Leadership in Social Movements

Contents

What is a social movement?

• Americans have always been organizers of social movements. De Toqueville commented in the 1830s that Americans were joiners who seemed to found voluntary associations to accomplish things as easily as they breathed.
• When people see problems and concerns as public concerns, they seek others that share their concern. To address those concerns, they organize with those other people toward action.
• Social movements form as people begin working in coordination with other people toward an end. As people begin taking note of what unites them with others, they begin to interact with those others. As they talk, their energies begin complementing each other and they begin working together. This is the emergence of a social movement.
• In their initial stages, social movements are non-institutional, that is, there is no formal organization, no "offices," no history or existence beyond those working together. Mature social movements may, in fact, develop formal institutions such as organizations with history and even an income tax exemption number.
• Thus, communication is at the very essence of social movements. They are formed in communication interaction, they continue to exist only as long as those in the movement communicate with each other to energize and direct their activities.
• There are four different types of social movement characterized by their different objectives:
• The Identity Movement. Identity movements provide a place for those who share a particular characteristic -- ethnic origin, sex, race, religion, creed -- to have public voice. Movements provide a context for the discourse that declares discontents to be more than private pain and for isolation of experience to be artificial. Identity movements provide people who had seen themselves as separated and isolated to embrace others and join with them to declare their identity.
• The Integrative Movement. Integrative movements seek to provide groups access to dominant structures of power. They seek to reorient the distribution of societal power to drain more power into the protesting groups.
• Cultural Movements. Cultural movements actively seek to bring about change in the culture through the organizing powers of the movement. They seek to do so through non-institutional means. Their objective is to change the attitudes of the people in the culture and with that change of attitudes their behaviors.
• Political Movements. Like cultural movements, political movements seek change. Unlike cultural movements, political movements seek to gain access to the power of political institutions as the vehicles of their change.
• Because they are so loosely organized, movements may change their objectives and even shift from one type of movement to another. Similarly, movements may splinter in arguments about what kind of a movement they want to be and what sorts of objectives they should be seeking.

Leadership in Social Movements

• The centrality of communication and the need for continual organization in a social movement makes their leaders particulary imporant.
• Leaders speak in Social Movements to:
• develop the sense of joining with others in shared concern
• motivate that concern into an active collective approach to addressing the concerns
• direct the action so it can be focused toward accomplishment of the movement's goals.
• Social movements are said to have "entropy"; that is, they will disintegrate over time if energy is not expended to keep them together and active. Therefore, leadership must be constant in a movement, always again uniting it, motivating it, and directing it.

Patterns of American Social Change

• Political Action in America is basically conservative. Rhetoric focuses action in the face of a concern. But that focus may seek to achieve change by finding the root of the problem in individuals, in institutions, or in the broader cultures and social orders. The efforts toward change follow the scope of the targeting. American politics normally focuses action on individuals so there is no institutional change. Even in times of more dramatic political activity, the focus is on institutions. More dramatic forms of social change, therefore, must rely on non-governmental and non-institutional sources. Social movements are such a strategy.
• American social change has been intensively linked with public voice. The founding discourse of the United States stresses the voice of people. In addition, the United States is a nation of new groups, most notably the immigrants but also nativist groups such as new religions and utopians of various kinds. "Founding" is thus the great American activity. Social movements are such groups founded for particular purposes.
• Thus, major social change in America has tended to be non-institutional. Even when change comes through the political system, it normally starts non-institutionally.

Rhetoric of Non-institutional Change

• The rhetoric of non-institutional change is more moralistic than practical. Where political rhetoric tends to emphasize pragmatism, social movements tend to emphasize idealistic rhetoric. The favorite strategy of American social movements is to ground the ideal in the American Declaration of Independence. This document founds the nation in idealism and commits the national community to the pursuit of ideals. Another favorite of movements is the use of the ideograph of <dream>. Americans dream dreams and then go on to accomplish them. A rhetoric of moral condemnation develops that compares experience with ideal.
• Rhetoric in American social movements tends to follow a standard pattern of rhetorical evolution:
• Stage 1: Develops a language to articulate discontent. This language uses narratives, metaphors, and other rhetorical devices to capture the morality of the discontent. It is a language that identifies people together from their common sense of discontent. Movements will succeed in growing as they are able to articulate the discontent.
• Stage 2: Identifies responsibility for the discontent. That is, the rhetoric develops a target for action. The scope of responsibility is a key to this move: class, society, system, or whatever. It brings a focus to responsibility. The rhetoric is often polemic, exaggerating the differences between the movement and its target. The rhetoric "perfects" this target, or creates the target's responsibility for the discontent.
• Stage 3: Focuses and directs the energy of the movement toward the target. In this mature stage the movement celebrates its successes. It is a rhetoric rich in the experience of being in the movement, the satisfactions, the dreams of success, and the accomplishments of the movement's work. This is the rhetoric that motivates continued action toward the idealistic goal.
• Successful Social Movements have certain characteristics in their rhetoric.
• They have diverse networks that allow diffusion of information. The mass media and other normal diffusion networks in a society usually isolate social movements. Movements must, therefore, develop their own media for diffusing their messages.
• They lodge authority in leaders, identifiable by members of the movement. More successful movements tend to have a single, emergent leader granted authority by members of the movement. Such a leader provides a single voice of coordination. Some movements have a diverse leadership, usually arranged in a hierarchy. Some movements in the past have attempted to distribute leadership so broadly as to be "leaderless." The difficulties with coordination in such circumstances makes such movements vulnerable to failure.
• They successfully convert "a mob" into an organized collectivity. Established institutions typically oppose social movements by charging that they are a "mob." Converting a disorganized cabal of individuals into a collectivity capable of joint action and coordinated response undermines the institution's strategy of opposition. But more importantly, it takes the combined energy of movement members and transforms it into energy available for the purposes of the movement.
• They provide an ongoing rhetoric of affirmation. Social movements are confronted daily with their failures. An effective movement rhetoric must provide strategies to affirm allegiance to the movement in the face of such failure. The rhetoric may celebrate successes, rededicate to the ideal, use the resistance of the institutions, or find nobility in loss, but somehow the energy devoted to the movement must be affirmed.

Tensions which shape American social movements

American social movements must handle a fairly standard set of tensions that threaten to divide the movement and destroy its concentration of energy.

• Political and Cultural Objectives. In the nineteenth century, some women believed that the energies of their movement should focus on achieving the vote and changing women's legal status -- political objectives. Others believed that the energies should focus toward changing the cultural possibilities for women including relationships in marriage, responsibilities in child-rearing, access to education, building their connections beyond the home -- cultural objectives. This split eventually led to a split in the movement. Most American movements face some version of this tension. Should the movement seek to gain access to the political system? Or, should the effort be to change cultural values? A firm choice one way or the other is not a necessity, but trying to do both creates strains that can eventually place the movement at odds with itself. Managing this tension is a normal need for rhetorical strategy in the movement.
• Adaptation or Confrontation as Strategies. The choice between a political route and a cultural route is not simply a matter of objective, but of strategy as well. Sometime in the life of a successful social movement, the political establishment will offer compromise that will ensure achievement of some objectives, but at the price of giving up other objectives. Once the political structure is embraced, energy drains more easily out of the movement. Should the movement reach out to the hated establishment and embrace its power to achieve a limited set of the movement's goals? Or should it continue to confront the movement and risk defeat in suppression?
• Enhancing Energy by Intensity or Extension. Movements have a sort of layered "onion" structure. At the center are dedicated, often obsessive members totally immersed in the ideology of movements. Several layers beyond are boundary members who are held loosely to the movement, perhaps even held occasionally. They drift in and out with their agreements and disagreements, their sense of success or failure. A focus on the purity of ideology will tend to draw ever more of the dedicated center's energy into the work of the movement. But that purity will tend to drive some of the marginal members away. Less confrontational and less ideological rhetoric will attract the energy of new members, but will cause consternation among the zealots. Which brings more energy into the movement's work? Rhetoric must manage this difficult tension.
• Iconistic versus Distributed Leadership. There are advantages to a movement to having a single authority figure who becomes the symbol of the movement. Martin Luther King's relationship to civil rights would be an example. The iconistic leader attracts the energy of admiring followers and can more easily weld them into a disciplined source of energy. But single leaders cannot always provide for leadership in diverse localities. Drawing authority to the single leader diminishes the authority of a more widespread leadership structure. In addition, the iconistic leader can die -- King is an example -- and the movement loose all momentum as no other leader can acquire the same focused power. Distributed leadership prepares movements to diffuse their power throughout the society, but no single source of authority for rhetoric is available. Providing coordination, speaking with one voice, becomes more difficult.

The rhetoric of social movements always must work within the conflicting pressures of these tensions. Some it can manage to do both. Some present true dilemmas and choices must be made. Rhetoric may be able to carve out positions within the pressure. But always, these pressures provide coordinates to understand a movement's efforts to achieve social change.

The Dialectic of Political and Cultural Change

Established cultural and political power can respond to a social movement in three basic ways:

• Ignore it. Movements must generate energy of their own to maintain themselves. The natural tendency of movements is toward disintegration. So one strategy to counter movements is simply to ignore them, thus doing nothing that would encourage resistance to your power or would prove the critique that constitutes the rhetoric of the movement. The strategy will fail if movements become successful in maintain themselves and even expanding their base.
• Co-optation. Established cultural and political power can embrace some of the objectives of a social movement and use its power to implement them. The result will be to draw the boundary layers away from the movement, thus sapping its energy. Too much loss of energy may destroy the movement. A classic example: the progressive wing of the Democratic Party saw the energy gathered by the Farmers movement of the 1890s. To attract that energy, the Party embraced many of the reforms demanded by the movement. Many working in the movement began to work for the same objectives within the Democratic Party. The loss of energy effectively ended the power of the movement. Murray Edelman calls the essence of this strategy "arousal and quiescence." Movements will tend to arouse the public to a level of energy that attracts political structure. Political structure then responds to that energy and absorbs it. This absorption leads to increased satisfaction and the energy falls dormant -- quiescence. Thus, Edelman argues, movements seldom obtain all of their objectives because a savvy political structure saps its energy by granting some demands, thus thwarting a more radical agenda.
• Suppression. Established cultural and political power may respond with the power available to it to crush the movement. Physical violence is always a possibility. Legal means are used at other times. The danger of this strategy is that the moral rhetoric of American movements often denounce the suppression as evidence of the need for action.