Loading field map
Are social movements the product of irrational crowd psychology, or are they strategic political actors pursuing rational goals? This question has driven the theoretical development of the sociology of social movements for over a century. The field's major frameworks can be understood as successive attempts to answer this question, each building on, challenging, or narrowing the insights of its predecessors. The story moves from an early view of protest as collective behavior to rationalist models focused on resources and political opportunities, then to cultural critiques that foregrounded meaning and identity, and finally to contemporary efforts that weave structure, culture, and relational dynamics together.
The earliest sociological framework for studying social movements was Collective Behavior, dominant from roughly 1900 to 1970. Drawing on crowd psychology and functionalist sociology, Collective Behavior treated protest, riots, and social movements as breakdowns of normal social order—irrational, spontaneous reactions to strain or anomie. Movements were seen as emotional outbursts rather than deliberate political action. This view reflected the anxieties of early twentieth-century elites about mass society, but it came under increasing pressure as the civil rights, antiwar, and student movements of the 1960s revealed a different reality: activists were strategic, organized, and goal-oriented. The empirical inadequacy of Collective Behavior opened the door for a fundamental reorientation.
In the 1970s, two closely related frameworks emerged that together replaced the irrationalist assumptions of Collective Behavior. Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT), developed by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, argued that movements are not spontaneous eruptions but rational enterprises that require resources—money, labor, organizations, media access—to succeed. RMT shifted attention from why people become discontented to how they mobilize resources. It treated social movement organizations much like firms in a market, competing for support. This was a sharp break from Collective Behavior: protest was no longer a symptom of social breakdown but a normal form of political participation.
At nearly the same time, Political Process Model (also called political opportunity theory), advanced by scholars such as Doug McAdam, Charles Tilly, and Sidney Tarrow, narrowed the focus to the state and political institutions. While RMT emphasized internal organizational dynamics, the Political Process Model argued that movements succeed or fail largely because of changes in the broader political environment—shifts in political alignments, the openness of the state to challengers, and the presence of influential allies. The two frameworks coexisted as complementary structural accounts: RMT explained how movements gather resources, while the Political Process Model explained when and why they have the opportunity to use them. Together, they established a rationalist orthodoxy that dominated American social movement studies through the 1980s.
By the 1980s, a growing number of scholars felt that the rationalist frameworks had left out something essential: the role of ideas, beliefs, and culture. Movements do not simply respond to resources and opportunities; they actively construct the meanings that make collective action possible. This cultural turn took two parallel forms, one American and one European.
The Framing Perspective, developed by David Snow, Robert Benford, and others, addressed the meaning gap directly. It argued that movements engage in "framing"—the strategic creation and dissemination of interpretive schemas that define a problem, attribute blame, and propose a solution. The landmark 2000 review "Framing Processes and Social Movements" by Snow and Benford consolidated this perspective, showing how framing bridges structural opportunities and individual motivation. Unlike the Political Process Model, which treated political context as given, Framing emphasized that movements must actively construct the grievances and identities that mobilize people. It remains a vibrant tradition, widely used to analyze how movements communicate their messages.
Meanwhile, New Social Movements Theory (NSMT), emerging from European social theory (Alain Touraine, Alberto Melucci, Jürgen Habermas), took a different cultural path. NSMT focused on the rise of movements centered on identity, lifestyle, and autonomy—feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights—rather than on material redistribution. It argued that these movements are not about resources or political access but about challenging cultural codes and asserting collective identities. NSMT coexists with the Framing Perspective as a parallel cultural critique of structural models, but with a distinct emphasis: Framing asks how movements construct meaning, while NSMT asks how they construct the self. Both remain active, with NSMT especially influential in studies of identity-based movements in Europe and beyond.
Since the 1990s, scholars have increasingly sought to overcome the division between structural and cultural approaches. Cultural and Relational Approaches represent a broad effort to integrate insights from the Political Process Model, Framing, and NSMT while adding new attention to networks, emotions, and the relational dynamics of protest. This framework draws on the relational sociology of Charles Tilly and the cultural sociology of Ann Swidler, among others. It treats movements not as bounded organizations or as carriers of fixed frames, but as dynamic fields of interaction where structure, culture, and agency are mutually constitutive. Key concepts include "relational mechanisms" (how ties between actors shape mobilization), "emotional dynamics" (how anger, hope, and solidarity fuel action), and "cultural repertoires" (the taken-for-granted tools activists draw on). Cultural and Relational Approaches absorb the insights of earlier frameworks while transforming them: they preserve the Political Process Model's attention to state power but embed it in cultural meaning; they extend the Framing Perspective by showing how frames emerge from relational contexts; and they deepen NSMT's concern with identity by analyzing how identities are performed and contested in interaction. This synthetic orientation is now the leading edge of the field, though it remains internally diverse.
Today, no single framework dominates the sociology of social movements. The Framing Perspective, New Social Movements Theory, and Cultural and Relational Approaches all remain active, each with a distinct division of labor. Framing is the go-to toolkit for studying movement messaging and media strategies. NSMT is indispensable for understanding identity-based and post-materialist movements. Cultural and Relational Approaches offer the most comprehensive vocabulary for analyzing the interplay of structure, culture, and interaction. There is broad agreement that movements are both strategic and cultural, that they operate within political constraints while also shaping those constraints through meaning-making. The main disagreement concerns emphasis: some scholars prioritize structural opportunities and resource dynamics, while others insist that culture and identity are not merely add-ons but constitutive of movement politics. This tension mirrors a deeper divide in sociology between positivist and interpretivist traditions, and it ensures that the study of social movements remains a lively, contested field.