New Social Movements

“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