Social Movements in Social Theory Klaus Eder

Social Movements in Social Theory
Oxford Handbooks Online

Klaus Eder
The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements
Edited by Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani
Print Publication Date: Nov 2015

Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Political Behavior
Online Publication Date: Nov 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199678402.013.11
Abstract and Keywords
Social movements have developed a complex link with social theory over time within the
Western tradition of social thought. It has offered a series of ideas identifying a problem
such as Marx’ idea of class consciousness and ideas that have been taken up much later
in doing social movement research (such as Durkheim’s ideas on the role of emotions).
This tradition originates equally in the “macro-theoretical” tradition, as in the “micro-
theoretical” tradition. The step beyond these is to focus on micro-foundations that avoid
the (misleading) agency–structure distinction. This locates the micro-foundations of
collective action not in a notion of agency, but in the structures of social relations
(networks) that link social action events by circulating meaning through these relations.
The macro-problem then is the emergence of complexity out of these structures of social
relations for which evolutionary theory provides new analytical tools.
Keywords: network structures, mobilization, collective action, emotions, institutions, semantics, micro–macro
distinction
Social Movements having a Hard Time in

Social Theory
SOCIAL movements have always been an irritating phenomenon in social theory (as they
are in social reality). Their preoccupation with the problem of social order moved social
movements to a residual category in social theorizing. The central issue has been to find
out how to transform movement into order, how to contain and channel deviance toward
orderly life. This has made them an object of theorizing that remained at the margin of
social theory. Looking into the “giants upon which we stand” (Merton 1965) such as
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Weber, Durkheim, or Simmel, they do not tell us much about social movements. This even
holds for Marx who engaged in social movements but who did not produce a compelling
theory about social movements. All this has to do with the preoccupation with order—
even Marx considered the working class movement as a step toward a new order—
socialism and communism. We could take this as a hint that there is not much to gain
from looking into social theory for making sense of social movements. The contrary is the
case: by keeping social movements conceptually at the margin of social theorizing, they
tell us a lot about the margins where the reproduction of order does not succeed. The
more these social theorists were preoccupied with order, the more interesting social
movements became as analytical keys to the problem of creating order in the permanent
movement produced by social action.
This preoccupation with social order contrasts with the fact that modern social theory has
emerged from a social movement: the movement against the old order in the eighteenth
and nineteenth century. The Enlightenment saw itself as a social movement producing
organizational forms such as clubs, associations that the old order looked (p. 32) at with
suspicion, mobilizing everything to censure political communication and to destroy the
networks formed to organize collective action (Habermas 1989 [1962]). Even the
nineteenth century has been full of other types of protest (Tilly, Tilly, and Tilly 1975). Yet
the theoretical analysis of social movements did not make it into the heart of social
theory.
Nevertheless, Marx and the Left Hegelians provide a special case in this modern
genealogy of social theory: they offered elements of a theory of social movements
grounded upon a fundamental critique of the enlightenment movement. Contrary to the
conservative critiques of the Enlightenment who saw the Enlightenment as an attempt to
set fire (light) to the house, Marx radicalized the Enlightenment critique by extending it
into a theory of class conflict which he linked to an analysis of the crisis-ridden evolution
of capitalist forms of social relations of production. The central variables explaining
collective action were the existence of an objective class (“Klasse an sich”) which
becomes conscious of itself (“Klasse für sich”). Yet this theoretical program fell short of
its realization. Class conflict and class mobilization remained undertheorized in the
decades to follow.
The Historical Baggage
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The Marxian Heritage
The Marxian heritage found a theoretically consequential “sociological” translation in the

seventies and eighties of the last century. An important step in the re-appropriation of the
theoretical intentions of Marx is offered by the work of Jürgen Habermas (1979). In a
similar vein, and using a genuinely sociological–historical perspective, Craig Calhoun
(Calhoun 1982) focussed the link of the theory of capitalist development with the theory
of class action. He made clear the issue of a necessary link between the structural
contradictions of capitalism and the class contradictions that sometimes fostered class
conflict and sometimes not. The theoretical question of why the mobilization of class
conflict increases or decreases thus needed an answer that required further theoretical
development. The general Marxian explanation provided a necessary but not a sufficient
condition for social movements.
The theoretical construction of the mechanism producing class action, namely class
consciousness, also marks the weak point of Marx’s theoretical strategy. Ideological
framings of reality block—as Marx argues—the awareness of the real world; yet a
scientific account of the real forces generating the reality of capitalist development can
overcome this blockage. Instead of developing a theory of social movements, a theory of
an intellectual avant-garde came to the fore, which undermined the development of a
genuine theory of social movements.
What is left is the theoretical proposition that social movements are practices that
(p. 33)
result from groups becoming aware of their position in social relations of production.
Exactly how this works remains unclear. Marx however gives casual examples of why
social movements do not arise, the most famous being contained in the metaphor of the
“sack of potatoes” in the eighteenth Brumaire (Marx 1953). This metaphor describes the
unconnected small land laborers who share nothing but the fact they all work on a little
piece of land. There is no connection among the land laborers themselves; they are linked
via the landowner who lives far away in Paris. This can be seen as a first network
analytical account of why the mobilization of workers fails, an idea taken up a hundred
years later in the social sciences.
Durkheim’s Effervescence Collective
Another classic has touched upon social movements, providing the grounds for a debate
in social movement theory that has become important in recent decades: the role of
collective sentiments in the making of collective action. This theoretical idea emerged—
paradoxically enough—when Emile Durkheim turned to social–anthropological studies
and developed an explanation of collective practices in “primitive” societies that
culminated in his book on the elementary forms of religious life (Durkheim 1968 [1912]).
Observing the phenomenon he called “effervescence collective,” Durkheim explained how
people were able to act together. The elements necessary for making intensive collective
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action possible is get out of everyday life and to enter a ritual process which binds the
group together and enables the group to defend itself against the bads that threaten it.
Such rituals accompanied preparations for warfare, distributive quarrels, or collective
responses to natural disasters.
What is important in Durkheim’s account is the emphasis on the emotional energy

invested in and reproduced by such collective actions. Acting together releases a
collective excitement that transcends individual intentionality by orienting collective
action toward a collectively shared goal. This is the reason why Durkheim described these
practices as a case of “religious life”: transcending the will of the individual and being
oriented toward securing the group is something that requires binding forces enacted in
religious life. Apart from the question of what “religious” means, the important
theoretical insight is into the non-individual, that is, the social nature of collective action.
Durkheim’s ideas gained momentum in different analytical directions. Some emphasized

the interaction processes taking place in collective action providing the basis for
theorizing different types of sequences of collective action, ranging from casual
encounters to institutionalized collective action (such as voting). Recent modifications of
symbolic interactionism have drawn on these premises (Collins 2004) as well as more
recent theories on investing emotional energy in collective action such as social
movements (Collins 2008) (see later).
Reformulating the Marxian Perspective: Touraine and

(p. 34)
Habermas
The Marxian heritage returned in the new wave of theorizing social movements that
started in the sixties of the last century with the work of Alain Touraine in France
(Touraine 1981). He was the most important social theorist of social movements at that
time, preparing the ground for what was to become the theory of the “new social
movements” (NSM). He attempted to shift social movements from the margins to the
center of social theory.
Conceiving society as something permanently produced in collective action, Touraine

discards the idea of order as the core issue for sociological analysis (Touraine 1977).
Reacting against Parsonian functionalism, Touraine sought to replace the concept of
society by the concept of “historical action systems” that act permanently against
attempts to produce social order. Building on a post-Parsonian model of structures of
historical action systems, the role of social movements thus becomes paramount as they
are viewed as the carriers of historical action. Emphasizing process over order, the
central problem of social theory is no longer the issue of institutional order (focussing
mostly on the state as the main guarantor of social order). The focus is on the issue of
who is able to intervene in social processes and how such interventions shape the
direction of social processes. This capacity of directing social change is variable,
depending upon the strength of social movements as the main carriers of systems of
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historical action. The explanation of social change is therefore located in the very
structure of historical action, which Touraine conceptualizes as being constituted by
three factors: (i) a collective actor with an (ii) identity who has an idea of the enemy while
referring to a (iii) “totality,” which means to the ensemble of historical processes in which
historical action is embedded.
This theoretical construction of social movements is an implication of a radical

interpretation of modernity as a situation in which societies engage in permanent self-
production. Social reality appears as though in permanent flux, structured by the
diversity of historical action events taking place in the here and now. In modernity, social
movements multiply, and the working class movement is just one of the many movements
competing for the direction of social change. The “old” movement (the working class
movement) is only a first step in the constitution of a modernity generating itself in the
medium of “old” and “new” social movements.
The long-term theoretical effect of this way of conceptualizing social movements has been
a new concern with the methodological issue of the “objectivity" of the observer of social
movements. Touraine articulated this problem as the link between the voice of social
movements and the eye of the observer (Touraine 1981). Since the eye constitutes a
permanent intrusion into the object of research which are the voices in society, the effect
of the eye has to be controlled methodologically. The solution Touraine offers for this
problem is the idea of seeing the sociological analysis of social movements as a
sociological intervention into movement practices. The method of “sociological
intervention” (p. 35) tries to figure out the extent to which social movements were able to
see their collective action as the kind of historical action that sociological analysts
assumed it might be. The theory of social movements provides hypotheses about the
possibility of historical action in a concrete situation of protest. The empirical results
produced by this coupling of theory and method in the analysis of social movements,
however, have been more or less disappointing: the movement society remained a
hypothesis that could not be proven empirically (Touraine et al. 1979; Touraine et al.
1980; Touraine 1981; Touraine, Wieviorka, and Dubet 1984). Yet the idea of reflexivity
introduced into social movement studies adds a meta-theoretical perspective lacking so
far in this field.
Habermas, a German contemporary of Touraine, provided an equally strong link between

grand theory and social movements. The main argument in the theory of communicative
action (Habermas 1987) is that social movements can be seen as mechanisms triggering
collective learning processes in societies. Social movements on the one hand acted
against the systemic decoupling of state and markets from the life-world while drawing
upon the resources that only life-worlds can offer, that is, the reference to basic moral
standards contained in the structure of communicative action among free and equal
people. Social movements are phenomena, situated between systems and the life-world
and fostered by the capacity to reclaim the normative standards betrayed by the systemic
decoupling of politics and economic exchange as executed in the modern state and in
capitalism. Such normative standards not only included universalist moral standards of
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justice, but also standards of equal recognition and standards of cognitive knowledge
made available by modern science. This framework in fact well-suited social movements
such as the anti-nuclear movement and anti-racist movements, yet turned out to be
insufficient to grasp the rise of collective action and protest not only in the West, but also
in the rest of the world, above all the rise of religious movements.
From Macro to Micro
The Paradox of Collective Action and the Challenge of RC Theory—

The Rationalist Turn
Given the strong macro-theoretical approach dominating the post-’68 period in Western
social science, the opportunities of a backlash against macro-structural theorizing
favoring micro-structural approaches have grown. Under the label “from structure to
action” (Klandermans, Kriesi, and Tarrow 1988) the turn to the actor’s perspective not
only promised new explanatory advantages, but also a normative claim: bringing the
actor back in as something which is good in itself. Introduced by a series of refinements
of analyzing collective action that ranged from resource mobilization theory (McCarthy
and Zald 1977; Jenkins 1983) to Olson’s paradox of collective action (Olson 1965), the
notion of strategic action gained ground in social movement analysis.
(p. 36) This turn engendered a bifurcation of the theoretical debate. On the one hand, the
implicit rationalist conception of resource mobilization theory joined the theoretical move
toward a neo-utilitarian paradigm in the social sciences, that is, rational choice theories.
On the other hand, the limits of rationalist assumptions of human action came to the fore,
pointing out the identity-related aspects of social action, considered as irreducible to
notions of strategic action (Cohen 1985).
The rationalist paradigm produced a series of insights into the dynamics of collective
action (Opp 1989). Rationalist assumptions allowed for the resolution of some of the
paradoxes in collective action. It added the idea of a “critical mass” of actors necessary
for getting social movements off the ground (Marwell and Oliver 1993). Yet theory
development stopped. The model offered by Opp, the “structural–cognitive model,”
combines structural and cognitive factors within an individualist theory perspective and
offers, in the author’s view, an alternative to failed theory programs (Opp 2009). Yet
theory development in the social sciences had already gone beyond the confines of this
model. Social relations (transcending the individual) and narrative semantics
(transcending the cognitive model) point to the new elements that go beyond such a
theorizing of social movements.
Page 6 of 22

Adding Emotions and Identity Claims—The Emotional Turn
The critique of this rationalist individualist paradigm within social movement studies
followed another path. It pointed to the neglect of non-rational factors in collective action,
yet kept the individualistic (or non-relational) premises. Alberto Melucci (a student of
Touraine) already in the eighties of the last century added the idea that identity offers a
central motivation for taking part in social movements (Melucci 1980, 1988, 1995). In
recent debates the idea that actors do not only act strategically, but also defend an
identity, gained ground. This has a parallel development in empirical economic theory,
which increasingly takes into account non-rational motivations in economic action (Gintis
et al. 2006; Fehr and Gintis 2007). These empirical additions to a theory of the social
actor however retained the basic assumptions of the individualistic model of explanation.
The postulate to bring back agency against structure even gave it some moral support.
The emphasis on emotions brought back the “individual” in an even more radical way,
namely as a body. The idea that social actors decipher the meaning of ongoing interaction
from the presentation of the body and the theoretical idea that the body is a medium of
creating social bonds among those acting together has its roots in the Durkheimian
tradition. Yet the role of emotions taken up in the recent “turn” in social movement theory
(Jasper 2011) remains within the individualistic paradigm of sociological explanation
since it offers no more than an extension of the motivational basis on which collective
action can draw. The theory of social movements therefore lived—as did much of the
social sciences—in a fruitless debate over rationalist versus non-rationalist theories of
action.
The increasing decline of rational choice theories and the emphasis on non-
(p. 37)
rational factors in the last decade opened up a new opportunity for theory development in
social movement research, reacting and adding to general social theory construction in
the social sciences. Introducing emotional factors allowed the theoretical eye to be
turned on forms of social action in which the focus was less on language and on
argumentative forms of addressing the other but rather on bodily movements and non-
argumentative forms of communication. Keywords indicating the new pathways of theory
construction are affective solidarity, emotional energy, emotional liberation, pride, and
shame (Polletta 2006; Polletta and Chen 2012). This provided the ground for linking such
research to the “narrative turn” in social theory (Eder 2009). Homo narrans became part
of social movement theory and opened new paths explaining the dynamics of social
movements.
A final effect of these theoretical innovations regards the double nature of the human
actor. He or she is no longer as a mere voice making claims, but a body sending signals.
Protest in particular is something that involves the body—exposure to police actions,
organizing everyday life in social movements. The methodological implications closely
join the conceptual–analytical advances. The focus on emotions and the body as the
carrier of emotions invites a return to behavioral social science. This means to observe
Page 7 of 22

not only speech acts, but also practices; less what people say, rather what they do. Yet
this is not a return to the behaviorism in the social sciences of the last century; it is
rather behaviorism turned constructivist. As Clark McPhail put it: the idea is to “extend
G. H. Mead’s theory of the act as a closed-loop, negative-feedback model of purposive
action” (McPhail 2006: 433). It is meaningful behavior emerging in and reproduced
through “practices” (Reckwitz 2003).
Re-Embedding the Actor: From the Individual

to Micro-Structures
Theoretical Challenges in Empirical Social Movement Research
Social movement research provides a particularly appropriate empirical field for

theoretical debates on the status of the individual in collective action. The fluidity of
social movements pinpoints the issue of keeping people together by providing a network
of social relations that continues even in times of non-action. This ephemeral nature of
social movements requires particularly strong mechanisms overcoming the natural
tendency to dissolve in time. The theoretical issue that results from extending the varying
motivational sources of human agency is to provide a model of how social reality emerges
from these motivational sources of agency.
Focussing on this emergent trans-individual level of analysis, theory building has to

separate two issues: the issue of the interactional nature of agency events and the
(p. 38) issue of the macro-level effects of the interactional nature of social action.
Regarding the first issue, the question is how agency affects existing social relations and
how these social relations affect agents. The second issue is how collective action events
produce macro-effects and how the latter affect collective action events. We will deal with
each issue in turn, beginning with the first and most critical central issue for social theory
since it addresses the very question of what constitutes the social as opposed to the
individual.1
Since social actors interact based on shared presuppositions about the world around
them, a central hypothesis in sociological theory is that social reality is constructed and
objectified in institutions. This implies a close, even reciprocally constitutive, link
between interaction processes and shared framings of this world. This theoretical
assumption has produced empirical research since the time when Ervin Goffman
developed his version of symbolic interactionism and the idea of frames of reality
construction (Goffman 1974, 1983). This idea has been taken up in social movement
research in a series of publications by David Snow and Robert Benford (for an overview,
see Benford and Snow 2000) introducing the notions of frames and framing as a way to
explain the way collective action in social movements emerges and continues to exist. The
Page 8 of 22

semantic reality of shared frames, manifest in words, concepts, arguments, images, and
stories that circulate between social actors, adds an important dimension of theoretically
modeling social movements. Yet it runs the risk of a culturalist bias in theorizing social
movements.
There is a theoretical position claiming to provide a link between the micro-reality of

actors, shaped by power and material resources, and the objectivity of the situation in
which they relate to each other. This position, so far less well established in social
movement research, draws upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu. In his work, the late
Bourdieu did not analyze social movements in a systematic way, yet he was sympathetic
to them. This relates to the opposite research interest: how to explain that actors tend to
reproduce the power structures to which they are exposed. It is easy to explain why this
holds for those having power (it serves their interest), yet a paradox for explaining the
social action of those who suffer from these power relations; the powerless paradoxically
reproduce the “rules of the game” by playing the game, while creating an illusionary
representation of this reality. Social movement then can be considered as a form of
collective action that breaks this illusionary reality and its institutional supports, based on
turning upside down the rules of the game played in a social situation.
Nick Crossley has applied this idea in a double argument (Crossley 2002). The first refers
to the argument that social movements develop “working utopias” which generate a
radical habitus, and create knowledge and justifications, all of which leads to a particular
“movement illusion” (Crossley 1999, 2003). The second argument refers to the creation of
networks providing a particular movement capital, to be invested in collective
mobilization and constituting a particular movement field. This is an attempt to apply
directly the implicit social theory of Bourdieu, an attempt that Crossley has rectified and
pushed further in his later work (Crossley 2008, 2009). He no longer repeats the claim
that the structural and cultural aspects of social reality should be better “integrated,” as
(p. 39) Snow and Benford have done.2 He goes a step further by drawing on the
observation that protesters not only create shared symbolic worlds (which he finally
conceptualizes as “conventions,” but also while doing so, they interact, engage in
practices, fight with each other, include some and exclude others in interaction networks,
while drawing on the resources these actors can command. As he states: “Networks,
resources and conventions are not discrete structures then but rather interlocking
aspects of a single structure, centered upon social interaction” (Crossley 2009: 28).
This return of the world of social interaction conceptualized as emerging from network
structures and creating network structures marks an important break in social theory,
produced by the evolution triggered not only in social movement studies but also in other
research fields such as migration studies. The theoretical challenge is how to
conceptualize the social dimension without reducing it to its cultural components.
Network–analytic techniques offer solutions to the problem of describing social relations

without reducing them to symbolic constructions. Theoretical concepts such as social
capital fostered such rectification offering possibilities of the re-embedding frames and
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identity constructions in social relations. A side effect of these analytical moves is the
discovery of the multi-functionality of social capital (as networks of social relation). Social
capital fosters structures of power and social inequality. However, social relations
practiced in associational settings can also foster democracy. This brought back an old
social–theoretical (or normative) debate that started with Alexis de Tocqueville on the
role of social associations for fostering democracy (Tocqueville 2008a, 2008b), which
Robert Putnam continued (Putnam 1993, 2000), and which is now taken up in social
movement research (Diani and McAdam 2003).
The current debates on associational social capital and its impact on the structure of
collective action (Baldassarri and Diani 2007) involve two important theoretical points.
The first is to offer an entrance point for arguments on the structures of social relations
as constitutive elements for organizing social action. This argument provides an
important challenge to and break with individualistic assumptions in social and political
theory. It claims an analytic priority for the structure of social action, that is, the rules
organizing social relations within which action events (normally produced by individuals)3
gain a shared meaning. This ontological priority of the social over the individual provides
the possibility to explain social action (individual and collective) in a non-psychological
way. Instead of opposing agency and structure, the claim is that agency is the producer of
events, which are linked to each other by structures of social relations and not by the
psychological properties of the agents.
Focusing on the micro-structures of social relations has equally affected the theoretical
status of normative claims in social theory. Given the old split between “normative
theories” and “empirical theories” (pinpointed in the debate over value-free or value-
loaded social-scientific research), the challenge is to argue that this distinction is useless
and misleading. The empirical side of the emerging theoretical argument is the emphasis
on the link between norms and agency. Norms are not only a special kind of motivation
(as foreseen by Parsons) but they are rules which regulate the relations between action
events; such rules foster, forbid, support, and command, thus situating (p. 40) action
events in a sequence of action events. Unpacking the notion of norms is the empirical
aspect of this theoretical endeavor. Providing an analytical model of the internal structure
of norms (analogous to the structure of the genetic information in living organisms) is the
other aspect of this theoretical endeavor. The particular difficulty that has accompanied
empirical research addressing issues of norms has been that there is an internal link
between normative rules and the structuring of social relations.
Linking normative theories with the micro-structures of social relations offers a new basis
for linking democratic theory with civil society (della Porta 2013; della Porta and Rucht
2013). On a concrete level, this linkage is under scrutiny in ongoing research as the
reciprocal effect of claiming democratic norms and organizing civic social relations in the
course of collective action. Instead of using normative claims as yardsticks for good
politics, theory development goes toward clarifying the constraints that occur when
claiming democratic norms. In this way, we can explain the dynamics of hiding real social
relations by producing illusions about them, equally in the political/economic institutional
Page 10 of 22

realm (through symbolic politics and ideological communication) as well as explaining the
dynamics of civil society that has to defend itself against incivility. The complex semantics
of democracy and its use by social actors in fighting for democracy or against distorted
forms of democracy are part of an evolving theoretical model that does three things.
First, the model makes explicit the implicit normativity of the micro-structures of social
relations. Secondly, it makes visible the ideological distortions of the semantics
representing these relations. Thirdly, it identifies those practices that realign the
normative structures of social relations with their semantic representation.
Meaning Circulating through Movement Networks
Introducing the notion of micro-structures of social relations provides the analytical tool
for describing and explaining the way collectively shared worlds emerge. The explanation
of this emergence no longer takes place on the individual level or on the institutional
level. It is taking place on the level of social relations. Roger Gould has made a strong
argument in this direction (Gould 1993, 2003). Assuming that the (micro-)structure of
network relations fosters or hinders collective action, he designed an explanatory
strategy that, using historical and ethnographic case studies, showed the role of different
forms of social relations (hierarchical versus egalitarian; boundary crossing and boundary
defending) for success or failure of collective action.4 A further step has been taken in a
collection of papers (Diani and McAdam 2003) which introduce the methodological and
analytic advances in the field of social movement research.
Yet there remains the task of linking networks with what circulates through these
networks as “meaning.” This is still an open issue. The most important strand of further
theorizing continues the tradition of Harrison White (White, Godart, and Corona 2007;
White and Godart 2007; White 2008). As they argue, the observation that narratives
(stories) run through networks requires the assumption of their co-emergence and
(p. 41) co-evolution. The micro-structures of social relations are channels for social
interaction in which semantic forms (stories) circulate. Both channels and stories
condition each other in the process of constructing social reality.5
The debate on the micro-structures of social relations shows that social movement
research has become not only a borrower of social theory developments, it is also
catalyzing theory development. This is due to the particular property of its object: being a
network of ephemeral social relations that must survive against institutional power and in
which stories circulate that run against established ideological delusion and illusions.
The Return of Macro-Theory in the Micro-

Analysis of Social Movements
Page 11 of 22

Movements as Devices that “Irritate” Social Systems
A final aspect of theory development in the field of social movement research is the issue
of how to bring back the macro-perspective that was so dominant in the historical
beginning of theorizing social movements (see earlier) into this theory development.
The “macro-perspective” has never been lost in social movement studies as the tradition
of the “political opportunity structure approach” and its development testifies (McAdam,
McCarthy, and Zald 1996; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). This approach describes how
actors act under the constraints of institutional structures that provide them with
“opportunities.” This theoretical model of going from the individual to opportunity
structures bypasses the reality of social relations and assumes a direct link between
individual actors and institutional “macro-structures.” Reducing the complexities of the
relational nature of social movements (the micro-structures of social relations among
actors) to an individualistic explanatory strategy simplified the explanatory task: the
political opportunity structure model simply claimed that actors react rationally to the
opportunities (and constraints) posed by the social/institutional/structural context. If
there is more than one actor interacting with other actors (which normally is the case),
then game-theoretic models have taken over the task of explaining the aggregate
outcome as a rational response a group of game-playing actors. Such two-level theorizing
has been attractive, providing a motivation and a particular (compatible with the
rationalist action assumption) group process (games) for explaining the variety of
situations and effects that can be observed in comparative social movement research. As
has been noted in this chapter, there is a strong theoretical argument against the claim
that game-theoretic modeling of social relations can grasp the micro-structures of social
relations in which social actors are involved when acting together. Thus, the political
opportunity structure model is theoretically deficient since it is based on a short cut
between the individual actor and the macro-structures of social institutions (Meyer 2010),
social systems (Luhmann 1995) or (recently) social fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2012).
Macro-realities (whether conceived as fields, systems, or institutions) matter,

(p. 42)
which also holds for social movements. Their effect is normally linked to the state
(especially in social movement research), but this is just one of many macro-structural
constraints collective action is facing. It can equally be the family (at times a favorite
object of collective action), the market (which has been rediscovered as an object in
recent collective action events), or religion (a topic of increasing importance in the
analysis of collective action). Another implication is the possibility of updating the
established notion of the (political and non-political) opportunity structure of collective
action. All this requires that we distinguish carefully between (macro-)“structures” used
for describing contexts of collective action (such as fields, institutions, or systems) and
(micro-)“structures” that constitute collective action by relating action events.
Page 12 of 22

Among the theoretical contributions that assess the role of macro-structures in the
making of the social world in general and in the making of social movements in particular,
functionalist theory still plays an important role. Apart from earlier functionalist accounts
(Smelser 1962), the most consequential formulation of such a perspective is contained in
the work of Niklas Luhmann who has opened up new theoretical insights into what social
movements “do” in a world of social structures and systems. Luhmann’s two books on
that topic start with the initial irritation that social movements do not fit the property of
social systems to be “autopoietic” systems (a central claim in Luhmann’s sociological
theory), thus challenging the theory of the autopoieis of social systems (Luhmann 1989,
1996). Luhmann’s contribution finally has been to see social movements as irritations for
social systems, forcing them to redraw their boundaries and to specify their functional
position regarding other social systems. To conceptualize and model these effects
Luhmann has that evolutionary theorizing be taken up again. This has been his proposal—
yet he has left it to others to make sense of it.
The use of the Darwinian theory of evolution in fact provides a conceptual model of the
mechanisms that work upon each other and promise to explain the otherwise chaotic
effects of human collective action. It is with recent trends in evolutionary theory that this
theoretical hunch has opened a new path of theory construction. The central issue in
evolutionary theory (already discarded by many researchers in the life sciences including
psychology and rational choice theory) is the recognition that evolution works not only on
the level of the individual but also on the level of groups. Both levels, the individual and
the group level, permanently interact yet follow different logics (Wilson 2002). This has to
do with the century-old observation that not everything that is good for a group is good
for the individual and vice versa in a given environment. Social processes therefore are
the product of a three-level reality in which groups (and the micro-structures constituting
them) play a mediating role between individuals and their given environments.
This shift in theoretical argument offers new possibilities for analyzing and explaining the
emergence, the role, and the effects of social movements. It allows us to go beyond
Luhmann’s observation that social movements are like those elements in the human body
that produce reactions and often overreactions against failures of systemic autopoiesis,
that is, they are like the fever that warns the system and at the same time (p. 43)
contributes—under specific conditions—to the repair of social systems. It rather turns
Luhmann’s hunch on its head: social movements constitute an important phenomenon the
micro-structures of which irritate institutions. Moreover, it offers the possibility of
bringing the actor back, but not as the idealized autonomous individual, but as a body
and a person that is involved in social relations.
From the Individual to the Group and Back: The Promises of

Evolutionary Theory
Page 13 of 22

This return of macro-structures in fact corrects for the exclusivity of the individual as a
causal factor in the construction of the social world. It argues for the causal effects of
macro-structures (as Marx already did). Nevertheless, it still does not provide the causal
mechanisms for explaining such effects. This brings back again the problem of the
missing link between (macro)-structure and action (Koopmans 2005). Network theory has
offered a solution in terms of describing micro-structures of social relations that mediate
between macro-structures (institutions or “infrastructures”) and action events.
Evolutionary theory offers a possible solution in terms of mechanisms selecting for micro-
structures of social relations. The missing link between actors and the macro-reality of
state, economy, and society are the micro-structures of social relations.
The theoretical solution to the problem consists of a two-step model: individuals are
selected into groups and groups are selected into existing social environments. Koopmans
argues that the media (and no longer the direct confrontation on a site) provide the
selection mechanism for protest groups (Koopmans 2004a). This is an empirical claim
based on a theoretical hunch offered by evolutionary theory: movements compete with
the groups opposing them in the medium of the mass media, thus producing effects
equally on the groups based on the institutional stability of the state and on groups based
on the institutional stability of civil society. Since this is an open process, we can expect
cycles of protest characterizing the process in the long run (Koopmans 2004b).6
Explaining the macro-effects of social movements within a model that privileges the
intentionalism introduced by the action theoretical turn (under the guise of providing
micro-structural explanation) shows serious flaws. Such an explanation must capitulate in
that face of the erratic picture of outcomes that do not correspond to intentions, neither
in the short run nor in the long run. To enhance the explanatory capacity of social theory
in social movement research, the return to macro-structures provided an outcome, but a
return not to the static conceptions of social structures or opportunity structures whose
variation over time was left to historical accounts and good story telling (Tilly 2002). The
theoretical issue is to account for the micro-structural processes shaping the selection of
individuals into (opposing) groups. Selection then often means that some are excluded,
which sets into motion again the formation of new groups made out of those selected.
Evolution here does not mean that we are heading forward in a process of ongoing all-
inclusion as some normative theories try to justify as the only (p. 44) reasonable end of
social action. Rather, it claims that by selecting some (as individuals or as groups) the
possibilities of newly emerging groups exist which can call into question the power that
groups have in controlling existing social relations. Without such selective processes, we
would not have social movements and we would not need social movements. Therefore
making such a selection process visible is a way to explain how counter-power emerges.
Instead of claiming a mechanism of all-inclusion, the theory proposes exclusion as a
mechanism for forming new groups capable of undermining the power of necessarily
partially inclusive groups. Social movements then are a particular social form that
organizes such counter-power, thus keeping the evolutionary process going.7
Page 14 of 22

What is then left of macro-structures as an analytical tool for explaining the constitution,
reproduction, or change of social movements? Macro-structures are emergent
“organizational” properties of social relations backed up by semantic representations that
justify these organizations.8 They delimit the range of possible justifications
(“conventions,” forms of legitimation) available at a certain point in time. They delimit the
rules of the game that can be played in a given situation. Whether we describe the
emergent naturalness of such situations as objectivation (Berger and Luckmann 1966) or
as social fields (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Fligstein and McAdam 2012) or as social
systems (Luhmann 1995) is open to further theoretical debate. Social movements
certainly are not institutions or fields, or systems, but actors in institutional environment,
playing field-specific games or marking systemic dysfunctionalities. What they do is to
exert permanent pressure on these emergent forms of complexity thus pushing the
evolutionary process also on the level of the “self-objectification” of social relations in
ever more complex forms of social life.
Leaving Old Debates and Entering New

Debates—Conclusion
Social theory is turning toward the micro-structural level of social reality, avoiding
equally psychological reductionism and macro-sociological determinism. Social movement
research has fostered this process and has been pushed by this process. It has revised the
Marxian beginnings of social movement theories as well as the theories of social action
offered by the classics of social theory. Debates on issues such as the structure–action
link or the macro–micro link are waning; explanatory models turn up that defy the
structure–action or micro–macro distinction. The analysis of rules making social
interaction in general, collective action in particular possible, has brought forward the
idea of micro-structures of social relations which constitute social action and which force
macro-structures to adapt. Micro-structures of social relations start to overcome the
actor centrism of theories of social action as well as the determinism of theories of macro-
structures conceived as systems, institutions, or even fields. The (p. 45) discovery of
micro-structures of social relations is generating new theoretical insights, pushing and
being pushed to a not insignificant part by the dynamic field of theorizing collective
action in social movements.
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Notes:
(1.) The second issue will be dealt with later as the issue of the functional consequences
of collective action events on the self-organizing capacities of societies.
(2.) In a critique of the framing approach Benford called for a better integration of the
cultural and the structural approaches in social movement research (Benford 1997). This
critique points at a general problem in social theory, which is the co-evolution of semantic
structures and network structures. Given this co-evolution, the conceptual mapping by
Benford is unclear since having “structural” properties applies equally to micro-social and
to macro-social realities.
(3.) Some academics claim that action events can also be produced by things (Callon
1999; Latour 2005). This is a secondary yet interesting aspect of the debate. It adds
support to the claim that action events produced by whoever makes sense only by their
socially mediated relation to other events.
(4.) Even some researchers coming from the tradition of rational choice theory have
moved in this direction as the work of Gerald Marwell and Pamela Oliver has shown
(Marwell and Oliver 1993; Oliver and Myers 2003).
(5.) Promising attempts of linking networks structures with semantic forms in the field of
explaining protest/collective action exist (Bearman and Everett 1993; Kim and Bearman
1997).
(6.) In a similar vein, selection theory accounts for organizational change (while
considering organizations as a special type of groups) (Haveman, Rao, and Paruchuri
2007). This is related to the problem of the emergence of complexity for which recent
organizational theory provides new analytical tools (Padgett and Powell 2012).
(7.) Another way of conceptualizing social–evolutionary processes is to describe the way

social relations are structured as a mechanism of “collective learning.” This is saying that
Page 21 of 22

aggregates of actors forming a group oppose existing ideas and provide new ideas to be
tested in ongoing social relations (Podolny and Page 1998: 62ff).
(8.) This is the classic definition of an “institution”: an organization coupled with a

collectively accepted meaning (Meyer and Rowan 1977).
Klaus Eder
Klaus Eder, Institute of Social Sciences, Humboldt University Berlin
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Social Movements in Social Theory

Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Nov 2015

Abstract and Keywords

Social Movements having a Hard Time in

Subscriber: Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek; date: 04 May 2018

The Historical Baggage

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The Marxian Heritage

The Marxian heritage found a theoretically consequential “sociological” translation in the

Durkheim’s Effervescence Collective

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What is important in Durkheim’s account is the emphasis on the emotional energy

Durkheim’s ideas gained momentum in different analytical directions. Some emphasized

Reformulating the Marxian Perspective: Touraine and

Conceiving society as something permanently produced in collective action, Touraine

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This theoretical construction of social movements is an implication of a radical

Habermas, a German contemporary of Touraine, provided an equally strong link between

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From Macro to Micro

The Paradox of Collective Action and the Challenge of RC Theory—

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Adding Emotions and Identity Claims—The Emotional Turn

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Re-Embedding the Actor: From the Individual

Theoretical Challenges in Empirical Social Movement Research

Social movement research provides a particularly appropriate empirical field for

Focussing on this emergent trans-individual level of analysis, theory building has to

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There is a theoretical position claiming to provide a link between the micro-reality of

Network–analytic techniques offer solutions to the problem of describing social relations

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Meaning Circulating through Movement Networks

The Return of Macro-Theory in the Micro-

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Movements as Devices that “Irritate” Social Systems

Macro-realities (whether conceived as fields, systems, or institutions) matter,

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From the Individual to the Group and Back: The Promises of

Subscriber: Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek; date: 04 May 2018

Subscriber: Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek; date: 04 May 2018

Leaving Old Debates and Entering New

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Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas (1966). Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion

der Wirklichkeit. Eine Theorie der Wissenssoziologie. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacqunat, Loic J. (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology.

Callon, Michel (1999). “Actor-Network Theory—The Market Test.” In Actor Network

Cohen, Jean L. (1985). “Strategy or Identity. New Theoretical Paradigms and

Collins, Randall (2008). Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

Crossley, Nick (2003). “From Reproduction to Transformation: Social Movement Fields

Subscriber: Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek; date: 04 May 2018

Gould, Roger V. (1993). “Collective Action and Network Structure,” American

Sociological Review. 58: 182–196.

Gould, Roger V. (2003). “Why do Networks Matter? Rationalist and Structuralist

Habermas, Jürgen (1979). Communication and the Evolution of Society. London:

Subscriber: Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek; date: 04 May 2018