“How 'New' are New Social Movements”
The Concept of New Social Movements
In this paper we critically examine current empowerment theory
and its relationship to social change, and set forth ideas
for social transformation drawing on new social movement theories
and compare it with the previous forms of social movements.
The historical and current conception of empowerment practice
focuses primarily on individual enlightenment and emancipation
in a way that is not directly relevant to collective action
and social transformation (Fay 1987; Heller, 1990; Breton,
1994)
Out of people working with one another comes a growing awareness
of previously unrecognised needs, accompanied by conflicts
around related rights and responsibilities. Critical to this
work is the acceptance of conflict as a necessary stage leading
to dialogue and new considerations. Useful dialogue must necessarily
relegate people's quantitative needs as secondary to the overriding
objective of development of the social unit as whole.
In considering new ways to meet conflicting needs, perception,
cognition, and action must function reciprocally, on a continuum.
New perceptions lead to new understanding, new understanding
leads to new behaviour; new behaviour leads to new perception.
In this formulation the power to name (perception-cognition)
includes the power to act (behaviour), and vice versa.
In the last two decades, the emergence of new forms of collective
action in advanced industrial societies stimulated a new form
of social movements. From the 1960s onwards, social movements,
protest actions and more generally political organizations
have become a permanent component of democracies.
Two of the most dramatic forms of social change are revolutionary
movements, with their explicit political programs, and millenarian
movements, with their strong religious and symbolic forms
of expression. Social scientists have developed a number of
theories to explain these spellings of fervour and collective
action, but the phenomena themselves remain ambiguous, contradictory,
and apparently impervious to simple causal explanation. Cultural
changes over the past two decades have led to a proliferation
of new social movements in Europe and the United States. New
social movements such as ecology, peace, ethnicity, New Age
philosophies, alternative medicine, and gender and sexual
identity are among those that are emerging to challenge traditional
categories in social movement theory. Synthesizing classic
and modern perspectives the contributors help to redefine
the field of social movements and advance an understanding
of them through cross-cultural research, comparison with older
movements, and an examination of the dimensions of identity—individual,
collective, and melding of the two.
When established identities and social statuses no longer
correspond to possibilities that are opened up by advances
in knowledge and technology, there arise new movements that
blend and meld the analytical distinctions between culture
and movements, perhaps more so today than ever before (Inglehart
1990 cited in Johnston et al 1995) .
The self reflective quality is especially characteristics
of the new social movements, more cautiously that ever before,
take steps to construct their own collective identities.Aldon
Morris (1992) has persuasively argued that a key distinction
between the old and new social movements is that some activity
create collective identity where as the old ones the collective
identity is to some extent imposed by repressive structural
conditions .
The concept of collective identity is the emerging forms of
collective action in highly differentiated systems .The concept
of collective identity have important consequences of clearing
up some misunderstandings on the new social movements. Contemporary
movements, like all other collective phenomena, are not new
or old but bringing together the forms of actions that involves
various levels of the Social structure. They comprise different
orientations that entail a variety of analytical points of
view. Their components belong to different historical periods
we must therefore seek to understand this multiplicity of
elements .The notion of collective identity can help to describe
and explain the multiplicity of chronic and diachronic elements.Most
of contemporary individual and social identities (constructed
with societal, cultural and technological resources) are radically
autonomous, nomadic and virtual – i.e. they are de-traditionalized,
open to negotiation and not based on a single interpretation
of a tradition. Values, political, cultural and social identities
- elective identities of “nomads of the present”,
often emerging out of new social movements or informal networks
- play an important role in determining choices of information
codes, images and identities. Among the principle innovations of the new movements in contrast
to the workers movements are a critical ideology in relation
to modernism and progress, decentralised and participatory
organizational structures, defence of interpersonal solidarity
against great bureaucracies and the reclamation of autonomous
spaces rather than material advantages .New social movements
are characterized, in Offe’s view, by an open fluid
organization, an inclusive and non –ideological participation
and greater attention to social rather than to economic transformations
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