2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82
Author(s):  
Sarah Waters

Recent literature on social movements has called for a renewal of theory so that it engages more directly with the social and historical dynamics in which movements emerge and crystallize. Too often, some critics argue, movements are treated as static or reified phenomena that are disconnected from their links to space and time. I examine new social movement theory from an historical perspective that emphasizes its connections with concrete social dynamics at a given point in time. Unlike alternative approaches, new social movement (NSM) theory and in particular the work of Alain Touraine, was forged out of a specific episode of social conflict—the May 1968 revolt in France—and was deeply informed by the experience of this conflict. This theory provides a dynamic and relational model in which social and historical processes are treated as major determinants of collective action within society. In fact, what explains the success of NSM theory and its enduring influence over time, is that it reaches beyond an analysis of social movements to provide an overarching theory of society at a given historical juncture. The article suggests that NSM theory provides a fruitful perspective for scholars searching for an approach that take history into account.


1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alana Lentin

The theoretical domain developed for the study of New Social Movements (NSMs) in the early 1980s has recently been largely abandoned by its main advocates. Increasingly, the cross-class, ‘post-materialist’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s, typified by the issues of environment, peace and feminism, cease to pose a radical challenge to contemporary western politics. This paper revisits the theoretical work of three of the European voices central to understandings of the emergence and success of New Social Movements. Claus Offe, Alberto Melucci and Alain Touraine succeed in amalgamating an essential emphasis on structural transformation and an understanding of the importance of identity in bringing about ‘new’ collective action in the 1970s and 1980s. In response, to the significant decrease in European work on the NSM phenomenon today the paper proposes that the existing body of theory may be insufficient for describing collective action at the turn of the Millennium. The increasing predominance of ‘identity’ politics (e.g. in the realms of ethnicity and sexuality) in the arenas previously dominated by ‘universalist’, post-particularist themes; the institutionalisation of elements of NSM action and concerns; and the perceived appropriation by transnational agencies of the issues dominating original state-NSM struggles are cited as reasons for the need to develop a new language to describe contemporary collective action phenomena.


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