Ideas, thinkers, and social networks: The process of grievance construction in the anti-genetic engineering movement

Abstract

Popular commentaries suggest that the movement against genetic engineering in agriculture (anti-GE movement) was born in Europe, rooted in European cultural approaches to food, and sparked by recent food-safety scares such as "mad cow" disease. Yet few realize that the anti-GE movement's origins date back thirty years, that opposition to agricultural biotechnology emerged with the technology itself, and that the movement originated in the United States rather than Europe. We argue here that neither the explosion of the GE food issue in the late 1990s nor the concomitant expansion of the movement can be understood without recognizing the importance of the intellectual work carried out by a "critical community" of activists during the two-decade-long period prior to the 1990s. We show how these early critics forged an oppositional ideology and concrete set of grievances upon which a movement could later be built. Our analysis advances social movement theory by establishing the importance of the intellectual work that activists engage in during the "protomobilizational" phase of collective action, and by identifying the cognitive and social processes by which activists develop a critical, analytical framework. Our elaboration of four specific dimensions of idea/ideology formation pushes the literature toward a more complete understanding of the role of ideas and idea-makers in social movements, and suggests a process of grievance construction that is more "organic" than strategic (pace the framing literature).Substantial evidence shows that a new social movement against genetic engineering in agriculture has had a significant impact on public acceptance of genetically engineered (GE) foods, the regulation of these new production technologies, and the economic fortunes of the agricultural biotechnology industry (Barrett 2000;Kilman 2002;Schurman and Munro 2003). Anti-biotech activists have helped to turn many consumers away from GE foods and catalyzed important new regulatory restraints on the technology, including insect refuge requirements for genetically engineered crops, a multiyear moratorium on new GE crop approvals in Europe, and new labeling laws in many countries. In 1999, a coalition of US-based activists exposed the presence of an unapproved

Against the neoliberal steamroller? The Biosafety Protocol and the social regulation of agricultural biotechnologies

“…Although few, if any, delegates outside the Like-Minded Group voiced support for including an article on socioeconomic considerations in the protocol, importantly, various forms of social welfarism can be seen in many countries in the global North, particularly Western Europe (Kleinman and Kinchy, 2003a, b). A variant of social welfarism can also be found in socioeconomic impact assessment undertaken by academic researchers (Freudenburg, 1986;Stabinsky, 2000) and in the work of a small cadre of activist intellectuals who established the conceptual foundation for the anti-biotechnology movement beginning in the 1970s (Schurman and Munro, 2006). 5.…”

Epistemic brokerage in the bio-property narrative: contributions to explaining opposition to transgenic technologies in agriculture

“…Political opposition to the GMO merged threat narratives of bioproperty and bio-safety: threats to nature, in the form of 'biological pollution' (gene flow); threats to human health, in the form of allergens; threats to farmers, in the form of bondage to monopoly seed corporations ('bio-serfs', 'bio-feudalism') and threats to national independence, in the form of dominance of agriculture by multi-national corporations [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Intellectuals in the excolonial world made crucial contributions to theorizing genetic engineering as especially catastrophic for the universal valent of development [18].…”

Transforming everyday life: Islamism and social movement theory

“…Yet, these dismissals do have an element of truth, in that an exclusive focus on "the English Department" (a metaphor that captures identity-formation, language, civil society, and the everyday) if coupled with an evasion of "the White House" (that is, 9 For a similar instrumentalist approach to the question of how a movement frames its goals, see Benford (1993), Gamson (1988), and Snow et al (1986). 10 Other scholars working on American and British cases have problematized the givenness of movement goals and demonstrated how they are constituted through narrative, thinking, and dialogic discourse (Polletta 1998a(Polletta , b, 2006Schurman and Munro 2006;Steinberg 1998Steinberg , 1999), yet everyday life and bodily practice has been marginal to their accounts. 11 See especially Tilly (1986Tilly ( , 1995b on learning and repertoires.…”

“…While they recognize in passing that creation of movement targets and identities also occurs "over the long run and outside of contentious interaction" (p. 144), no tools are provided for the analysis of such creation. Schurman and Munro (2006) have also drawn attention to the lack of theorization regarding this pre-contentious phase of mobilization in political process explanations. 13 The metaphor belongs to Todd Gitlin (1995), who criticizes the excesses of identity politics.…”

“…18 But, in many cases, this street action presupposes the formation of a collectivity through inculcated dispositions. Grievances are not omnipresent, as political process theorists assume (Hafez 2003;McCarthy and Zald 1977;Tilly 1978); they are constructed by movements (Schurman and Munro 2006).…”