Social Networks and Social Movements

Contentious Connections

Nick Crossley, John Krinsky, Nick Crossley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317565871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The concept of networks and the techniques of social network analysis have each assumed increasing importance in social science in recent years, not least in relation to the analysis of collective action and particularly social movements. This timely collection offers a fascinating glimpse into the state of the art. Each chapter uses network analysis to tackle a different question regarding the nature and dynamics of social movement activity, and each reflects upon the advantages and limitations of the method for its purposes. The case studies focused upon are drawn from a variety of national contexts, both contemporary and historical, and both the methods used and the uses to which they are put are no less diverse. A must have book for anybody interested in social movement networks and contemporary ways of analysing them.

This book was published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

Social Movements and Social Networks: Introduction

JOHN KRINSKY* & NICK CROSSLEY**

*Department of Political Science, The City University of New York, NY, USA **Department of Sociology, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

ABSTRACT In this Introduction we provide a brief literature review of work on social networks and social movements, a brief introduction to certain key concepts and debates in social network analysis, and a brief introduction to the articles which follow in the special issue.

The importance of social networks and the usefulness of social network analysis (SNA) as a research method are both widely acknowledged in social movement studies (see Crossley, 2007; Diani & McAdam, 2003). Interest in both has increased significantly in recent years, not least as an effect of computing and software developments (e.g. Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002) which have facilitated routine access to sophisticated analytic tools for anybody with a basic PC or laptop and the patience to read one of a number of very clear introductions to SNA (e.g. Scott, 2000; Wasserman & Faust, 1994).

A great deal of research on networks and social movements has drawn on ideas from network analysis without employing its formal, quantitative tools. Conversely, studies that do employ the formal tools of network analysis have most often drawn their questions from work that uses networks in a less formal sense. In either case, however, there is a broad understanding – and one that reaches back into the main traditions of research from the 1970s forward, including resource mobilization theory, political process theory, framing theory, the Dynamics of Contention program (e.g. McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001), and new social movement theory – that recognizes social movements as essentially reticulate in structure, and therefore amenable to analysis through metaphors and formal operations that capture the properties of their networks.

One of the great strengths of network-analytic studies – and network-metaphorical thinking – in social movement studies is that it invites the observer to look below the official stories and representations that movements and their activists make and discover hidden dynamics and relations (which, it is true, activists sometimes want to keep from view, but also may sometimes appreciate as clarifying why they are running into roadblocks). As Tilly (2005, p. 61) writes:

In practice […] constituent units of claim-making actors often consist not of living, breathing whole individuals but of groups, organizations, bundles of social ties, and social sites such as occupations and neighborhoods. Actors consist of networks deploying partially shared histories, cultures, and collective connections with other actors […]

Such actors, however, almost never describe themselves as composite networks. Instead, they offer collective nouns; they call themselves workers, women, residents of X, or United Front Against Y. They attribute unitary intentions to themselves, and most often to the objects of their claims as well. They recast social relations and network processes as individuals and individually deliberated actions.

Although thinking in these terms is hardly new for movements, the advance of formal-analytic tools to translate thinking into concrete research has made analysis both easier and – unfortunately – sometimes more empiricist, as good network data may be hard to assemble. Nevertheless, as Saul Alinsky, the intellectual and practical ‘father’ of community organizing in the USA counseled organizers as far back as the 1940s (Alinsky was influenced by Chicago-School community studies), those people designated as leaders in a community are not necessarily the real leaders; the organizer has to find the real leaders by finding out who the people are to whom others talk and listen, and from whom others seek help and advice.

Even if understood most simply as the social ties among individual actors in and around movements, networks are important to collective action in many ways. At the most basic level, members of aggrieved populations must communicate if they are to coordinate their efforts, pool their resources and act collectively, and different patterns of connection between them will affect the ease with which such coordination is achieved, along with its efficiency/effectiveness (Coleman, 1990; Crossley & Ibrahim, 2012; Marwell & Oliver, 1993). This is one reason why some social movement scholars, notably Diani (1995), conceptualize social movements as networks (of activists and/or social movement organizations [SMOs]). ‘Social movement’ implies concerted activity which implies a level of coordination between actors that can only be achieved through sustained interaction and thus, through networks.

Moreover, in addition to the usual benefits of ‘social capital’ (Burt, 2005; Coleman, 1990), higher density – or a greater number of ties among actors – within networks has been linked, both theoretically and empirically, to increased solidarity, mutual support and to the generation of incentives for self-sacrifice within movements (Coleman, 1988; Crossley & Ibrahim, 2012; Gould, 1991, 1993, 1995; Pfaff, 1996). Where density is higher, participants are more willing to engage in the often costly and risky activity of protest (Coleman, 1988; Crossley & Ibrahim, 2012; Gould, 1991, 1993, 1995; Pfaff, 1996). Furthermore, because they involve more intense interactions among their members, dense networks facilitate establishment of the nonmainstream values, situational definitions and commitments which are characteristic of many social movement communities (Coleman, 1988; Fischer, 1982). That is to say they facilitate the formation and preservation of movement-specific subcultures – wherein shared definitions of the substance, source, and of scope of the aggrieved group’s troubles can develop – which again fuel collective action (e.g. Scott, 1992). Conversely, as Goodwin (1997) shows, where collective action separates participants from others with whom they enjoy strong affective ties, this can have a destabilizing and demotivating effect.

None of these effects – or the effects of networks we present below – are automatic. All are mediated by other factors and, most importantly, by the interagency of those involved. How a network ‘works’ and what effects it has depend in large part upon the content of the interactions (ties) of its members. Furthermore, as various authors have argued, the graph theoretic and/or statistical methods of SNA capture only one aspect of networks and their significance, failing to engage sufficiently with issues of meaning and identity, and thereby necessitating use of qualitative methods too, in a mixed-method strategy (Crossley, 2010; Edwards, 2009; Emirbayer & Goodwin, 1994; Mische, 2003).

Social Networks and Social Movements

The study of social movements and social networks has a long relationship in sociology. At least since Tilly (1978) adopted the idea of ‘catnets’ (category-networks) to describe the groupness of social movement actors in From Mobilization to Revolution from the network theorist, Harrison White, some element of network theory and analysis has been present in the discipline. And the roots likely extend farther back than that. For Tilly, catnets were a sort of analogue to the Marxist question of how to define a class, and extended too to E.P. Thompson’s (1963) contentions in The Making of the English Working Class that there was simultaneity in the development of ‘class in itself’ and ‘class for itself’ (‘The English working class was present at its own birth’). Catnets were a more formal and abstract way of talking about whether the members of groups objectively had connections with each other, and whether they understood these connections to give them sufficient commonality upon which they could base collective action. For White, who developed a distinct perspective on social networks throughout his career, the cultural content and aspects of networks are always central: social ties are narrated, either explicitly or not – ethnomethodologists, too, understand social ties to be based on collective, shared stories that underwrite social relationships – and typical ‘story sets’ compose distinct ‘types of [social] tie’.

In spite of this culturally laden groundwork, the study of social networks and the study of social movements have not always been as resolutely concerned with types of tie, stories, and identities as the earlier work might have suggested. Even Tilly took nearly 20 years to fully appreciate the cultural valences of his own arguments (see Krinsky & Mische, 2013). Instead, social movement scholars have often treated the analysis of social networks in ways that emphasize certain types of tie, and the strength of those ties, over the questions of how these types of tie form. This is not necessarily a shortcoming, but it is shorthand geared toward the analysis of specific issues that have concerned scholars of social movements for decades. These issues include questions about diffusion of social movement performances or actions, identities, and organizational forms; the centrality of certain actors and organizations in movements as ‘brokers’ of information, ideas, or resources; the centrality of actors and organizations as leaders or focal points of power and prestige; the role of social networks in recruiting movement participants; the structure of movement organizations and coalitions; and, finally – again, with significant concern for the cultural aspects of networks – shifts in repertoires of contention and in meaning structures. We will turn, in a moment, to brief descriptions of each of these areas of research.

Diffusion and Brokerage

Networks provide the channels whereby movement frames, repertoires, and sometimes even triggers are diffused beyond instigators to a wider population of potential participants (Andrews & Biggs, 2006; Hedström, 1994; Hedström, Sandel, & Stern, 2000; Ohlemacher, 1996; Oliver & Myers, 2003). In some cases, this will involve the ‘broadcast networks’ of both the mass and more specialized, activist media. In others, it will involve networks of geographically dispersed SMOs. Many accounts, however, suggest that face-to-face networks are important in the decisions that activists make regarding the appropriation and use of information and innovations that reach them by means of mass broadcasts.

Research on the US Civil Rights movement revealed the importance of social networks for diffusing sit-ins and other types of actions from one city to another. Rather than spreading spontaneously, ‘like a fever’, the sit-ins of 1960 spread through networks of activists affiliated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and particularly through its youth division (see Polletta, 1998). Aldon Morris’s (1984) research revealed that instead of being simply a more hidebound organization that abjured direct action, the NAACP – while not officially involving itself in direct action – was a key ‘mobilizing structure’ that underlay the resurgence of militant challenges to Jim Crow at a crucial juncture in the Civil Rights movement. Moreover, he discusses the connections among civil rights movements in the South – and the North – and the ways in which these relationships were mediated by competition over resources (one type of tie) and by the necessity of cooperation against the counteroffensives of the white supremacist power structures of the Jim Crow South (another type of tie). Accordingly – and put more formally than Morris does in his work – the diffusion of protest activities through the Southern Civil Rights movement networks was conditioned both by preexisting networks of activists and by the organizational activities of resource-mobilization by which formal organizations acted as brokers, bringing resources from funders – often, though not exclusively – in the North to the struggle.

Similarly, some of the language of framing also uses network-like metaphors and is concerned crucially with diffusion. The practice of ‘frame bridging’, for example, involves a kind of brokerage that enables ideologically congruent frames to join together even among otherwise unconnected actors; it is a key process in coalition-building, but involves diffusion of ideological content through the establishment of new ties among actors. Even more crucially, the diffusion of ‘master frames’ such as the demand for group rights in the 1960s and 1970s, has been traced in a number instances to show how frames travel through networks of interrelated activists, and from one arena to another. Without this diffusion, we cannot see ‘cycles of protest’, and without such cycles, we are unlikely to see the formation of ‘repertoires of contention’, in which certain kinds of contentious performances become modular and generalized means of social and political activism.

Furthermore, brokerage appears as a key explanatory mechanism in a good deal of studies of social movements, both because of brokers’ importance in diffusion dynamics and because of the roles that brokers play in intra-movement communication and the power they accrue in doing so. Again, though not cast in network terms, Robnett’s (1997) study of ‘bridge leaders’ in the Civil Rights moveme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Social Movements and Social Networks: Introduction
• 2. Do Social Networks Really Matter in Contentious Politics?
• 3. Infectious Innovations? The Diffusion of Tactical Innovation in Social Movement Networks, the Case of Suffragette Militancy
• 4. Change in Covert Social Movement Networks: The ‘Inner Circle’ of the Provisional Irish Republican Army
• 5. Networks of Contention: The Shape of Online Transnationalism in Early Twenty-First Century Social Movement Coalitions
• 6. Anatomy of Protest in the Digital Era: A Network Analysis of Twitter and Occupy Wall Street
• 7. Who are the active and central actors in the ‘rising civil society’ in Mexico?
• 8. Beyond the Activist Ghetto: A Deductive Blockmodelling Approach to Understanding the Relationship between Contact with Environmental Organisations and Public Attitudes and Behaviour
• Index