Social Movements

Overview

Social movement identity can be understood across two dimensions. The first is the relationship of the individual to the collective and the impact on individual biography that occurs through the identity quest often associated with joining a social movement. The second is the ongoing process of constructing and maintaining a collective or movement identity. Such an identity is never fixed, but represents the sorts of permanently evolving solidarity networks that, in and of themselves, raise symbolic challenges to the dominant social order. Within these networks also exists a range of multiple, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting individual identities. Social movement actors must negotiate across differences in these identities to create a strategic unity through which to articulate movement claims.

Identity and Biography

Individual identities are often changed in the process of joining a social movement and such movements are understood to play an identity-affirming function for many participants. For many activists, the act of joining a social movement is part of an individual identity quest. Activists often report experiencing new feelings of “belonging” and “recognition” in movement groups and organizations. The conscious and reflexive process of defining an identity that is separate fromor oppositional toan identity imposed by the dominant social system is the most personal experience of the liberation associated with social movement action. Individuals who identify as belonging to a particular movement can enjoy feelings of solidarity with other activists with whom they share a range of values and aspirations, but with whom they may not otherwise experience personal contact.

An interest in individual identity has also been driven by social movement scholars’ attempts to answer what is known as the “free rider” dilemma as it relates to activists’ motivation to participate in collective action. Scholars working in the rational tradition of social movement scholarship have struggled to understand why individuals would make the “irrational” choice of engaging in social movement activism when they could instead make the more “rational” decision to “free ride” on the efforts of others, enjoying the collective benefits produced by others but without cost to themselves. The pleasures and rewards associated with identity-quest have been posited as one alternative to material rewards that may motivate individuals to participate in social movement action.

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