Social Movement

Social movements represent the organized endeavors of multiple individuals, communities, or organizations to pursue political objectives within society and are generally seen to act outside formal state or economic spheres. They can be organized around particular groups (e.g., people with disabilities) or particular goals (e.g., environmental conservation), and their demands can be focused on society as a whole, on the state, or on the economy (or any combination of these). Geographers have become increasingly interested in the scope, nature, and orientation of social movements during recent years, although it remains difficult to measure their effects because they often are very dynamic and often are composed of informal or voluntary associations. Social movements also cannot be understood in isolation and out of context because it is necessary to understand and view them within a broader framework of social and geographic analysis.

Many theories of social movements understand them as a phenomenon within civil society, that is, a major arena of political action (along with the state and the[Page 438] economy). Originally, civil societies were seen as a realm of society that was distinct from and complementary to the state and the market, and until the early 20th century little attention was focused on civil societies; therefore, many theories of social movements were understood to be the product of conflict between the state and the economy and derived from theoretical work concerned with these themes (e.g., Marxism). Movements concerned with labor (e.g., trade unions) were understood in these terms as emanating from structural conflicts in the sphere of the state or the economy.

Social movements were popularized in particular by Manuel Castells's work on the city as a space of collective consumption (by which was meant the state's provision of housing, transport, education, etc.). Castells's work, which was rooted in the French political experience, claimed that contradictions and tensions abounded in the state's provision of these goods and services, leading to urban struggles that later transformed into urban social movements aiming to promote social change. Castells argued that crises in state provision led to anticapitalist urban struggles, although his work was criticized for being too economistic and mechanistic as well as silent on the gender composition of such movements.

Since the 1980s, many observers have highlighted how many of these urban social movements are being displaced by new local–global modes of communication, leading to the creation of new social movements (NSMs). New social movement theory developed initially in Europe to help explain a host of new movements that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s and that did not seem to fit the model of Marxian class conflict that had been the predominant model in much European social movement theory. These movements are new because they are more issue specific, use less conventional tactics, cut across class lines, and are less likely to turn to established political parties and channels to achieve their objectives. NSMs are made up of networks of collective actors (both in the North and in the South) with common interests and identities that have the threat of mobilization as the main source of their power. NSMs can be both progressive and regressive and can be very diverse and heterogeneous, including squatter movements, women's associations, human rights organizations, neighborhood groups, indigenous rights groups, youth groups, and self-help organizations of various kinds. For some observers, NSMs may be indicative of wider shifts in postwar civil society and may be a response to the decline in the authority and legitimacy of the state or a result of the global emergence of neoliberal economic philosophies. Some new social movement theorists emphasize a change in the economic structure of the First World as a structural force shaping the new movements. This is said to involve a shift from an industrial, heavy manufacturing–based Fordist economy (named after Henry Ford's assembly line) to a postindustrial, postmodern, or post-Fordist economy centered more on the service sector and computer-based information industries.

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