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This essay provides information Social Movement !
Conventionally, social movements have broadly been perceived as organised efforts to bring about changes in the thought, beliefs, values, attitudes, relationships and major institutions in society, or to resist changes in any of the above structural elements of society. Social movements are viewed as intended and organised collective actions based on certain defined aims, methodology for collective mobilisation, distinctive ideology, identified leadership and organisation.
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However, since the late 1960s, especially in the wake of the proliferation of new forms of collective protest, resistance and mobilisation, like the students, environmental, Black civil rights, women’s, etc., movements in the United States and Western Europe, efforts have been made to identify new elements in social movements.
It has been widely recognised that social movements help to generate a sense of collective identity and new ideas that recognise the reality itself. And redefine modes of collective existence and Melucci has emphasised on collective identity formation. To him, social movements grow around relationships of new social identity that are voluntarily conceived “to empower” members in defense of this identity. Eyerman and Jamison highlight that:
By articulating consciousness, the social movement provides public spaces for generating new thoughts, activating new actors, generating new ideas. Thus by producing new knowledge, by reflecting on their own cognitive identity, by saying what they stand for, by challenging the dominant assumptions of the social order, social movements develop new ideas that are fundamental to the process of human creativity. Thus social movements develop worldviews that restructure cognition, that recognise reality itself. The cognitive praxis of social movements is an important source of new social images and transformation of societal identities.
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Social movements are framed based on a collective identity of various groups, namely, women, environmentalists, students, peasants, workers, etc., who are organised on the basis of common identity and interests. To Allan Scott, in a social movement the actor’s collective identity is linked to his or her understanding of their social situation. To him “a social movement is a collective actor constituted by individuals who understand themselves to have a common interest, and at least some significant part of their social existence, a common identity”.
However, participation in social movements may not always be for the quest of an identity; rather, it may be for the gratification of political and material interests. Tilly, McAdam, Tarrow and many others are of the view that social movements manifest in response to the increase in the potential political opportunities and growing receptivity of the state to the activities of the challenging groups.
In general, these scholars emphasise the various resources involved in the manifestation and operationalisation of social movements. This approach, known as resource mobilisation, assumes that collective actions are related to the specific opportunity structures. Here importance is given on the rationality of human action, whereby the participants in the social movement calculate the costs and benefits of their participatory action in collective mobilisation.
In this approach social movements are seen either as the creation of entrepreneurs skillful in the manipulation or mobilisation of social resources or the playing out of the social tensions and conflicts. Thus the motivation of the actors is seen as rational economic action. The resource mobilisation theory, indeed, aims to interpret those sets of social movements that are the visible parts of the American social reality in management terms. It is linked to the policy problem of containment.