Four Stages of Social Movements
Explore different stages of social movement such as emergence, coalescence, bureaucratization, and decline. Updated: 08/22/2021 Have you ever been asked to tweet, friend, like, or donate online for a cause? Perhaps you have 'liked' a local nonprofit on Facebook, prompted by one of your friends liking it, too.
Key Takeaways The four stages of the life course are childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. What happens during childhood may have lifelong consequences. Social location in society—social class, race and ethnicity, and gender—affects how well people fare during the stages of the life course.
Social location in society—social class, race and ethnicity, and gender—affects how well people fare during the stages of the life course. Adams, E. J. (2010).
Recruitment by people in the social networks of social movement sympathizers plays a key role in transforming them into social movement activists. Four major stages in the life cycle of a social movement include emergence, coalescence, institutionalization or bureaucratization, and decline.
Social movements have a life cycle: They are created (stage 1: emergence), they grow (stage 2: coalescence), they achieve successes or failures (stage 3: bureaucratization), and eventually, they dissolve and cease to exist (stage 4: decline).
Explanation: The four stages of social movement development in order are: preliminary stage, coalescence stage, institutionalization stage, decline stage.
in the third stage of a social movement Bureaucratization, you have a foundation and you are all organized and you have a lot more political power.
The first stage of the social movement life cycle is known as the emergence, or, as described by Blumer, the “social ferment” stage (Within this stage, social movements are very preliminary and there is little to no organization.
The major types of social movements are reform movements, revolutionary movements, reactionary movements, self-help movements, and religious movements.
Social movements emerge when political opportunities open up for social actors who usually lack them (Tarrow 1994). Social movements prove effective when they build or illuminate solidarities that have shared meaning within particular groups, situations and political cultures and make them feel connected.
Sociologists have studied the lifecycle of social movements—how they emerge, grow, and in some cases, die out. Blumer (1969) and Tilly (1978) outlined a four-stage process through which social movements develop. In the preliminary stage, people become aware of an issue, and leaders emerge.
Social Movement. :a large group of people who are organized to promote or resist some social change.
A social movement is a mass movement and a collective attempt of people to bring about a change, or to resist any change. The concept central to any social movement is that people intervene in the process of social change, rather than remaining mere spectators or passive participants in the ebb and flow of life.
The second stage of the social movement life cycle is known as coalescence. Stage two is characterized by a more clearly defined sense of discontent. It is no longer just a general sense of unease, but now a sense of what the unease is about and who or what is responsible.
Some characteristics of social movements are that they are involved in conflicts with clearly identified opponents, and they share a collective identity.
An example of this stage would be the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1950s. There was, of course, a general and long standing sense of discontent among the African-American population in the South.
Often, social unrest or discontent passes without any organizing or widespread mobilization. For example, people in a community may complain to each other about a general injustice, but they do not come together to act on those complaints, and the social movement does not progress to the second stage.
Stage 1 is emergence.
To reiterate a definition already presented, a social movement may be defined as an organized effort by a large number of people to bring about or impede social, political, economic, or cultural change.
Resource mobilization theory is a general name given to several related views of social movements that arose in the 1970s (McCarthy & Zald, 1977; Oberschall, 1973; Tilly, 1978). This theory assumes that social movement activity is a rational response to unsatisfactory conditions in society. Because these conditions always exist, so does discontent with them. Despite such constant discontent, people protest only rarely. If this is so, these conditions and associated discontent cannot easily explain why people turn to social movements. What is crucial instead are efforts by social movement leaders to mobilize the resources—most notably, time, money, and energy—of the population and to direct them into effective political action.
In this regard, recall that one of the essential conditions for collective behavior in Smelser’s value-added theory is structural strain, or social problems that cause people to be angry and frustrated. Without such structural strain , people would not have any reason to protest, and social movements would not arise.
When activists organized a rally or march, they would typically publicize it by posting flyers (which were mass produced at some expense by using a mimeograph machine or photocopier) on trees, telephone poles, and campus billboards, and they would stand on campuses and city streets handing out flyers.
These include the abolitionist movement preceding the Civil War, the women’s suffrage movement that followed the Civil War, the labor movement, the Southern civil rights movement, the Vietnam era’s antiwar movement, the contemporary women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and the environmental movement.
Special-interest groups normally work within the system via conventional political activities such as lobbying and election campaigning. In contrast, social movements often work outside the system by engaging in various kinds of protest, including demonstrations, picket lines, sit-ins, and sometimes outright violence.
However, socialization continues throughout the several stages of the life course, most commonly categorized as childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age . Within each of these categories, scholars further recognize subcategories, such as early adolescence and late adolescence, early adulthood and middle adulthood, and so forth.
The four stages of the life course are childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Socialization continues throughout all these stages. What happens during childhood may have lifelong consequences. Traumatic experiences and other negative events during childhood may impair psychological well-being in adolescence and beyond ...
Childhood. Despite increasing recognition of the entire life course, childhood (including infancy) certainly remains the most important stage of most people’s lives for socialization and for the cognitive, emotional, and physiological development that is so crucial during the early years of anyone’s life.
Adulthood is usually defined as the 18–64 age span. Obviously, 18-year-olds are very different from 64-year-olds, which is why scholars often distinguish young adults from middle-age adults. In a way, many young adults, including most readers of this book, delay entrance into “full” adulthood by going to college after high school and, for some, then continuing to be a student in graduate or professional school. By the time the latter obtain their advanced degree, many are well into their 30s, and they finally enter the labor force full time perhaps a dozen years after people who graduate high school but do not go on to college. These latter individuals may well marry, have children, or both by the time they are 18 or 19, while those who go to college and especially those who get an advanced degree may wait until their late 20s or early to mid-30s to take these significant steps.
Old Age. This stage of the life course unofficially begins at age 65. Once again, scholars make finer distinctions—such as “young-old” and “old-old”—because of the many differences between people who are 65 or 66 and those who are 85, 86, or even older.
First, as scientists are increasingly recognizing, the teenaged brain is not yet fully mature physiologically. For example, the frontal lobe, the region of the brain that governs reasoning and the ability to consider the consequences of one’s actions, is not yet fully formed, leaving teenagers more impulsive.
Here we will just indicate that old age can be a fulfilling time of life for some people but one filled with anxiety and problems for other people, with social location (social class, race and ethnicity, and gender) once again often making a considerable difference.
To reiterate a definition already presented, a social movement may be defined as an organized effort by a large number of people to bring about or impede social, political, economic, or cultural change.
According to this view, social movements are more likely to arise and succeed when political opportunities for their emergence exist or develop , as when a government that previously was repressive becomes more democratic or when a government weakens because of an economic or foreign crisis (Snow & Soule, 2010).
Resource mobilization theory is a general name given to several related views of social movements that arose in the 1970s (McCarthy & Zald, 1977; Oberschall, 1973; Tilly, 1978). This theory assumes that social movement activity is a rational response to unsatisfactory conditions in society. Because these conditions always exist, so does discontent with them. Despite such constant discontent, people protest only rarely. If this is so, these conditions and associated discontent cannot easily explain why people turn to social movements. What is crucial instead are efforts by social movement leaders to mobilize the resources—most notably, time, money, and energy—of the population and to direct them into effective political action.
The labor movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries established the minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and the right to strike.
New social movement theory, a development of European social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s, attempts to explain the proliferation of postindustrial and postmodern movements that are difficult to analyze using traditional social movement theories.
In this regard, recall that one of the essential conditions for collective behavior in Smelser’s value-added theory is structural strain, or social problems that cause people to be angry and frustrated. Without such structural strain , people would not have any reason to protest, and social movements would not arise.
These include the abolitionist movement preceding the Civil War, the women’s suffrage movement that followed the Civil War, the labor movement, the Southern civil rights movement, the Vietnam era’s antiwar movement, the contemporary women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and the environmental movement.
Coalescence is the second stage in a social movement people are becoming more and more organized and are complaining as a group against someone or something. in this stage people are angrier and they know the cause. Bureaucratization.
Succeeded. To succeed in a social movement is to reach the goal that you were striving for. Failure. To fail in your social movement would be to not reach your goal that you had starting the movement. Co-optation. Co-optation is when the leader of a social movement goes to meet and negotiate with the other sides leader, ...