Download What is a Social Movement?

Communication, Institutions and
Power
Spring, 2017
Gary Fields
What is Communication?
What is Communication?
• 16th century origins from Latin “communicare” meaning to “share.”
• When we “share” something, we are engaged in an act of
“exchange.”
• When we exchange, we are essentially “trading.”
• From the Oxford English Dictionary, trade and communication are
inextricably linked.
Adam Smith (1776)
“The division of labor, from
which so many advantages are
derived, is not the effect of any
human wisdom but instead
derives from the propensity in
human nature to truck, barter,
and otherwise exchange one
thing for another.”
Book 1, Chapter 2
Means of Conveyance
• The Body (including voice)
• Infrastructure
What is Communication?
• Connection: enabling information and materials to
circulate from one point to another.
• Mobility: Movement of materials or meaning from one
point to another.
• Exchange: Transfer of materials, meanings, men/women
from one point to another.
• Infrastructure: A system of access enabling materials
meanings, and people to move from one point to another.
Communication involves…
• Distance
• Time
• Access
• Connection
What Changes
When Communication Changes?
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Economic Life
Technology
Politics / Institutions
Work
Consumption
Boundaries
Property
Truth
Conflict / Power
“History must be
mobilized if we are
to understand the
present.”
The Border
Shenzhen – Mango Jeans
Shenzhen – Foxconn Electronics
Guangdong – Workshop of the World
What is a Social Movement?
What is a Social Movement?
• …Collectivities acting with organizational coherence outside institutional
channels with the aim of challenging, resisting or overturning such systems.
Snow / Soule, 2011: 6
• …an organized effort to change laws, policies, or practices by people without
power to make change through conventional channels.
Francesca Polleta
• …an effort by individual / group actors to confront a perceived injustice by
mobilizing political, economic, and cultural power collectively in order to
remedy the injustice and chanage the values of society.
Marshall Ganz
• …an organized effort to redefine society’s cultural values in order to promote
change.
Touraine, 2002: 90
What is Necessary for Collective Action?
What is Necessary for Collective Action?
• Injustice
• Trigger that amplifies Injustice.
• Claim (Story) that explains why is it necessary to
correct Injustice, and seeks to attract people to the
cause by projecting a vision of something better.
• Communications Infrastructure that spreads the
story about Injustice, the Trigger, and the Claim.
• Repertoires (practices) that challenge structures of
power that elicit consent.
Order and Consent
Society functions on the basis of consent in which
individuals / organizations submit to institutionalized
rules of power and order.
Social movements challenge institutionalized rules of
power and the systems of belief underlying power in
presenting an alternative.
‘Hegemony’ and Theorizing Order
Society consists of a political
order which rules through law
and force, and a civil society
which rules through consent. For
Gramsci, such consent was the
basis of ‘culture’ in which a
dominant ideology or world view
prevailed. Gramsci use the term
cultural hegemony to describe
dominant ideologies to which we
give our tacit consent. Breaking
this cultural hegemony was the
key to social change.
Order, Consent and Social Movements
Key Questions
How do people come to understand their consent
to order as somehow intolerable?
How do people come to act collectively to change
what they believe to be intolerable?
Snow / Soule
5 Questions
1) What is the nature of the injustice or grievance?
2) Why do movements emerge in time and place?
3) Who are the participants and how do they come
to take part?
4) How do movements pursue their aims?
5) What are the outcomes of social movements?
Communication and Social Movements
• How is communication situated in modelling
protest and social movements?
• What is the relationship of media to collective
activity?
• How do we understand communication and the
notion of social “ties” between people?
• What are the different arguments about media,
social ties and collective action?
Gladwell / Strong Ties
What makes people participants in activism?
[Degree of personal connection between
individuals and movement – STRONG TIES.
Gladwell / Weak Ties
What kinds of connections does social media
promote?
Social media promotes weak ties between
individuals.
Weak Ties promote networks; strong ties
promote hierarchies.
Repertoires / Ties
What does Gladwell argue are the types of
repertoires necessary for social movement?
What type of ties are necessary to promote such
repertoires