Social Movements and Tactical Choice

Abstract

For much of the past 40 years, the study of social movement tactics has viewed organizers' choices as driven by a desire to maximize efficacy and efficiency within a context of scarce resources and structural constraints. As sociologists increasingly turned toward culture, a new orientation emerged to view tactical choice as a process of gathering, interpreting, and evaluating information within dynamic, uncertain, and often-contradictory contexts. The importance of the cultural turn has been amply demonstrated in studies of such things as identities, emotions, and collective action frames, but the full implications of its insights continue to be discovered. Four insights in particular warrant greater attention: many core concepts in the study of social movements have an interpretive, subjective, and contingent nature; tactics are a means of communication; social structures are imbued with culture, and culture is thoroughly structured; and social movements sometimes behave irrationally, and what appears to be irrational behavior often is in fact rational. I briefly discuss three areas of scholarship -collective identities, diffusion, and institutional fields -that demonstrate innovative ways that sociologists continue to combine and incorporate these insights and point the way toward a more sophisticated understanding of social movements and tactical choice.

The missing spirals of violence: four waves of movement–countermovement contest in post-war Britain

“…In the last two decades, a wideranging literature has emerged on how cultural processes -the negotiation of group identities; the development, performance and reproduction of group rituals; emotions; processes of framing or the production of internalised moral orders -shape, even comprise, social movement activism (Jasper, 2007;Larson, 2013;Virchow, 2007).…”

Mass Transit Shutdowns as a Tactical Innovation in Bogotá, Colombia

“…The social movements literature has long pointed out that activists tend to adopt tactics they "believe to be the most effective and least costly" (Meyer and Tarrow 1988:22, no emphasis in the original). As pointed by Larson (2013), this classic perceived-effectiveness assumption has inspired the research on protest tactics for over four decades-especially the literature on disruptive tactics such as the one analyzed here (Francisco 2010;Gamson 1975;Lichbach 1998;McAdam 1983;Piven and Cloward 1977;Soule 1997).…”

“…It is important to highlight that-unlike the present article-studies of tactical innovations based on (aggregate) protest-event data overwhelmingly do not provide representative attitudinal data regarding activists' perceived effectiveness of tactics (Francisco 2010;Karapin 2011;Koopmans 1993;McAdam 1983;Wang and Piazza 2016;Wang and Soule 2012). From a theoretical point of view, providing such attitudinal data is critical because research suggests that tactics perceived as effective by activist are indeed more likely to diffuse (Barber 2002;Larson 2013;Soule 1997Soule , 1999Tilly 1978).…”

Gender beliefs as a dimension of tactical choice: the ‘Take Back the Night’ march in Sweden

“…During the last four decades, social movement scholars have developed explanations of tactical choice that fall into two broad categories and differ according to their conceptions of power. In repertoires of contention, the main explanation from the first category, power is understood as operating through structures that exist outside of collective actors and are concentrated in centralized authority, such as governments and corporations (Doherty & Hayes, 2019;Larsson, 2013;Taylor & Van Dyke, 2007). A repertoire of contention is the set of strategic performances or tactics for making claims upon adversaries available to collective actors in a given historical and cultural context (Tarrow, 1993a;Tilly, 1986).…”

“…In characteristics of collective actors, the main explanation from the second category, power is understood as operating through the interpretations created by collective actors (Doherty & Hayes, 2019;Larsson, 2013;Taylor & Van Dyke, 2007). According to Larsson (2013, p. 867), tactical choice from this perspective is 'a process of gathering, interpreting, and evaluating information within dynamic, uncertain and often-contradictory contexts'.…”