Movements for Political And Social Change

MOVEMENTS FOR POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE

POLITICAL MOVEMENTS are an expression of the struggle for the political space and benefits. These are an expression of the contentions in a polity. The political movements are by non-state groups who are led by their elite. The elite of the group lead the movement. In fact the process of the construction of identities and reinforcing them is also a part of political movements.
A political movement may be organized around a single issue or set of issues, or around a set of shared concerns of a social group. In contrast with a political party, a political movement is not organized to elect members of the movement to government office; instead, a political movement aims to convince citizens and/or government officers to take action on the issues and concerns which are the focus of the movement for a “CHANGE”.
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS are a type of group action. They are large informal groupings of individuals and/or organizations focused on specific political or social issues, in other words, on carrying out, resisting or undoing a social change. Change is such an evident feature of social reality that any social-scientific theory, whatever its conceptual starting point, must sooner or later address it. At the same time it is essential to note that the ways social change has been identified have varied greatly in the history of thought. Furthermore, conceptions of change appear to have mirrored the historical realities of different epochs in large degree.
Social movements are central to modernity. They are central both because modernity connotes movement and because modernity involves new political alliances and allegiances in which mass movements play a significant role. But social movements are more than the spontaneous gathering of masses of individuals. They are a distinct form of collective behavior. They are purposive and relatively structured forms of collective behavior. Crowds, even traffic jams, are made up of masses of individuals, but they are not modern movements. Unlike crowds, social movements are composed of groups of individuals gathered with the common purpose of expressing subjectively felt discontent in a public way and changing the perceived social and political bases of that discontent.
What makes social movements modern is not their collective but their distinctly political character.




• Charles Tilly defines social movements as a series of contentious performances, displays and campaigns by which ordinary people made collective claims on others [Tilly, 2004]. For Tilly, social movements are a major vehicle for ordinary people's participation in public politics [Tilly, 2004:3]. [Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004, Boulder, CO, Paradigm Publishers, 2004 262 pp. ISBN 1-59451-042-3 (hardback) / ISBN 1-59451-043-1 ]

• Sidney Tarrow defines [Tarrow, 1994] a social movement as collective challenges [to elites, authorities, other groups or cultural codes] by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interactions with elites, opponents and authorities. [Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Collective Action, Social Movements and Politics, Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-521-42271-x] He specifically distinguishes social movements from political parties and interest groups.
The "social movement" was invented in England and North America during the first decades of the nineteenth century and has since then spread across the globe. Modern Western social movements became possible through education (the wider dissemination of literature), and increased mobility of labour due to the industrialisation and urbanisation of 19th century societies.
The expansion of education and the closer links between the production of knowledge and the practical interests of the state and private economic sectors in increased productivity and profits have provided much fuel for contemporary conflict and the emergence of new social movements. Many participants in the new social movements are the products of this transformation, at once the beneficiaries of higher education and detractors of its shifting aims.
It is sometimes argued that the freedom of expression, education and relative economic independence prevalent in the modern Western culture is responsible for the unprecedented number and scope of various contemporary social movements. Threfore our focus in these papers would be on how “MODERNITY” plays a central role in the “Movements for Political and Social Changes” in societies.





MODERNITY AND MOVEMENTS
The idea of legitimacy is central to the modern understanding of politics. Political action requires minimally "that an actor or actors make some explicit claim that the means of action can be recognized as legitimate and the ends of action become binding for the wider community" (Offe 1985, 826–27, C. 1985. New social movements: Changing the boundaries of institutional politics. Social Research 52:817–68.). Thus it is possible to make a distinction between Sociocultural and socio-political movements. Sociocultural movements, for example, religious sects or countercultures, make use of legitimate and accepted forms of collective action—public demonstrations, recruitment, bloc voting, and so on—in their attempts to increase their numbers and secure the right to practice their beliefs. Yet they usually do not intend by these actions to make these beliefs or practices binding on the entire political community. When they do, as in the case of many contemporary Islamic movements, they are no longer sects or sociocultural movements but full-fledged socio-political movements.
So far we have distinguished socio-political movements from sociocultural movements and other, more spontaneous, forms of collective behavior. To differentiate socio-political movements from ad hoc protest groups, we further require that socio-political movements have a more or less generally accepted set of shared beliefs. Such a set of beliefs provides for a common understanding and definition of a conflict situation and allows continuity from one specific situation to the next. Socio-political movements must also possess some form of organization and means of communication to give them stability and continuity.
Socio-political movements, then, are more than masses of people gathered in protest; they require forms of organization and communication that allow continuity over time and space. The forms these movements take differ in modern societies depending on the specific political culture, but the existence of such organizations and networks of communication is a characteristic of modernity and modern politics. Although they are more structured than crowds and mass mobilizations, socio-political movements are less structured than political parties. They expand and contract, continually taking in and losing participants. They are more flexible in organization and tolerant in beliefs than political parties because their purpose is less a practical and instrumental one than an expressive one. However, the line between parties and movements cannot be drawn too firmly.
Socio-political movements may produce their own political parties or work with and within other parties as tactics for achieving some of their ends. Not all who participate in the movement need join or even accept the idea of a more formal political party as part of the movement itself. For many participants, in most cases for even the majority, the movement may be only a vaguely defined or experienced set of beliefs and emotions


through which one may discover and express dissatisfaction without necessarily feeling loyalty to any organization or political program. To maintain a sense of continuity, socio-political movements require both the fluidity of ideas and emotions, as expressed in public demonstrations, pamphlets, and newsletters, and the stability provided by more formal organization and leadership. The leadership stands for and speaks for the movements at times when no mass public is visible, something that seems necessary and yet that creates problems of its own.
It is common today to distinguish "old" social movements from "new" ones (Melucci 1980, . The new social movements: A theoretical approach. Part 2. Social Science Information 19:199–226. / 1981. Ten hypotheses for the analysis of new movements. In Contemporary Italian Sociology, ed. D. Pinto, 173–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) Such a distinction rests on two sets of criteria. The first, associated with Alain Touraine, builds on the theory of the historical transition from an old industrial society to a new postindustrial society (Touraine 1981. The voice and the eye: An analysis of social movements . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). From this point of view the labor movement is an old social movement because it expresses the conflicts of industrial society and industrialization, that is, the conflicts between labor and capital. New social movements, such as the women's movement, express conflicts representative of the new postindustrial society.
A second set of criteria differentiating between new and old social movements stems from the issues they raise and the locus of the changes they wish to bring about. In this case the labor movement not only reflects the old struggle between labor and capital but also is rooted in and concerned with the labor process itself in its demands for change and its vision of the future. New social movements, however, express concerns that according to established ways of thinking are outside the labor process. These concerns are primarily noneconomic issues, such as gender relations and the meaning of war and peace. The new social movements express concerns that are more cultural than economic. They aim at changing norms and values rather than productive and distributive relations.
These distinctions between old and new social movements provide a convenient way of categorizing various contemporary political conflicts and social movements. For one thing, classes and related class interests, which provided the prime source of collective identity and motivation for collective action in the past (at least in Europe), seem less a factor today, at least for explaining social movements. Contemporary social movements seem motivated by concerns other than those directly associated with income and economic security. In addition, rather than focusing on the labor process the realm of concern has shifted to what has been called the "life-world," which involves issues of personal identity, personal life, neighborhood, sexuality, and life-style.






Finally, the types of demands put forward by the new social movements lie, to some extent, outside the realm of traditional compromise politics, whether that be labor-market politics or representative democracy as it currently exists. Unlike working-class movements, which can offer and withdraw their labor power in exchange for concessions from capital, the new social movements have little to offer in exchange. Their demands tend to be made in nonnegotiable terms and are usually expressed negatively: antiwar, antinuclear, and so on. Whether this approach represents tactics or is an early stage of movement development remains to be seen. The literature on social movements includes a long-standing discussion concerning the strategies and tactics of social movements (Jenkins 1981 Socio-political movements. In Handbook of political behavior, 4:81–153. New York and London: Plenum Press.). In any case the distinction between old and new social movements seems worthwhile to make from an analytical point of view. From the actor's point of view its validity seems beyond question.

POST MODERNISM AND MOVEMENTS
Thus far we have discussed the sociological understanding of modernity and Movements. In this section our task is to take up the question of how modernity itself has affected the development of modern movements. In the preceding section we drew an analytical distinction between old and new social movements. Our task here is to connect this discussion with the changes in economic and social structure that may be referred to as "POSTMODERN." we argue that what we call "new" movements are the expression of post modernity.
Three societal dynamics underlie the development of post modernity: The Expansion of the State, the Explosion Of The Knowledge Industry, And The Development Of The New Mass Media. These three dynamics of social change have both influenced socio-political movements and been influenced by them. The old movements were at once the product of modernity and an essential element in its dynamism. The working class movement, for example, was the product of industrialization and urbanization, but modern democracy was a force in its development in specific directions. Similarly, new movements are both the product of modernity and a reaction to it.
It is important, however, to distinguish the postmodern critique of modernity from the premodern critique. The premodern critique of modernity focused on modernization as such and based itself on an idyllic past, usually with right-wing political overtones. In contrast, the postmodern critique of modernity, although sharing some of the features of Romanticism—which are especially evident in the environment movement—represents a "progressive" transcendence of modernity rather than its outright rejection.


At this point we would like to discuss three of the changes underlying the postmodern condition. First, since the end of World War II Western societies have undergone an exceptional transformation in economic and social structure. To a great extent the root of this transformation lies in the expansion and intervention of the state into areas that previously were the domain of civil society, including private economic activity regulated by a market and social activity, such as child-care, regulated by tradition. This shifting ground between state and civil society, between public and private areas of action and responsibility, is part of the field of ambiguity and potential conflict from which new socio-political movements emerge. State expansion and intervention have politicized private domains and provoked a reaction from both the political left and the political right.
Second, in the postwar period Western societies have also experienced a shift toward knowledge-based, capital-intensive production, which requires more highly educated workers. The state-supported transformation of the employment structure has been underpinned by a revolution in education in which the links between education and production have become more pronounced and rationalized through various forms of manpower planning. What we call the new movements are to a great extent peopled by the highly educated and the content of their critique of modern society builds on both their educational experience and their occupational expectations.
A related development important to the understanding of the new movements is the expanded employment opportunities for women—especially married women—made possible by the knowledge industry and the general expansion of the public sector. The expansion of service, administrative, and care-giving occupations, which coincided with the growth of the state and its intervention into what previously were private services, has opened up many new paid employment opportunities for women. New opportunities for work and education helped establish the condition in which the social values and norms that defined a proper "woman's place" could be challenged. Here the interplay between the beliefs of a socio-political movement (the women's movement) and a shifting economic and social structure of opportunity becomes clear. Structural possibilities and social conflicts grew together, opening fields of contention from which socio-political movements would emerge.






Third, the changes in representative democracy that occurred as part of modernity have laid the grounds for post modernity. During the course of their development the old movements became participatory movements. Whatever their original intentions or ideologies, they came more and more to be concerned with getting a piece of the modern pie and participating in modern politics as equal partners with capital and other powerful political and economic actors. These movements—and here we think primarily of the labor movements of Western Europe—developed into organizations that became part of the institutionalized power and decision-making structures of modern society. Such movements developed into centralized organizations and associated with political parties, slowly gaining power and influence but losing the dynamism and the mass engagement with which they began. Perhaps this development was both necessary and successful, for no one can deny the actual power labor movements enjoy today in Western Europe. Except for ceremonial occasions, however, hardly anyone would deny that the "movement" aspect has disappeared. Political power and participation were bought at the price of accepting a certain definition of modern politics, that of administration and redistribution through the centralized state, and of the loss of a social movement. In the dialectic between movement and organization, the movement got lost. This development is also important in understanding new social movements and their rejection of modernity. For the new movements modernity is associated with a particular type of politics. The new movements are expressions of the rejection of the politics of administration and its representatives in both labor and capital. In this sense they are postmodern because they reject the identities of class and the ideology of political modernism.
With discussion of the social, political and economic background to post modernity we now turn to the effects of modernity on the new socio-political movements. We discuss three dynamics in this connection: STATE INTERVENTION, THE KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY, AND THE MASS MEDIA.

STATE INTERVENTION
We have mentioned some of the ways that state intervention in social and economic spheres has influenced the development of social movements in recent times. State expansion and intervention into labor market planning, education, family life, and child-rearing, both passively through taxation and other forms of economic redistribution and actively through the reorganization of services traditionally performed privately, have had the effect of politicizing new spheres of social life. This politicization has generated reactions on both the political left and the political right and has provided issues for activists in new social movements. Although the creation of the nation-state and the resulting political identity was central to what classical social theory meant by modernity, post modernity is at once more universalistic (concerned with humanity and nature, women's liberation, and world peace) and more parochial (concerned with local control and self-reliance). And in contrast with modernist political movements, which had a class character and drew political identity from material concerns, such as labor and capital, postmodernist movements are more idealistic and diffuse in their participants and interests.
In addition to its expanded role as employer and redistributors of funds, the state has become the arena as well as the focus of political action. All these factors have influenced the development of sociopolitical movements in the recent past, and go a long way in explaining their emergence, the types of issues raised, and the particular activists who populate them. But there is another side to state intervention: the state as activist and political agent. We can perhaps best show what we mean with examples from our own research concerning the development of European environmentalist movements.
• Case Study: The Swedish state has played a very active role in defining environmental issues and deciding environmental policy since the early 1970s. Sweden was one of the first countries to create a governmental agency concerned with environmental protection, and this early activism on the part of the state, an activism in favor of environmental protection, has played a significant role in the way the Swedish environmentalist movement has developed. For one thing, this positive attitude toward regulation and control took many issues and potential mobilizing forces away from the environmentalist movement. For another, state intervention has had the effect of turning environmental protection into series of legal and technical issues. As a result the environmentalist movement has been forced to accept the state's definition of the situation and to shape its reaction along lines and according to rules it has had no part in framing. Thus the movement developed more as a movement of experts who could participate in environmental debates by virtue of being conversant in the legal and technical language of the field and who were recruited as a counterweight to government and industry experts. The movement became more and more professionalized, which shaped the type of issues taken up, the type of activist attracted to the movement, and the type of organization used. Professionalization created a potential rift between a knowledgeable leadership and a less knowledgeable, and thus less powerful, rank and file. Furthermore, the government has been able to recruit many of the movement-produced experts into its own administration of the environment.

THE KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY
The expansion of education and the closer links between the production of knowledge and the practical interests of the state and private economic sectors in increased productivity and profits have provided much fuel for contemporary conflict and the emergence of new social movements. Many participants in the new sociopolitical movements are the products of this transformation, at once the beneficiaries of higher education and detractors of its shifting aims. The argument that higher education is manipulated by technocratic interests, which grew out of the student movements of the 1960s, has been extended into new areas by recent sociopolitical movements. Activists in the environmentalist movement use this critique of the relationship between education, science, and state-corporate interests (and the view of nature that underlies it) as a platform from which to criticize Western society in general. Many activists in the peace movement share this general criticism. They describe science, Knowledge, and technology as arms of common state and corporate interests and identify the military-industrial complex as central to the modern mode of production. Thus, the knowledge industry and the links between education, knowledge, and corporate and state interests provide a common focus for new sociopolitical movements and in this way have influenced their development. At the same time, because many activists in these movements are highly educated professionals employed in the very institutions they criticize, the movements have influenced the production of knowledge.
To take another example from my ongoing research, the environmentalist movement in Europe has developed in particular ways in part because of the interaction between professional scientists—both as activists and as the representatives of government or private interests—and the movement itself. The environmentalist movement has helped shape the course and content of knowledge production in part because of this interaction. Many scientists, and not just ecologists and biologists, have been influenced in the type of research they do and the broader theoretical frameworks they apply by their own or their colleagues' participation or interest in environmentalist organizations. New scientific frameworks have been developed or greatly modified in conjunction with the rise of environmentalism—the science of ecology is but one obvious example— and research programs have been instituted and funded for the same reasons.
The same may be said about the more applied areas of technological development. The concept and development of "alternative technology" arose within the environmentalist critique of modern production and consumption practices. Both the development of new scientific frameworks and the formulation of alternative technologies have focused on the modernist orientations of the knowledge industry. This modernism is identified in the productivity orientations that are thought to underpin contemporary knowledge production, which view nature as an object of human intervention and redirection. Because of the universalistic, rational-scientific orientation of much of modern environmentalism, which stems from the background of its activists and the political-cultural context in which it has developed, the environmentalist movement in Europe has contributed to the postmodern critique of modernity. This has the somewhat paradoxical effect of opening rational alternatives to modernity to modern rationality. Some of these alternatives (not all of course) contain the seeds of a new form of knowledge production, based on a new cosmological orientation and a new view of the relationship between humanity and nature (Cramer, Eyerman, and Jamison 1987The knowledge interests of the environmental movement and the potential for influencing the development of science. In Sociology of the sciences yearbook, 1987 , ed. S. Blume, J. Bunders, L. Leydesdorff, and R. Whitley, 89–115. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel).






Mass Media
Like the state and the knowledge industry, the new mass media have helped "create" the new sociopolitical movements. Coverage in the mass media and the instant attention gained through modern communications technologies have helped build these movements into significant social and political forces and have influenced their internal strategies, organization, and leadership. As Todd Gitlin has documented in his brilliant account of the influence of the mass media on the development of the student movement in the United States, the media in many senses became the movement (Gitlin 1980 The whole world is watching: Mass media in the making and the unmaking of the new left . Berkeley: University of California Press.). New sociopolitical movements are shaped by the mass media in several ways. Activists are conscious of media attention. They are also aware of their own importance in making and shaping "events" and in catching the public eye. To be noticed by the media is to gain legitimacy and significance and the ability to influence policy as well as the public at large. Modern movements must learn to use the media; otherwise the media will use and abuse them.
Modern politics is played out before the public. The mass media are the producers as well as important interpreters of this drama. The mass media, either because of their form or because of the values they embody, are attracted to the spectacular and the flamboyant. This has the effect of making the media event and the colorful movement leader a significant factor in the development of modern sociopolitical movements. Would such an organization as Greenpeace, one of the fastest-growing organizations in the environmentalist movement, be possible without the mass media and modern techniques of communication and administration? We certainly think, NO.
Other movement organizations are also influenced by the modern media. Gitlin demonstrates that the American student organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a rather small group of well-brought-up students, was given celebrity status through media attention, which transformed not only the organization and its leadership, giving precedence to the colorful and the violent, but also its aims and its ideology, giving precedence to "radical" ideas and positions even though such views had previously only had marginal status within the movement. Philip Lowe and David Morrison show how the media and media attention have significantly affected the tactics and the aims of British environmentalist organizations (Lowe and Morrison 1984 Bad news or good news: Environmental politics and the media. The Sociological Review 32:75–90.). Unlike the SDS, environmentalist groups have for the most part received favorable coverage in the media, especially as long as environmental issues remain free from partisan politics. This explains why environmental activists have been at pains to steer free of political parties. Lowe and Morrison go so far as to suggest that modern environmentalism, as opposed to the earlier conservation movement, would never have achieved its influence without its creative use of the media.

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• Case Study: A recent prominent example is of “The Lawyer’s Movement in Pakistan” for the restoration of Judges and freedom of Judiciary. The movement began on March 9, 2007, when the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Chaudhry, responded negatively to the request from five generals -- including Musharraf -- that he voluntarily resign. Offered several other lucrative posts, he responded with a firm ``No'', resulting his immediate arrest and termination from the Supreme Court. The Lawyers movement rose to confront the dictatorship of President Pervez Musharraf. Its aim is to create an atmosphere where the judiciary can work independently, without being under the influence of any regime, whether military or civil.

During the first month there was a fierce debate among the lawyers' elected bodies over these questions. After coming to the conclusion that they could not win the struggle on their own, they invited all the civil society organizations and Mass Media to participate The media popularized the movement to such an extent that the Musharraf dictatorship responded by introducing new laws to curb the growing radicalization of the media. The movement never stopped and Media took the brunt of the Draconian Law. Media faced real hardship in covering and disseminating news because of the curbs enforced by the military regime. Although the movement is just a year old, it has achieved impressive results, courtesy “Mass Media”.


CONCLUSION

We have attempted to show how the development of modernity has created the grounds for the emergence of modern sociopolitical movements and how, in turn, these movements have been influenced by modernity. We have also tried to show how these movements are a central part of what we mean by modernity and how they have influenced our understanding of modernity.

No modern movement can hope to gain influence without taking into account the centralized state and its form of discourse and organization, and no modern movement can afford to ignore the mass media. And just as taking the state into account entails paying the price of becoming organized and centralized, media attention has its own price. In this way modern sociopolitical movements are shaped by various key aspects of modernity at the same time that they play a significant role in the development of modernity.


BIBLIOGRAPHY



Offe 1985, 826–27, C. 1985. New social movements: Changing the boundaries of institutional politics. Social Research 52:817–68.


Melucci 1980, . The new social movements: A theoretical approach. Part 2. Social Science Information 19:199–226. / 1981. Ten hypotheses for the analysis of new movements. In Contemporary Italian Sociology, ed. D. Pinto, 173–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Touraine 1981. The voice and the eye: An analysis of social movements . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).


Jenkins 1981 Socio-political movements. In Handbook of political behavior, 4:81–153. New York and London: Plenum Press..


Cramer, Eyerman, and Jamison 1987The knowledge interests of the environmental movement and the potential for influencing the development of science. In Sociology of the sciences yearbook, 1987 , ed. S. Blume, J. Bunders, L. Leydesdorff, and R. Whitley, 89–115. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel.


Gitlin 1980 The whole world is watching: Mass media in the making and the unmaking of the new left . Berkeley: University of California Press.


Lowe and Morrison 1984 Bad news or good news: Environmental politics and the media. The Sociological Review 32:75–90.