The diffusion of protests (2)
Excerpts from the paper “Diffusion Models of Cycles of Protest as a Theory of Social Movements” n.d. by Pamela E. Oliver (University of Wisconsin) and Daniel J. Myers (University of Notre Dame), www.nd.edu/~dmyers/cbsm/vol3/olmy.pdf
This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding social movements as interrelated sets of diffusion processes and explains why such a conception is broadly useful to scholars of social movements.
[...] We begin with the fundamental observation that in social movements, actions affect other actions: Actions are not just isolated, independent responses external economic or political conditions–rather, one action changes the likelihood of subsequent actions. That is, diffusion processes are involved. This inter-action influence has long been recognized. Tarrow’s work on cycles of protest (e.g. 1998) has long recognized these interrelations. McAdam’s work on “tactical diffusion” showed that the civil rights movement was not a steady stream, but a series of bursts of action each driven by a tactical innovation: bus boycotts, freedom rides, sit-ins, demonstrations, and riots (1983). Many scholars have also noted the many ways that protest actions cannot be understood in isolation, but rather need to be viewed as interactions with the police and other social control forces, particularly as the police learn more effective methods of repression over time. Protest actions obviously interact as well with social policy changes and political speech-making (what we often call “elite support”). And, of course, over time one social movement affects another, as tactics and frames diffuse and produce the effects that Meyer and Whittier (1994) call “movement spillover.” The civil rights demonstrations and marches of the early 1960s not only led to civil rights legislation, but indirectly fostered the increased militancy and anger of Blacks and the elite responsiveness which contributed to the wave of black urban riots. The Black movement, in turn, was a direct inspiration for activists who explicitly studied the histories and writings of Black movement activist, including for example the Chicanos who founded La Raza (García 1989) and early feminists (Evans 1980).
[...] In short, diffusion processes are critical to the evolution of social movements. Scholars are increasingly recognizing the theoretical importance of diffusion processes, and using diffusion language in discussing social movements. Until recently, however, these discussions have stayed at a fairly superficial level. The fact of the diffusion of action has been repeatedly demonstrated in quantitative data showing the dispersion of events across time or space, and in qualitative research documenting the direct connections between events. A wealth of new data has been and is being collected giving the time series of various kinds of violent and nonviolent events in a number of different nations (Hocke 1998; Jenkins and Eckert 1986; Kriesi et al. 1995; McAdam 1982; Olzak 1990; Olzak 1992; Olzak and Olivier 1994; Olzak, Shanahan and McEneaney 1996; Olzak, Shanahan and West 1994; Rucht, Koopmans and Neidhardt 1998; Rucht 1992). Careful analyses of these data are yielding great payoffs in our understanding of the dynamics of collective events and the interplay between different modes of action by different actors. The combination of these data and recent advances in the technology of modeling diffusion make it possible to give a much more detailed account of the mechanisms of diffusion and to integrate diffusion processes with the other processes known to be important in social movements.
Taking advantage of these data and technical advances requires reorientation of both social movement theory and traditional diffusion theory so that the two can be integrated. In this paper, we discuss the issues involved in integrating these theories, the steps that have been taken so far, and the tasks that remain. Although it is possible to imagine a full theoretical conception that is more complex than we are able to fully portray at present, we believe that the work accomplished so far indicates the tremendous advances that will be possible from completing the process of theoretical integration.
[...] The linchpin of the integration of social movement theory with diffusion concepts is to re-conceive the basic concept of a social movement. As we, among others, have written elsewhere, there has never been much clarity about just what kind of thing a social movement is. [...] If we are to gain the advantages of diffusion theory, we need to give up the conception of a social movement as some kind of coherent entity, and instead conceive a social movement as a distribution of events across a population. We use the term “event” here in a general sense to encompass the actions of the various actors in a population, as well as their beliefs. In this sense, specific protest actions are events, but so is a resource flow from one group to another. It is also an event when a certain proportion of the population comes to hold a particular belief. Under this conception, a social movement peaks when there are a lot of protest actions happening involving a large proportion of the population “at risk” for participating.
[...] An emphasis on the diffusion of action as the core process in a social movement is central to studies of waves of conflict and cycles of protest. [...] For scholars not used to thinking this way, the transition is difficult, but it is very important if we are to achieve a real understanding of the protest phenomenon. The transition perhaps can be compared to that in the study of evolutionary biology, where it is recognized that a species is not a distinct entity which can make choices about how to adapt to an environment, but a statistical distribution of traits across individual organisms. Species evolve when the distribution of characteristics within a breeding population changes. Social movements rise when the overall frequency of protest events rises in a population, they become violent when they ratio of violent events to non-violent events rises, and so forth.
The diffusion of protests (1)
Excerpts from Koopmans, Ruud (2004) ‘Protest in time and space: the evolution of waves of contention’, in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 19–46.
A simple repetition of past patterns of protest by dissidents is [...] unlikely to lead to such an exposure of political opportunities. Regimes have established ways of dealing with known types of protest and elite controversies are unlikely to emerge over how to respond to them. The possibilities for exposing political opportunities are therefore greatly enhanced if there is a novel quality to protest. Such novelty can consist of new actors involved in protest or a redefinition of their collective identities, new tactics or organizational forms, or demands and interpretive frames that challenge the regime’s legitimacy in novel ways. It is significant in this respect that Eastern European communist regimes were not brought down by traditional dissident movements, but by a much more diffuse challenge that included ordinary workers – posing a particular ideological problem in these alleged “workers’ paradises” – and ethnic and linguistic minorities – whose leverage was greatest where a quasi-federal state structure made it difficult to deny such groups public legitimacy (Beissinger 1996). In the GDR, the linkage of traditional dissidents to the refugee crisis and advocates of free travel was of decisive importance (Joppke 1995).
[...]
Here we arrive at the crucial importance of diffusion processes in the expansion of contention. In the words of McAdam (1995: 231), “…initiator movements are nothing more than clusters of new cultural items – new cognitive frames, behavioral routines, organizational forms, tactical repertoires, etc. – subject to the same diffusion dynamics as other innovations.” Such diffusion processes have commanded considerable attention in the recent social movement literature and there is much we can learn here from more established diffusion theories in other fields. Since an entire chapter is devoted to this important problematic in this volume, I will here only highlight some of the most important characteristics of diffusion processes.
Diffusion is responsible for the emergent and eruptive character of protest waves that puzzled collective behaviorists and mass psychologists, and was subsequently neglected by the resource mobilization school, probably because this aspect of protest waves stood in uneasy tension with the idea of social movements as carefully planning, organized, rational actors. What epidemics, fads, contentious innovations, or any other diffusion process have in common is that they are socially embedded: they can only spread by way of communication from a source to an adopter, along established network links (Strang and Soule 1998; Myers 2000). Granovetter (1973) has argued that “weak ties” are particularly important in the diffusion of innovations because they link constituencies which have relatively few social relations in common, whereas communication along strong network ties is less likely to contain information that is novel to the recipient. In modern open societies, the mass media are the weak tie par excellence, and may communicate innovations between groups who share no social links at all – apart of course from their watching or reading the same news media. Therefore, the mass media play a crucial – but understudied – role in the diffusion of protest in modern democracies (Myers 2000).
A second important characteristic of social diffusion – and here the parallel with contagion and epidemics ends – is that adopters are not passive recipients, but actively choose to adopt a particular innovation or not. Innovations may be helpful for one group, but seen as useless or inapplicable to its circumstances by another. The process by which groups make such decisions about the applicability of innovations to their context is sometimes denoted as “attribution of similarity” (Strang and Meyer 1993) or, in a more objectifying sense, as “structural equivalence” (Burt 1987). Apart from internal characteristics of the adopting group, the similarity or equivalence of the political context will play an important role in such considerations. It is certainly no coincidence that the diffusion of contention that started in the autumn of 1989 respected clearly circumscribed geopolitical boundaries. All Eastern European countries whose regimes were directly existentially linked to the Soviet Union were affected by it, as were communist countries in immediate geographical and cultural proximity such as Yugoslavia and Albania. But the wave neither spread to the non-European communist world, nor to non-communist countries within Europe.
Such limits to the scope of diffusion depend strongly on the actual interlinkages of opportunity structures in different contexts. Protests could spread across Eastern Europe not just because these were structurally and culturally similar communist countries, but also because a weakening of one regime had immediate consequences for the strength of another. Earlier revolts in the Eastern Bloc had always been smothered in the threat or actual use of military force by the “brother countries”, first and foremost the Soviet Union. Starting with Gorbachev’s explicit indication that the Soviet Union would this time not intervene, every subsequent failure of a regime to contain or repress opposition made the position of remaining hard-liners more precarious until even those who did choose the road of repression such as Ceaucescu in Romania were no longer able to scare regime opponents from the streets. Such “opportunity cascades” may be an important mechanism for protest diffusion. They may, it should be noted, themselves be partly the result of diffusion processes. Innovations also spread within elite networks, subject to similar constraints as protest diffusion. Thus, glasnost and perestroika, Yeltsinite radical reformism, as well as the strategy of mobilizing ethno-nationalism as a means of elite survival, all diffused throughout Eastern Europe’s communist elites, and differential adoption of such strategic models often introduced conflicts within formerly consensual regimes.
The linkage between diffusion and political opportunities is reinforced by a third and final central characteristic of diffusion processes. Contrary to the assumption of irrational contagion that underlies the collective behavior approach, numerous studies have shown that adoption depends on the perceived success of innovations. For instance, in his study of the early history of airplane hijackings, Holden (1986) showed that only successful hijackings increased the subsequent rate of hijacking, whereas unsuccessful hijackings had no discernable impact. This is the main reason why protest innovations can only spread if political opportunities are conducive. Innovations that fail to help those who employ them to achieve their aims are unlikely to be adopted by others. However, success or failure may not always be so easy to determine, certainly if more long-term strategic aims are concerned. Especially in authoritarian contexts, the mere fact that mobilization is not repressed may be a sufficient indicator of success for that type of mobilization to spread.
E-seminar: Media and social changing since 1979
This e-seminar took place some time ago (in December 2012) but I thought I’d repost the relevant information and links here from the Media Anthropology Network site for archival purposes.
Media Anthropology Network
European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)
E-seminar 42
4-18 December 2012. John Postill (RMIT): Media and social changing since 1979: Towards a diachronic ethnography of media and actual social changes. (PDF, 230 KB)
Comments: Brian Larkin (Columbia University) (PDF, 80 KB)
E-Seminar on Media and social changing since 1979 (PDF, 220 KB)
Abstract
In this paper I address the question of how to study media and social change ethnographically. To do so I draw from the relevant media anthropology literature, including my own research in Malaysia and Spain. I first sketch a history of media anthropology, identifying a number of key works and themes as well as two main phases of growth since the 1980s. I then argue that anthropologists are well positioned to contribute to the interdisciplinary study of media and social change. However, to do so we must first shift our current focus on media and ‘social changing’ (i.e. how things are changing) to the study of media in relation to actual social changes, e.g. the suburbanisation of Kuala Lumpur in the 1970s to 2000s, or the secularisation of morality in post-Franco Spain. This shift from the ethnographic present continuous to the ethnographic past simple (how things changed from A to B) – a move from potential to actual changes – does not require that we abandon our commitment to ethnography in favour of social or cultural history. Rather, it demands new forms of ‘diachronic ethnography’ that can handle the biographical logic of actual social changes.
Keywords: media, social change, social changing, diachronic ethnography, multi-timed ethnography, media anthropology, social history, world history.
Extracts from Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London and New York: Pluto Books, 2012.
p. 27-28 ‘If Castells… was the [late 1990s] social theorist of the rise of the World Wide Web, Hardt’s and Negri’s joint work, which came at a later stage, bears the stamp of the era of mobile media and the new forms of collective action their diffusion inspired. Compared to Castells’ discussion of networks, Hardt and Negri do recuperate an appreciation of the role of the body and its mobility… Yet they too fail to take into account the emplaced character of collective action, the fact that it requires physical locations as stages of its performance’.
p. 28 ‘The place of the multitude, Hardt and Negri suggest, is a ‘non-place’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 40)’.
p. 27 Hardt and Negri (2004) notion of ‘swarm intelligence’ similar idea to Wasik’s flash mobs and Rheingold’s (2003) smart mobs.
p. 26-27 ‘The concept of the swarm comes to represent… nomadic corporeality, this ‘body without organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 40), a multitude which can act together without being reduced to one identity or one place’. For these authors, today’s ‘complex technical linkages’ allow for the emergence of collective action out of heterogeneity and multiplicity, without the need for centralisation. Swarms without hives.
p. 28 Yet ‘We know from biology that while honey-bees fly across great distances they also need a fixed place to return to, and some comrade bees to remain there to keep the hive in place.’
p. 29 In common with Castells, Hardt and Negri reject the ‘imaginary of the crowd or the mass’. This ‘brings about a disregard for the importance of places as sites for the display of collective action – which clearly leaves little room for an understanding of the ‘take the square movements’ of 2011, and the importance of the occupation of public spaces has acquired in their unfolding’.
p. 29 That said, both Castells and Hardt and Negri ‘correctly identify a situation of radical heterogeneity and multiplicity at the root of contemporary society’.
The concept of affordances (in brief)
A useful summary of the concept of ‘affordances’ found in Juris, J. S. (2012), Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation. American Ethnologist, 39: 259–279.
In the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, the concept of “affordances” was introduced as a way to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of technological determinism, on the one hand, which views new modes of social relations as actively caused by particular forms of technology, and technological constructionism, on the other hand, which views technological artifacts as entirely socially shaped, both in terms of their form and meaning (Hutchby 2001:441–442). In contrast, a theory of “affordances” (Gibson 1979) views technologies as artifacts that “may be both shaped by and shaping of the practices humans use in interaction with, around and through them” (Hutchby 2001:444). Ian Hutchby specifically defines affordances as “functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object” (2001:444). For analyses of technological affordances in relation to the Internet and social media, see Wellman et al. 2003 and Boyd 2011.
Skuse, Andrew, Marie Gillespie & Gerry Power (eds). Drama for development: cultural translation and social change. xxiii, 324 pp., tables, bibliogrs. New Delhi: Sage Publications India, 2011. £45.00 (cloth)
John Postill. Review for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), Volume 19, Issue 1,pages 195–196, March 2013.
Drama for development assesses the work of the BBC World Service Trust (WST). Since its 1999 inception, the Trust has faced the ‘daunting challenge’ of translating developmental goals into local radio and television drama (p. 3). The result is a ‘bricolage’ of top-down and grassroots communicative forms in widely differing cultural and political contexts across Asia and Africa (p. 5).
Although strongly shaped by two of its co-editors’ anthropological training in Britain (Skuse and Gillespie), the volume brings together WST practitioners and theorists from a range of disciplinary and national backgrounds. Its declared aim is to break new ground in the small but dynamic field of drama for development. This aim is amply fulfilled through three introductory chapters followed by ten case studies that are destined to become a key resource in this area for scholars, students, and practitioners in the sociology and anthropology of media and development.
The cases range from long-running radio dramas such as Afghanistan’s New home, new life (Skuse, Skuse and Gillespie) to Nepal’s pilot production Sweet tales from the Sarangi (Skuse and Wilmore) through past TV soaps like Jasoos Vijay, woven around an HIV-positive detective in North India (Lapsansky and Chatterjee, Frank et al.). WST dramas may not command global audiences, but in their own national contexts they have often made a significant impact. Thus Jasoos Vijay was one of the ten most popular shows on Indian television during its 2006-7 heyday, whilst over two-thirds of Rwanda’s population follow the radio drama Urunana.
The book’s main strength lies not at the macro-level of post-Cold War geopolitics (see below) but at the micro-level of drama production. Its careful exposition and analysis of the challenges faced by both expatriate and ‘local’ staff casts doubt on the grand claims of media gurus about the epochal changes wrought by new media. Collectively, they capture a mature site of cultural production as it struggles to leave behind the ‘high expectations’ of earlier communication models and move towards more modest but realistic ambitions (Sugg and Power).
One rich vein mined in the book concerns the limits and possibilities of cultural translation. For example, Hintjens and Bayisenge show how the radio drama Urunana created ‘safe spaces’ for listeners to discuss sensitive issues such as HIV and pregnancy across ethnic divides in post-genocide Rwanda. But as Skuse and Gillespie argue, safe spaces are not always readily available, as drama for development is not the clean slate imagined by earlier practitioners (and some donors to this day). Thus in conservative countries like Afghanistan, pushing the generic and moral boundaries too far can result in audiences turning away from the drama. Over time WST writers had to learn how to ‘mimic’ Afghan oral genres, including gossip, to engage their audiences. Likewise, the innovative social realism of a WST radio drama aimed at Nepali audiences would sometimes baffle listeners steeped in South Asian traditions ‘in which the cosmic, the mythic and the fantastical may be equally important as the real’ (Skuse and Wilmore, p. 167). By contrast, the visual and narrative conventions of the Bollywood-inspired Detective Vijay were familiar to Indian audiences, albeit with the intriguing twist of its male hero being HIV-positive.
The book’s editors and contributors are not afraid to level criticism at some of the field’s stakeholders (e.g. Britain’s High Commission in Islamabad hoping to ‘change the national consciousness for a few thousand pounds’, p. 233), but they do so diplomatically – as befits the media worlds they both describe and inhabit. There is none the less a telling contrast between the measured critical stance of Skuse (see, e.g., his remarks about the WST’s ‘neoliberalism’) and more uncritical positions in other places (e.g. Sugg and Power’s casual description of the early 1990s BBC as merely ‘helping’ Russia and other post-communist states ‘along the road to a free enterprise civil society’, p. 34). Students, lecturers and practitioners alike should find this and other contrasts in the volume to be useful triggers to debate and comparison as the field continues to change and rising nations – notably China – seek to apply new forms of ‘soft power’ across the developing world.
Drama for development is a powerful reminder that we should not overlook radio or television in our fascination with the newer technologies, for both ‘old’ media remain as central to the lives and aspirations of billions of people across the global South – and indeed the North – as they were in pre-Facebook times.
Do grad students have to know social theory?
By Michael E. Smith, Professor in the School of Human Evolution & Social Change at Arizona State University, and Affiliated Faculty in the School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning.
I am writing this on the bus between Ann Arbor and East Lansing, Michigan. I gave a lecture at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan on Friday. This was a great experience. The lecture (the “Jeffrey Parsons Lecture”) is run by the archaeology grad students – they are the ones who invited me, and my schedule was set to maximize my interaction with students. Normally when one visits a program, one has individual meetings with the faculty, and then maybe a lunch with a bunch of students. Well, I had lunch with some faculty, but meetings and events all day with grad students (including breakfast and dinner, not to forget Friday afternoon beers, called “007” at Michigan for some reason I can’t recall).
This is a great group of students. They are smart and competent and each one I talked to is doing good research. And they are solid empirical scientists who don’t have much use for high-level social theory. But several expressed a concern about whether they would be expected to talk the social-theory talk when interviewing for jobs or otherwise interacting with outsiders. Has social theory so infected the discipline that everyone needs to deal with it (regardless of whether it helps their research or not)? That is an excellent question, one without a short, easy answer. So here are some thoughts on the question.
