Why do social movements occur

Thus, social movement is the effort by an association to bring about a change in the society. A social movement may also be directed to resist a change. Some movements are directed to modify certain aspects of the existing social order whereas others may aim to change it completely. The former are called reform movements and the latter are known as revolutionary movements.

Social movements may be of numerous kinds, such as religious movements, reform movements, or revolutionary movements. Firstly, Social institutions are relatively permanent and stable elements of a culture, whereas social movements have an uncertain life. Marriage is a permanent social institution but the life of family planning movement is not certain.

Secondly, institutions hold institutional status. They are regarded as necessary and valuable aspects of the culture. A social movement lacks institutional status. Some people are indifferent or even hostile to it. Social movements may also be distinguished from association.

Firstly, an association is an organized group, while some social movements may be totally unorganized. Secondly, an association carries the customary behaviour of the society, while the social movement is concerned with some change in behaviour norms. The society is undergoing constant changes. The values and behaviour are changing in all civilized societies. In the course of cultural drift most of the people develop new ideas. To get these ideas operative in society they organise a movement.

The development of a democratic society, the emancipation of women, the spread of mass education, the removal of untouchability, equality of opportunity for both the sexes, growth of secularism are the examples of cultural drift. A changing society is to some extent disorganized because changes in different parts of society do not take place simultaneously. One part changes more rapidly than the other producing thereby numerous lags.

Industrialization has brought urbanization which has in its turn caused numerous social problems. Social disorganization brings confusion and uncertainty because the old traditions no longer form a dependable guide to behaviour. The individuals become rootless. They feel isolated from the society. A feeling develops that the community leaders are indifferent to their needs. The individuals feel insecure, confused and frustrated.

Confusion and frustration produce social movements. When a group of people feel that injustice has been done to it they become frustrated and alienated.

Such feeling of injustice provides fertile soil for social movements. The feeling of social injustice is not limited to the miserable poor. Any group, at any status level may come to feel itself the victim of social injustice.

A wealthy class may feel a sense of injustice when faced with urban property ceiling Act or high taxes intended to benefit the poor. Social injustice is a subjective value judgment. A social system is unjust when it is so perceived by its members.

Thus, social movements arise wherever social conditions are favorable. It may be noted that in a stable, well integrated society there are few social movements. In such a society there are very few social tensions or alienated groups. The people are contented.

But in a changing and continuously disorganised society the people suffer from tensions. They are not fully contented. In such a society they perceive social injustice and become dissatisfied. It is the dissatisfied who build social movements. The modern society is more afflicted by social movements. Thus, the people who are homeless and misfits of society become the supporters of mass movements. Some may join it first to fill their leisure Ume, or they may be personally attracted to some of its members.

Or, they may join to get an office in the movement with the desire to achieve prestige or exercise power rather than to further the goals of the movement. It may again be emphasized that unless there is deep and widespread social discontent, social movements will not originate and develop.

The sequence pattern of social movement may be summarised as follows. First, there is unrest and discontent in some part of the population.

A small group of individuals becomes conscious of the need for a change, voices its feelings and opinions, and sets out to influence the opinions and emotions of others and prepare them for a reform. Then, thereafter, there is a period of growth in following.

A preliminary organization is effected and the programme is restated in more popular and appealing terms. Then follows a more systematic effort to gain supporters. There is a formal campaign. They lacked the strong-tie connection to other people who were staying. People follow or friend people they have never met. While these online acquaintances are a source of information and inspiration, the lack of engaged personal contact limits the level of risk we will take on their behalf.

Most theories of social movements are called collective action theories, indicating the purposeful nature of this form of collective behaviour.

The following three theories are but a few of the many classic and modern theories developed by social scientists. Resource mobilization theory focuses on the purposive, organizational strategies that social movements need to engage in to successfully mobilize support, compete with other social movements and opponents, and present political claims and grievances to the state.

Framing theory focuses on the way social movements make appeals to potential supporters by framing or presenting their issues in a way that aligns with commonly held values, beliefs, and commonsense attitudes.

Social movements will always be a part of society as long as there are aggrieved populations whose needs and interests are not being satisfied. However, grievances do not become social movements unless social movement actors are able to create viable organizations, mobilize resources, and attract large-scale followings. As people will always weigh their options and make rational choices about which movements to follow, social movements necessarily form under finite competitive conditions: competition for attention, financing, commitment, organizational skills, etc.

Not only will social movements compete for our attention with many other concerns—from the basic our jobs or our need to feed ourselves to the broad video games, sports, or television , but they also compete with each other. For any individual, it may be a simple matter to decide you want to spend your time and money on animal shelters and Conservative Party politics versus homeless shelters and the New Democratic Party.

The question is, however, which animal shelter or which Conservative candidate? To be successful, social movements must develop the organizational capacity to mobilize resources money, people, and skills and compete with other organizations to reach their goals. Taken together, along with all other social movement organizations working on animals rights issues, these similar organizations constitute a social movement industry.

Every social movement organization a single social movement group within the social movement sector is competing for your attention, your time, and your resources. The chart in Figure The sudden emergence of social movements that have not had time to mobilize resources, or vice versa, the failure of well-funded groups to achieve effective collective action, calls into question the emphasis on resource mobilization as an adequate explanation for the formation of social movements.

Over the past several decades, sociologists have developed the concept of frames to explain how individuals identify and understand social events and which norms they should follow in any given situation Benford and Snow ; Goffman ; Snow et al.

A frame is a way in which experience is organized conceptually. Imagine entering a restaurant. It probably does not occur to you to wear pajamas to a fine dining establishment, throw food at other patrons, or spit your drink onto the table.

However, eating food at a sleepover pizza party provides you with an entirely different behaviour template. It might be perfectly acceptable to eat in your pajamas, and maybe even throw popcorn at others or guzzle drinks from cans. Successful social movements use three kinds of frames Snow and Benford to further their goals. The first type, diagnostic framing , states the social movement problem in a clear, easily understood way.

The anti-gay marriage movement is an example of diagnostic framing with its uncompromising insistence that marriage is only between a man and a woman. Any other concept of marriage is framed as sinful or immoral. Prognostic framing , the second type, offers a solution and states how it will be implemented. When looking at the issue of pollution as framed by the environmental movement, for example, prognostic frames would include direct legal sanctions and the enforcement of strict government regulations or the imposition of carbon taxes or cap-and-trade mechanisms to make environmental damage more costly.

As you can see, there may be many competing prognostic frames even within social movements adhering to similar diagnostic frames. Finally, motivational framing is the call to action: what should you do once you agree with the diagnostic frame and believe in the prognostic frame? These frames are action-oriented. In the aboriginal justice movement, a call to action might encourage you to join a blockade on contested aboriginal treaty land or contact your local MP to express your viewpoint that aboriginal treaty rights be honoured.

With so many similar diagnostic frames, some groups find it best to join together to maximize their impact. When social movements link their goals to the goals of other social movements and merge into a single group, a frame alignment process Snow et al. For example, Carroll and Ratner argue that using a social justice frame makes it possible for a diverse group of social movements—union movements, environmental movements, aboriginal justice movements, gay rights movements, anti-poverty movements, etc.

This frame alignment process involves four aspects: bridging, amplification, extension, and transformation. These organizations join together creating a new, stronger social movement organization. Can you think of examples of different organizations with a similar goal that have banded together? In the amplification model, organizations seek to expand their core ideas to gain a wider, more universal appeal. By expanding their ideas to include a broader range, they can mobilize more people for their cause.

For example, the Slow Food movement extends its arguments in support of local food to encompass reduced energy consumption and reduced pollution, plus reduced obesity from eating more healthfully, and other benefits. Transformation involves a complete revision of goals. Once a movement has succeeded, it risks losing relevance.

If it wants to remain active, the movement has to change with the transformation or risk becoming obsolete. In short, it is an evolution to the existing diagnostic or prognostic frames generally involving a total conversion of movement. New social movement theory emerged in the s to explain the proliferation of postindustrial, quality-of-life movements that are difficult to analyze using traditional social movement theories Melucci Rather than being based on the grievances of particular groups striving to influence political outcomes or redistribute material resources, new social movements NSMs like the peace and disarmament, environmental, and feminist movements focus on goals of autonomy, identity, self-realization, and quality-of-life issues.

Moreover, the movements themselves are more flexible, diverse, shifting, and informal in participation and membership than the older social movements, often preferring to adopt nonhierarchical modes of organization and unconventional means of political engagement such as direct action. The dimensions of existence that were formally considered private e.

However, as Melucci argues,. These are precisely the areas where individuals and groups lay claim to their autonomy, where they conduct their search for identity…and construct the meaning of what they are and what they do pp.

Collective behaviour and social movements are just two of the forces driving social change , which is the change in society created through social movements as well as external factors like environmental shifts or technological innovations. Essentially, any disruptive shift in the status quo, be it intentional or random, human-caused or natural, can lead to social change.

Below are some of the likely causes. Changes to technology, social institutions, population, and the environment, alone or in some combination, create change. We will focus on four agents of change recognized by social scientists: technology, social institutions, population, and the environment.

Some would say that improving technology has made our lives easier. Imagine what your day would be like without the internet, the automobile, or electricity. In The World Is Flat , Thomas Friedman argues that technology is a driving force behind globalization, while the other forces of social change social institutions, population, environment play comparatively minor roles.

He suggests that we can view globalization as occurring in three distinct periods. First, globalization was driven by military expansion, powered by horsepower and windpower. The countries best able to take advantage of these power sources expanded the most, exerting control over the politics of the globe from the late 15th century to around the year The second shorter period, from approximately CE to CE, consisted of a globalizing economy.

Steam and rail power were the guiding forces of social change and globalization in this period. Finally, Friedman brings us to the post-millennial era. In this period of globalization, change is driven by technology, particularly the internet Friedman But also consider that technology can create change in the other three forces social scientists link to social change.

Advances in medical technology allow otherwise infertile women to bear children, indirectly leading to an increase in population. Advances in agricultural technology have allowed us to genetically alter and patent food products, changing our environment in innumerable ways.

From the way we educate children in the classroom to the way we grow the food we eat, technology has impacted all aspects of modern life. Of course there are drawbacks. The increasing gap between the technological haves and have-nots——sometimes called the digital divide ——occurs both locally and globally. Further, there are added security risks: the loss of privacy, the risk of total system failure like the Y2K panic at the turn of the millennium , and the added vulnerability created by technological dependence.

Think about the technology that goes into keeping nuclear power plants running safely and securely. Each change in a single social institution leads to changes in all social institutions. For example, the industrialization of society meant that there was no longer a need for large families to produce enough manual labour to run a farm. Further, new job opportunities were in close proximity to urban centres where living space was at a premium.

The result is that the average family size shrunk significantly. This same shift toward industrial corporate entities also changed the way we view government involvement in the private sector, created the global economy, provided new political platforms, and even spurred new religions and new forms of religious worship like Scientology.

It has also informed the way we educate our children: originally schools were set up to accommodate an agricultural calendar so children could be home to work the fields in the summer, and even today, teaching models are largely based on preparing students for industrial jobs, despite that being an outdated need. As this example illustrates, a shift in one area, such as industrialization, means an interconnected impact across social institutions.

Population composition is changing at every level of society. Births increase in one nation and decrease in another. Some families delay childbirth while others start bringing children into their fold early. Population changes can be due to random external forces, like an epidemic, or shifts in other social institutions, as described above. But regardless of why and how it happens, population trends have a tremendous interrelated impact on all other aspects of society.

In Canada, we are experiencing an increase in our senior population as baby boomers begin to retire, which will in turn change the way many of our social institutions are organized. For example, there is an increased demand for housing in warmer climates, a massive shift in the need for elder care and assisted-living facilities, and growing awareness of elder abuse.

There is concern about labour shortages as boomers retire, not to mention the knowledge gap as the most senior and accomplished leaders in different sectors start to leave. Further, as this large generation leaves the workforce, the loss of tax income and pressure on pension and retirement plans means that the financial stability of the country is threatened. Globally, often the countries with the highest fertility rates are least able to absorb and attend to the needs of a growing population.

Family planning is a large step in ensuring that families are not burdened with more children than they can care for. Turning to human ecology, we know that individuals and the environment affect each other. As human populations move into more vulnerable areas, we see an increase in the number of people affected by natural disasters, and we see that human interaction with the environment increases the impact of those disasters.

Part of this is simply the numbers: the more people there are on the planet, the more likely it is that people will be impacted by a natural disaster. But it goes beyond that. We face a combination of too many people and the increased demands these numbers make on the Earth. As a population, we have brought water tables to dangerously low levels, built up fragile shorelines to increase development, and irrigated massive crop fields with water brought in from far away.

How can we be surprised when homes along coastlines are battered and droughts threaten whole towns? The year holds the unwelcome distinction of being a record year for billion-dollar weather disasters, with about a dozen falling into that category. From twisters and floods to snowstorms and droughts, the planet is making our problems abundantly clear CBS News These events have birthed social movements and are bringing about social change as the public becomes educated about these issues.

Humans have long been interested in science fiction and space travel, and many of us are eager to see the invention of jet packs and flying cars. But part of this futuristic fiction trend is much darker and less optimistic. In his novel set in , there is a more frightening future. Since then, there has been an ongoing stream of dystopian novels, or books set in the future after some kind of apocalypse has occurred and when a totalitarian and restrictive government has taken over.

These books have been gaining in popularity recently, especially among young adult readers. And while the adult versions of these books often have a grim or dismal ending, the youth-geared versions usually end with some promise of hope.

So what is it about our modern times that makes looking forward so fearsome? The capitol punishes the districts for their long-ago attempt at rebellion by forcing an annual Hunger Game, where two children from each district are thrown into a created world where they must fight to the death. Connotations of gladiator games and video games come together in this world, where the government can kill people for their amusement, and the technological wonders never cease.

From meals that appear at the touch of a button to mutated government-built creatures that track and kill, the future world of Hunger Games is a mix of modernization fantasy and nightmare. When thinking about modernization theory and how it is viewed today by both functionalists and conflict theorists, it is interesting to look at this world of fiction that is so popular.

When you think of the future, do you view it as a wonderful place, full of opportunity? Or as a horrifying dictatorship sublimating the individual to the good of the state? Do you view modernization as something to look forward to or something to avoid? And which media has influenced your view? Modernization describes the processes that increase the amount of specialization and differentiation of structure in societies resulting in the move from an undeveloped society to developed, technologically driven society Irwin By this definition, the level of modernity within a society is judged by the sophistication of its technology, particularly as it relates to infrastructure, industry, and the like.

However, it is important to note the inherent ethnocentric bias of such assessment. Why do we assume that those living in semi-peripheral and peripheral nations would find it so wonderful to become more like the core nations? Is modernization always positive? One contradiction of all kinds of technology is that they often promise time-saving benefits, but somehow fail to deliver. How many times have you ground your teeth in frustration at an internet site that refused to load or at a dropped call on your cell phone?

Despite time-saving devices such as dishwashers, washing machines, and, now, remote control vacuum cleaners, the average amount of time spent on housework is the same today as it was 50 years ago. While once businesses had to travel at the speed of the Canadian postal system, sending something off and waiting until it was received before the next stage, today the immediacy of information transfer means there are no such breaks. Further, the internet bought us information, but at a cost.

The morass of information means that there is as much poor information available as trustworthy sources. There is a delicate line to walk when core nations seek to bring the assumed benefits of modernization to more traditional cultures. For one, there are obvious pro-capitalist biases that go into such attempts, and it is short-sighted for Western governments and social scientists to assume all other countries aspire to follow in their footsteps.

Additionally, there can be a kind of neo-liberal defence of rural cultures, ignoring the often crushing poverty and diseases that exist in peripheral nations and focusing only on a nostalgic mythology of the happy peasant.

It takes a very careful hand to understand both the need for cultural identity and preservation as well as the hopes for future growth. Collective Behaviour Collective behaviour is non-institutionalized activity in which many people voluntarily engage.

There are four different forms of collective behaviour: crowd, mass, public, and social movement. There are three main theories of collective behaviour. The first, the emergent-norm perspective, emphasizes the importance of social norms in crowd behaviour.

The next, the value-added theory, is a functionalist perspective that states that several preconditions must be in place for collective behaviour to occur. Finally the assembling perspective focuses on collective action rather than collective behaviour, addressing the processes associated with crowd behaviour and the life cycle of various categories of gatherings. Social Movements Social movements are purposeful, organized groups, either with the goal of pushing toward change, giving political voice to those without it, or gathering for some other common purpose.

Social movements intersect with environmental changes, technological innovations, and other external factors to create social change. There are myriad catalysts that create social movements, and the reasons that people join are as varied as the participants themselves.

Sociologists look at both the macro- and microanalytical reasons that social movements occur, take root, and ultimately succeed or fail. Social Change There are numerous and varied causes of social change. Four common causes, as recognized by social scientists, are technology, social institutions, population, and the environment.

All four of these areas can impact when and how society changes. They are all interrelated: a change in one area can lead to changes throughout. Modernization is a typical result of social change. Modernization refers to the process of increased differentiation and specialization within a society, particularly around its industry and infrastructure. While this assumes that more modern societies are better, there has been significant pushback on this western-centric view that all peripheral and semi-peripheral countries should develop according to the model of North America and western Europe.

Collective Behaviour 1. Which of the following organizations is not an example of a social movement? The movement may require its members to dress in special ways, boycott certain products, pay dues, attend marches or rallies, recruit new members, and use new language. Concerning the latter, recent social movements have given rise to new terms like Hispanic American, African American, feminists, and psychiatrically disabled. For a social movement to succeed, leaders must heighten their followers' awareness of oppression.

To stimulate their social movement in the s and s, feminists convinced women that they were being discriminated against in various arenas, including work, school, and home. Specifically, any movement designed to stimulate fundamental changes will surely face resistance to its activities.

Critics feel the theory does not adequately discuss the issue of how opposition influences the actions and direction of social movements. Previous Social Change Defined. Removing book from your Reading List will also remove any bookmarked pages associated with this title.

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