An organisational enquiry into social movement

Abstract

Social movements, as a genre of phenomena, could potentially find an important place within the broad concerns of public systems. The present research, which probes into the principal problematique concerning social movements, is a work towards this end. The concept of social movement has broadened over time, to include a whole range of phenomena. The working definition adopted for the present study visualizes a social movement as a conscious, collective, sustained attempt to bring about for resist change in a social order through non-institutionalized means. The literature on social movements is as vast and varied as the range of the phenomena. The study scans through this corpus to focus on the most contemporary debate from where it derives its research questions. The central issue in this is whether a social movement is an entirely amorphous, anomic phenomenon (The Traditional, or, The Collective Behavior School), or, whether all or some part of it may be deemed as a complex organization (Resource Mobilization School). The research design which follows from the research questions and the methodological concern, involves the empirical study of an actual social movement, using the embedded case research method. The two units of analysis being the social order and the social movement within. A social movement among the predominantly Bhill wage-laborers and peasants in the Dhulia district of Maharashtra, known widely as the Shahda Movement, was chosen for the empirical study, Waged against economic exploitation, extra-economic coercion, and other atrocities this had attracted considerable media and social attention in the earl seventies. The case is analysed mainly to question the generalizability of the positions of the above two contending schools about the basic character of a social movement. This is followed by an attempt to offer a new set of hypotheses, Central to these hypotheses is the concept of SOCIAL MOVEMENT KERNEL, visualized as the main driving force of a social movement, which satisfies the properties of a formal organization. It is contended that such a view of social movement theory, while facilitating the prospect of further theorization at the same time.