Critical Dialogue
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Tarrow, Sidney. 2013. The Language of Contention:
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Cambridge University Press.
Response to Sidney Tarrow’s review of The Logic
of Connective Action: Digital Media and the
Personalization of Contentious Politics
doi:10.1017/S1537592714001005
— W. Lance Bennett
On behalf of my coauthor, Alexandra Segerberg, I thank
Sidney Tarrow for his review of our book. We intend The
Logic of Connective Action to stir discussion about different
ways in which large-scale contention can be organized.
Part of that discussion entails clarifying misconceptions of
the sort contained in several of Tarrow’s concerns.
First, the claim that we conflate social movement
studies with Mancur Olson’s collective action paradigm
obscures the crucial point that we use Olson only to
construct a theoretical continuum bounded by two ideal-
type logics of social association: rational choice assumptions
about mobilizing individuals at one end, and self-motivated
social networking at the other. These contrasting organiza-
tional logics take on many empirical variations, and overlap
in the middle of the continuum in the hybrid form of
organizationally enabled connective action where loosely
networked organizations use social media to personalize
their causes. We clearly point out that after the resource
mobilization school of the 1970s, most social movement
470 Perspectives on Politics
scholars relaxed and even challenged rational choice
assumptions, arraying movement studies away from the
end point of the continuum. However, many social
movement perspectives include characteristic such elements
as formal organization, leadership, and collective identity
framing. As we move along our continuum toward the other
ideal type, connective action, social mobilizations such as
Occupy Wall Street or the Spanish indignados lose those
characteristic organizing elements.
Not engaging with the different organizational logics
that define our theoretical continuum may explain
Tarrow’s confusion about the role of personalized com-
munication. He is right that personalization has emerged
previously in movement studies in analyses of various
group-identity movements such as feminism and gay
rights. However, connective action addresses a more
granular personalization at the level of diverse individuals
who share personal stories both online and off under
inclusive-action frames like “We are the 99%.”
This lack of attention to the ways in which concepts
are anchored in theory may account for Tarrow’s challenge
that our account of personalization is really a throwback to
Durkheim’s concept of anomie. Nowhere do we imply that
there is an inherently anomic condition associated with
social networking—far from it. Durkheim referred to the
separation of the individual from traditional society at the
dawn of the modern industrial age, which is a far cry from
the transition away from formal memberships and insti-
tutional loyalties characteristic of individuals in postindus-
trial democracies that are the main focus of our book.
Perhaps this looking back in time and conceptual space
to interpret our analysis also accounts for Tarrow’s puzzle-
ment about what makes digitally networked communication
so special, as he refers to the importance of earlier commu-
nication technologies such as the printing press. Those earlier
technologies depended on organizations of various sorts to
deploy and control their content, from the religious sects that
made the Protestant revolution to the print shops of the
American Revolution. In the middle case of our spectrum
(organizationally enabled connective action), when organiza-
tions use social technologies they give up important degrees of
control over messages to publics who share the technologies
and their uses. And, at the crowd-enabled end of our
continuum, organizations are not the owners or even the
managers of technology. Organizations are outcomes of
patterns of communication-technology use.
This inclination to reduce our work to prior categories
and historical cases may also explain Tarrow’s trouble
with our introduction of new methods that require
evaluation from the reader. At some level, any good
empirical work requires intellectual judgment from the
reader. However, since our methods involve no fancy
statistics or ungrounded assumptions, it seems that the real
challenge for the reader involves coming to terms with the
changes in social and political organization that inspire our
theory and methods.
Underlying most of Tarrow’s concerns is a reluctance to
consider the implications of social media as organizational
rather than purely informational. His comparison of
a cryptic text message from the Philippines with an iconic
passage from Tom Paine misses our point that communi-
cation is not just about content. As one moves away from
conventional movement forms—where language matters
more to evoke collective identifications and bridge differ-
ences between organizations—communication becomes
more about organization, and various organizational
qualities of complex communication networks explain
the scale, speed, endurance, and impact of connective
action. Nostalgia for times gone by is understandable, but
it may stand in the way of grasping emerging forms of
political organization and participation.
The Language of Contention: Revolutions in Words,
1688–2012. By Sidney Tarrow. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2013. 263p. $80.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.
doi:10.1017/S1537592714001017
— W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington, Seattle
Much of the scholarship on contentious politics consists
of time-bound examinations of particular historical epi-
sodes. In The Language of Contention, Sidney Tarrow steps
back to explain historical changes and continuities in the
language that inspires and encapsulates those contentious
episodes. Words like “strike” or “boycott” shift meanings
across extended periods of time. Other terms such as “male
chauvinist” live in more restricted time capsules. Tarrow
applies an inventive mix of methods to trace the life
histories of contentious words associated with revolutions,
race and gender relations, citizenship, and the politics of
love (e.g., same-sex marriage) and hate (e.g., anti-Semitism).
The book concludes with a reflection on the rise of
large-scale contemporary protests such as Occupy Wall
Street, with their reliance on personal communication
technologies that, in the author’s view, diminish the
power of language to stir common sentiments and create
enduring solidarity.
While Tarrow’s approach to language analysis makes an
important contribution to the study of contentious
politics, there are several points that invite more de-
velopment. In particular, his assertion about the dimin-
ished language of loosely organized crowds such as Occupy
seems to miss how these mobilizations differ from
traditional movements—differences that both explain
the diminished poetry of words and suggest looking
beyond language to address other aspects of communica-
tion at play. In addition to this main point of contention, I
also point to a couple of places where key arguments could
be better clarified.
Throughout the book, Tarrow addresses the intriguing
analytical question: What is the link between repertoires
of action and discourse repertoires? We know that words
matter, but how? He shows how shifts in usage and the
introduction of new terms reveal changes in political
practices and the issues that give rise to political
contention. Tracing the diffusion of familiar terms, such
as boycott, strike, or sabotage, reveals how common
repertoires of action spread across time, languages, and
cultures, often while adding or subtracting repertoires of
action in the process. Among the many puzzles examined
in these case studies is how such simple vocabularies can
motivate large numbers of people to take often-risky
actions to improve their life conditions. Tarrow draws
upon the traditions of linguistics, anthropology, and
social movement studies to develop a typology of
language use and political practice to address these
questions. One dimension of the typology is the symbolic
resonance of political words—the mix of familiarity,
emotion, and historical depth that enables people in
conflict to sort through their options and join together,
knowing something about how those categories of action
turned out in the past. The other dimension of language
choice and practical guidance is strategic modularity—the
knowledge about the ways in which various terms have
been adapted to new conditions, and how those adapta-
tions have worked. Tarrow uses this framework to show
how words variously decline or become enriched by new
practices. The rich examples nicely illustrate the important
idea of polysemy, or the multiplicity of meanings that keep
political discourses in continuous play and negotiation.
One question that seemed to go begging in this often
exhilarating historical tour is: How does one decide
among arguments when operating at such high levels of
historical abstraction? For example, the engaging chapter
on class politics documents a decline in references to class
language in U.S. and British books published in the last
decades of the twentieth century (p. 76). This seems
paradoxical in light of the dramatic increases in inequality
in those nations over the same period. Tarrow attributes
this linguistic shift to declining subjective perceptions of
class in polls and popular culture, accompanied by
populism on the right and strategic decisions not to
overplay old ideological appeals on the left. This account
seems a bit piecemeal in its neglect of a rising global
neoliberal political economy during that period, displac-
ing unions and moving labor parties in many nations
toward neoliberal market reforms. Bringing this neo-
liberal turn into the explanation might also have offered
a better account for the reason that Occupy had to invent
a new, more individualized language (“We are the 99%)
to frame its protests.
Beyond its refreshing historical scope, Tarrow’s frame-
work may help to reconcile a paradigm split within social
movement studies, where the long-dominant school takes
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