Gamson, The Success of the Unruly

i	Sociology 432: Social Movements

William A Gamson, "The Success of the Unruly"

Chapter 27 in McAdam & Snow.

This is a chapter from a book in which Gamson had the innovative idea of trying to sample protest movements from history much the way an opinion pollster tries to sample voters from a country's population. This extract doesn't review the careful and ingenious ways Gamson went about getting his sample of 53 social movements so you have to accept the fact that these 53 are representative of all social movements in U.S. history -- or at least all social movements that have been written about sufficiently for Gamson to have coded them on his major variables.

The strength of this reading is that has a clear central hypothesis that gets tested systematically.

Concepts and theory

Gamson makes a critical distinction between moral judgments and strategic judgments . One common ploy in social science is to note some conventional wisdom and show, using more rigorous methods, that the conventional wisdom may be wrong. Gamson sets up his analysis precisely this way. What is the common belief about the consequences of violence? How does Gamson explain why people believe this even though he thinks it is wrong? Gamson uses rather precise definitions. He needs precision so that independent coders could read each history of a social movement and code that movement for these concepts:

violence users
violence recipients
constraint users (page 362)
constraint recipients

Gamson has two "measures" of success (described better in another section of his book not reproduced here).

acceptance
new advantages

Methods

What are some specific examples of violence users and violence recipients? of constraint users?

Results

Figure 1 is the basic test of Gamson's hypothesis; Figure 2 refines it to look at a subset of social movements that did not have revolutionary, "displacement" goals. What is the evidence that being unruly is more successful?

What is the evidence about the success of political authorities in using violence against social movements? What is the conventional wisdom?

There are two sets of numbers in each figure: the %s on top of the bars and the n= under the bars. What do each mean?

Conclusions

What's your one-line summary of Gamson's contribution?

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Last updated August 31, 2005

comments to: reeve@umd.edu