WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT Women in Development

Women in Development

Introduction

Women in Development

The decade of the 1960s contested this vision and revivified a field that had been sinking into marginality. As the student, anti-war, women's and environmental movements developed concrete and purposive critiques of elites and authorities, the result for social movement research in both Europe and the USA were the 'normalization' of collective action (Piven and Cloward 1992). There was a growing tendency to see movements as the outcome of the instrumental mobilization of resources and collective action as one element - albeit a turbulent and uncivil one - in the political process (McAdam 2001).

The analytical gains brought by these new models have been enlightening, but have been purchased at the cost of obscuring the unique character of social movement activity. Europeans, in particular, have criticized North American approaches for neglecting the ideological projects of movements and for becoming insensitive to their impact on culture. Americans themselves criticized the lack of attention to emotions in their models (McAdam 2001). The response of some scholars has been to revive social psychological approaches to movements and, of others, to pay greater attention to how movements construct meaning (Klandermans 1992).

An important heritage of the 1960s movements was to underscore the remarkable diffusion of contentious collective action among a variety of social groups and nation-states in broad cycles of protest that appeared to follow a dynamic that was not predictable from either macrosocietal trends or from state policies (Aidi, 2005). Analysts have also observed a growing appearance of hybrid forms of interest social movement-type organizations that combine a capacity for contentious collective action with more traditional lobbying and educational activities.

Wallerstein (2002) called these new forms of movement professional movement organizations, but they often encompass part-time and amateur activists using the widely diffused organizational skills and communication resources available to quite ordinary people in today's societies. The capacity of these groups to overcome their paucity of resources, to use innovative forms of collective action, and to gain access to the media differentiates them from earlier forms of social movement (Klandermans 1992). The Internet and other forms of personal communication reinforce this trend away from professionalisation and towards decentralized movement mobilization.

Two pairs of contradictory trends mark social movements today. On the one hand, there has been so powerful a diffusion of movement activity that the world may be entering a stage in which collective action has become an accepted part of routine politics; on the other hand, there has been a spread of violent, intolerant and mutually exclusive movements like Islamic fundamentalism, ethnic violence in Eastern Europe and anti-immigrant and racist movements in the West. Second, as grassroots forms of participation compete with ever more declining electoral turn-out; transnational movements rise above the national state, targeting international institutions, foreign states and inchoate objects like 'globalization'. While the last phase of social movement research took its cues from the largely civil, national and purposive movements of the 1960s, the next phase will have ...