Social Movement

A loosely organized, sustained effort by a large number of people, often outside formal political channels, to achieve or resist a particular social or political change through collective action and a shared identity. Sociologists distinguish social movements from more spontaneous crowd behavior by their duration, degree of organization and explicit goals, and typically classify them by aim and depth of ambition: a reform movement seeks a specific policy change within the existing order, such as the temperance or civil rights movements, while a revolutionary movement seeks to remake the social order itself. Resource mobilization theory, developed from the 1970s onward, shifted the field away from explaining movements by grievance alone, since grievances are close to constant, toward the organizational resources, leadership, funding and preexisting social networks a movement needs to convert discontent into sustained collective action. Movements tend to pass through a recognizable life cycle from emergence, through coalescence and formal organization, to eventual decline through success, repression, co-optation or the exhaustion of member commitment, and they draw on repertoires of contention, the historically and culturally specific tactics such as the strike, the sit-in, the boycott and the mass march that participants use and that themselves change over time.