New Social Movement

By: Mary Anne Winslow
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:25:20
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The world society is very diverse and different in all aspects all around the globe. The difference in cultures, traditions, sociological establishment, religion and believes leads to diverse attitude to social phenomenon. However people all over the world still share some of the values and believes that are the same and find positive reaction in any country. Thus a lot of various movements have been started all around the globe that unite people who share the same idea. In the following article I want to pay a thorough attention to the new social movement.

There appears to be a high level of consensus among European students of social movements about trends in the recent past. Two parallel and opposed developments have occurred. On one hand, labor movements, concerned to improve workers' material conditions, have declined in significance. On the other hand, new social movements concerned with such oppressions as those around gender, sexuality and race and with such pathologies of modernity as militarism and environmental degradation, have become more important.

This consensus, which began to emerge in the early 1980s, was not accidental. That period witnessed the rapid growth of peace movements, and the increasing prominence of the Green movement in West Germany and elsewhere. Around the same time most of the advanced economies of Europe, North America, and Japan experienced significant declines in levels of strike action.

Reflecting on these dual and opposing trends, social movement theorists sought explanations to encompass both developments. Why were New Social Movements becoming more important while labor movements were declining? Out of their reflections, in an intellectual context marked by a discrediting of traditional Marxism, there appeared a paradigmatic account, which this article critically reviews.

At the risk of over-simplification, there has, we think, emerged a prevalent pattern of explanation. The twin trends in social movements are explained in terms of a broader general pattern of structural change within advanced industrial societies. Following a track in social theory already partly beaten by Bell, Touraine and others, the causal chain can be described variously. There has been a "profound transformation of society's conflict structure in the course of the macro historical process of modernization"; or "to explain the ascendancy of new politics and the distinctive features of the new social movements, it is necessary to locate them in a postmodern shift in economic and social organization and culture". In summary terms, a process of systemic change has occurred - variously termed the emergence of "post-industrial society," "programmed society," "post-Fordism," "high modernity" or "post-modernity" - involving a shift in social composition which has in turn been reflected in the fate of social movements. The working class has been subject to shrinkage, attenuation and incorporation, with weakening effects on labor movements. Simultaneously, the service class or new middle class has grown, and with it have expanded new movements either based on that class or on no class at all. The systemic shift is associated with a change in contested issues. Where previously "material" questions were central in social conflict, now ''post-material," "symbolic" or "identity" issues are taking centre stage. The waning of old movements and the waxing of new movements is part and parcel of a societal, structural change. Thus the modernization of economy and polity is producing, or develops in tandem with, a set of cultural changes which find expression in new patterns of social movements.

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