Dissertation Research/Approach

= Approach to the Dissertation = Prior to starting research on organizations that in an earlier age might have been called social movements it is useful to consider what came before. Some research argues in favor of a particular model based on only one or perhaps two cases that makes one wonder whether the findings can be extrapolated any further. Larger, global studies of the phenomena can be critiqued as summarizing data, but at too high a level to be valuable to anyone other than fellow academic entrepreneurs in search of an argument. It is for this reason that it is necessary to consider carefully how one is to research and write if one is attempting, perhaps naively, to create more useful and explanatory literature than those highly esteemed names who have gone before. In the following few pages I consider a small number of books on social movements with the intention of revealing the strengths they have. Subsequently I argue in favor of collaborative and interdisciplinary research alongside innovative methods as I feel that they might yield more in the future for a broad set of readers.

Foundations of Social Movement Studies

Much can be made of the case study approach to social change. An example of this is Doug McAdam’s book, Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency 1930-1970 in which he examines the development of the black social movement in the United States. Using this case he formulates a political process model of social movements. The model he advances attempts to address the weaknesses of earlier explanations by focusing on the dynamics of social movements. Specifically he argues that the emergence of social movements results first from broad socioeconomic processes that play into expanding political opportunities and indigenous organizational strength. This combination, along with what he calls cognitive liberation, provides for the emergence of a movement. Its subsequent development or decline is a result of the response of those who can apply social control (who are more than likely in opposition to the movements) and whether individual actors credit the movement with achieving progress. The model as described sounds plausible though tellingly, in his introduction to the second edition, he feels it is necessary to modify and reinterpret it to better fit his case. It is this revision as much as anything else that makes me question the wisdom of seeking a more detailed generally applicable model as the raison d’être of social movement studies, even though as a general explanation his model clearly does provide some value in and of itself.

An alternative approach to social movement studies is exemplified in the work of Beverly Silver. Her analysis creates a “narrative of working-class formation in which events unfold in dynamic-time-space.” She rests her analysis on the contents of a database that catalogues events of labor unrest between 1870 and 1996 taken from two papers of record, The Times (London) and The New York Times. Silver’s methodology permits her to draw conclusions about labor unrest congruent with David Harvey’s more recent concept of spatial fixes. Silver argues that capital has attempted to escape labor unrest through strategies related to innovations around production methods and locations, product enhancements and finally financial engineering. Silver’s analysis is both insightful and persuasive. It manages to analyze a global phenomenon, labor unrest, over an extended period and do so without being constrained by the Westphalian state as a unit of analysis. However, she uses data from only two Anglophone newspapers, and whilst she removes sites of unrest in the home country of each paper this limited range of data sources begs the question whether the papers tend to report more on unrest in countries in which the readership has invested capital or from which the readership has previously emigrated. Moreover, the breadth of the project naturally limits the granularity of the research. It is such a limitation that I find most pertinent in a study that seeks to explain the existence of macro processes operating across the world and over more than a century, especially in a century where innovation for innovation’s sake did as much to change industrial structures as did labor market unrest. It is for the above reasons I am not persuaded that further research in the same vein will yield significant additional insight regarding social movements.

Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow’s à la carte approach to definitions and explanations of movements in their book Contentious Politics is more fruitful. Their book’s seemingly more modest aim is to provide a consistent syntax for movements and locate them in a wider context of politics and institutions. The obvious limitation is that the contingencies that might generate a social movement and whether it might be successful are innumerable. That said, the syntax that Tilly and Tarrow provide and the recognition from McAdam that the complex dynamics and cycles are extremely relevant seems a sound foundation to begin studies of social movements.

Similarly Charles Kurzmann’s book on the Iranian revolution also points to fertile ground though it punts on the question of identifying a single underlying cause for a rapidly executed revolution. His answer that it is a hyper-contingent situation however stops short of exploring the details of the ever-contingent situation that he saw at the core of the critical moments of the Iranian revolution, though his “non-explanation” explanation suggests that there is nothing more to say surely the contingency he has identified deserves more research.

Building on the foundation of research described above and searching for a method that might just yield a useful path of enquiry, it is necessary to clarify what one is attempting to understand. For me the question at the heart of social movement literature is to understand the possibility of the transformation of an existing political system or social order specifically the changes of a net enabled society. Changes of the order of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1992 are key. Why did these events occur? What sustained their success?

Richard Flacks makes such a call for a reinvention of the field in his essay “The Question of Relevance,” in which he exhorts researchers to perform research around political opportunities in partnership with activists. He argues that activist biographies and “the origins of their commitment” are important. His invocation of John Dewey as a trade unionist and Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward as activists campaigning for welfare rights are models of active scholarship that he would like to see repeated. This call for engagement seems correct yet his solutions seem rooted, for the most part, in refining arguments already made around understanding political opportunities through his personal lens.

I hazard there is more to understand regarding the contingencies Kurzman recovers in his book. Is the revolutionary moment going to be understood by better ethnography? Is it going to be understood through more sophisticated traditional statistics? I would argue that getting beyond non-explanations won’t be achieved by doing more of the same – not macro news report analysis, further definition of the syntax of movements, the development of generalized dynamic models, or better structural analysis. It will come from integration of the understanding we already have from the above analysis and insights already gained, alongside approaches, and data from other fields - not repeated variations of similar analyses but different and better analyses. It will necessarily be interdisciplinary and collaborative in its approach. Perhaps the work on the politics of perceptions and misperceptions advanced by Robert Jervis in international relations which he uses to explain state behavior, might yield insight. Perhaps acquisition of social network data, unlike that provided by sampling methods, can permit an understanding of social relationships and shed additional light and get inside the molecular processes to which Trotsky refers in his account of the Russian revolution and Kurzmann hints at in history of the Iranian revolution. Can mathematical simulations of such situations be created that model social movements that grow exponentially enable us to understand the communications structure within movements more effectively?

To increase the efficacy of such approaches it will be necessary to adopt the research behavior of hard scientists, where collaboration within a lab and team-centric publishing is more the norm than individual competing analyses. Moreover, the social scientists will have to get as close to the social movements as hard scientists get to their experiments. Otherwise the level of data required will be missed. Breaking down these barriers may be achieved formally through the creation of research partnerships within the academy or by modifying the process of publishing such that it becomes more open and more frequent. Additionally publishing of work under a creative commons license, and engagement between distributed researchers and movement participants using non-traditional genres of publishing may also help.

That said, this means pushing up against existing academic norms that reward publishing within strict disciplinary boundaries and sometimes in a style sometimes unsuited to reading by others outside of the sub-field. However, innovation in these ways might create somewhat of a virtuous circle. The tighter the engagement, the more likely people will obtain difficult to acquire data, thus generating more collaboration and better the articles with a wider the readership.

This dissertation partly because of its subject matter and partly because of the point in time in which it is being written may well benefit from being constructed in way that is conscious of the possibilities for collaboration and feedback. Undoubtedly there are challenges in attempting this. For one a dissertation is an assessment of the work of a single person, and secondly the public embarrassment of making errors in plain sight will be considerable. However, it is my intention to incorporate a diverse set of methods and lines of thinking perhaps unfamiliar to social movement scholars and develop the bulk of the material in a wiki such that interested readers can stumble upon it and comment as appropriate. Additionally this will allow me to embed (via links) my writing with that of others, and utilize non-traditional forms of material as appropriate. Moreover, given the low likelihood of publishing it subsequently (given the free fall of the book publishing industry), my work will contribute to the discourse on this subject earlier and possibly more substantially than otherwise. (Notwithstanding the final product will be a traditionally typeset document fulfilling all requirements and clearly the product solely of my hand.)