Organizing spaces: Meeting arenas as a social movement infrastructure between organization, network, and institution (original) (raw)
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Organizing Spaces: Meetings as Social Movement Infrastructure
On the one side, Schwartzman (1986) deplored that meetings are “a neglected social form in organizational studies”, a situation which has hardly changed in the last decades. On the other, social movement researchers found that “[c]ontemporary movements resemble an amorphous nebula of indistinct shape” (Melucci 1996: 114) and complained about “insufficient information on internal processes” because decisionmaking in social movements is typically “treated as ‘black box’ processes within SMOs [social movement organizations]” (Minkoff and McCarthy 2005: 289, 304). In my paper, I argue that meetings, especially inter-organizational meetings, are the place to look in order to understand internal social movement processes. While it is commonly accepted that social movements are not organizations but networks of groups, organizations, and individuals, it is also clear that social movements are nevertheless organized, or rather: engaged in organizing processes. If organizations provide the structural context for organizational processes, I contend that meetings provide the structural context for organizing and mobilizing processes in social movements. In other words, meetings constitute a core infrastructure for these processes. Yet, the importance of meetings is not reflected in the literature on social movements or on organizations. This paper makes a first step towards a better understanding of the internal infrastructure of social movements by presenting a typology of meeting arenas which helps to map this communicative infrastructure. Based on several years of participant observation in various organizing processes of the global justice movements at the local (Berlin), national (Germany), and transnational (Europe) level, the paper describes some core characteristics of social movement meetings and explores what actually happens inside them, focusing on the culturally defined role of the facilitator and how the practices of consensus decision-making is also culturally contingent.
Social Movement Studies, 2019
The growing attention paid to the relational spaces of collective action is good news. It owes a lot to the legacy of interactionism and allows us to more accurately grasp the relevant contexts of protest that cannot be subsumed solely under big contexts such as political opportunity structure, economy, and so on. One can however worry about the never-ending succession of paradigms – more often acronyms – in the subfield of social movement studies. ‘Context’ issues are in fact linked to the very status of explanation in social sciences, and to the unequal nomological (or conversely more historical) ambitions of social sciences – a debate that is far from being settled. This article insists on this underlying epistemological debate, before highlighting different aspects of what is at stake in the way relational contexts of collective action should be considered: relational understanding of strategies, the link between mobilizations and transformations in and between social spaces, and the role and types of differentiation of society. Here, the classical (but barely translated) work of Michel Dobry appears as particularly useful in order to better understand contexts, if we consider them at the same time through interactions and the differentiation of society. But far from pleading for a new magic bullet, the article intends to support a more historically contextualized approach of social movements that is less interested in the establishment of laws than the understanding of the consequences of specific forms of social differentiations. This understanding could ultimately lead to a good definition of what relevant context of collective action might be.
Social Movements and Networks, 2003
It is difficult to grasp the nature of social movements. 1 They cannot be reduced to specific insurrections or revolts, but rather resemble strings of more or less connected events, scattered across time and space; nor can they be identified with any specific organization, rather, they consist of groups and organizations, with various levels of formalization, linked in patterns of interaction which run from the fairly centralized to the totally decentralized, from the cooperative to the explicitly hostile; persons promoting and/or supporting their actions do so not as atomized individuals, possibly with similar values or social traits, but as actors linked to each other through complex webs of exchanges, either direct or mediated. Social movements are, in other words, complex and highly heterogeneous network structures. Since the 1970s, analysts of social movements and collective action have tried hard to make sense of these structures, and their dynamics. That collective action is significantly shaped by social ties between prospective participants is not a recent 2 discovery (e.g.
Juris et al., Movement Building and the United States Social Forum
2014
Despite the growing academic literature on the World Social Forum process, few scholars have attempted to systematically analyze the social, cultural, and political impact of the forums. This has to do in part with the inherent difficulties of assessing movement consequences, which is particularly complicated for an activity geared toward creating ‘open spaces.’ This article presents an analytic framework for evaluating the impact of the social forums through an analysis of the 2010 United States Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit from the perspective of a local Boston-based delegation called the Boston Freedom Rides. We then use that framework to consider the impact of the 2010 USSF, bridging the academic literature on movement outcomes with activist perspectives. We make two related claims. First, the social forums, and the USSF in particular, should be viewed and their impact assessed in light of their generativity as ‘movement-building machines’: infrastructures designed for the production of social capital, networks, solidarities, meanings, frames, identities, knowledges, strategies, skills, and repertoires. Second, with respect to the Freedom Rides, the 2010 USSF contributed to movement building on multiple levels, but more so within rather than across movement sectors. Our goal is less to make a definitive argument about the impact of the 2010 USSF than to provide a helpful way of thinking about movement building as a social movement outcome, which can be applied and refined through further comparative and longitudinal research. We thus favor breadth over depth in outlining a broad framework for future inquiry.
Quarrelling and Protesting: How Organizers Shape a Demonstration
Mobilization: An …, 2011
On February 15, 2003, about 20 million people around the world protested against the imminent war in Iraq. In the Netherlands, 70,000 people marched in the streets of Amsterdam. This study focuses on the organization and mobilization processes preceding this event in Amsterdam. We trace how the organizers' attempts to form a coalition and the quarrels that ensued affected mobilization efforts, composition of the demonstration, media attention, and, subsequently, how and when participants were mobilized. We argue that, although infrequently studied, the specific ways that initial mobilization structures are formed are critical factors in the trajectory of mobilization. We use in-depth interviews with the organizers, newspaper content analyses, and survey data from participants to trace these effects.
Mechanisms of Social Movement Success: Conversation, Displacement and Disruption
Revista Internacional de Sociología, 2016
A great deal of social movement scholarship tends to assume-and in some cases explicitly argues-that disruption is the primary mechanism through which protest movements win major concessions from the holders of power. Nonetheless, some studies and much empirical evidence provide a strong basis to argue that other paths to social movement success also exist. The importance of discourse and framing has also been highlighted in a number of studies but we argue that the full contribution of talk itself to movement success is best captured through the concept of "conversation" and an examination of the preconditions for its viability. The successful displacement of power-holders by protest movements, although a less common pathway to success than disruption and conversation, also deserves conceptual and empirical attention. In this paper we make this set of distinctions conceptually explicit, differentiating analytically between these three mechanisms of movement success and delineating the conditions required for each mechanism to prove viable and 'useful'. We rely on extensive examples drawn from movements and protest events in the United States, Spain and Portugal, using this empirical material, as well as the existing theoretical literature, as our basis for constructing a conceptual argument on the ideal typical distinction between these three mechanisms and the conditions that allow them to operate. We also take up the questions of whether, and when, movement actors can successfully combine these mechanisms or-alternativelyfind themselves pressed to pursue one or another of these pathways to success in a relatively 'pure' form.