Sociology 432: Social Movements

Our objective in this course is to do both theory and practice. By theory, we will mean what are the important concepts we need to analyze a wide range of social movements, and, even more importantly, what are the causal relationships among these concepts. Five concepts that will recur throughout the course are:

• success: did the movement achieve its goals?
• tactical militance: what did the movement actually do?
• external groups: who is involved in a movement?
• organization: how well organized and bureaucratized is the movement?
• recruitment: who joins and why?

The important sociology here is how these factors are causally related to each other. For example, how does tactical militance influence success? How does better (i.e., more formal) organization influence the tactics chosen? This focus on causal relationships is not unique to sociology, but it is probably much stronger here than it would be in a history or political science approach to social movements. If you keep the importance of causal relationships in mind throughout the course, you will do better.