social Movements: an introduction", Blackwell pub., 2006 (original) (raw)

Even though the study of social movements has for long been neglected, from the second half of the 20 th century on, research on the field has increased considerably to the extent that nowadays it represents an important and wide area of sociological studies. Because of the heterogeneity and the multidimensional nature of social movements, different approaches have been adopted in order to answer a variety of questions concerning this form of collective behaviour and to analyse their structure, their development, their components and their symbolic processes.