Social movements’ organizational bases shift far more than their repertoires

Evidence

Is nothing new? Some students of transnational movements (for example, Bennett 2003, 2004) reply that electronic communication is facilitating the formation of virtual political communities capable of nearly instantaneous international mobilization, and that the countersummits, social forums, antiwar demonstrations, and similar phenomena of recent years constitute dramatic new forms of claim-making. Yet if (as Tartakowsky fears for France) the large but short-lived, single-issue demonstration is gaining ground, it has not driven out or much transformed the other standard social-movement performances at the national scale. So far, the organizational bases of social movements have shifted far more than their repertoires. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1270

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

Related

• Increasingly transnational movements have surprisingly left the basic repertoire unchanged (similarity 0.87)
• Movements run organizing drives and legal attacks in parallel phases (similarity 0.80)
• The demonstration form is spreading to authoritarian regimes while core repertoire stays static (similarity 0.80)
• Demonstrations detached from social movements and diffused into nondemocratic regimes (similarity 0.79)
• Social movements show symbolic but not causal coherence distinct from general contention (similarity 0.79)
• Modern protest movements are transient swarms held together by stimuli, not durable organizations (similarity 0.79)
• Transnational antiglobalization activism extends a two-century-old social-movement form (similarity 0.78)