Culture Within Sites, Culture as Resources, and Culture as Wider Contexts: A Typology of How Culture Works in Social Movement Theory

Sociologists of social movements agree that culture matters for studying collective action, and have proposed a variety of theoretical concepts to understand culture and mobilization, including framing, free spaces, and collective identity. Despite this, what we mean when we say “culture matters” remains unclear. In this paper, I draw on 30years of social movement theory and research to construct a typology of three ways that culture is seen as shaping social movement activity: (i) culture renders particular sites fruitful for social movements to mobilize out of; (ii) culture serves as a resource that assists in movement action; and (iii) culture provides wider contexts that shape movement activity. This typology represents the analytic building blocks of theories about culture and social movements, and is presented towards the end of clarifying and sharpening our theoretical concepts. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research that draw on, refine, and extend these three building blocks. Beginning in the 1980s, the sociology of social movements experienced a “cultural turn” resulting in greater attention to symbols, meaning, and the expressive elements of social behavior. Resource mobilization and political process theory, the dominant sociological theories of social movements in the 1980s, had largely excised cultural factors from their analysis (Williams 2004), but the rise of identity politics, “new social movements,” and contemporary right-wing movements made ignoring meaning and expression in our theorizing increasingly problematic (Garner 1997). As such, sociologists have spent the past 30years bringing cultural concerns into social movement studies without losing sight of the significant theoretical gains made by resource mobilization and political process theory. Despite the widespread agreement that culture matters and the proliferation of concepts to understand culture and social movements, how culture factors into collective action is not always apparent. In this paper, I clarify some of this uncertainty by presenting a typology of the three primary ways that sociologists have understood culture as contributing to collective action: (i) culture renders particular sites fruitful for social movements to mobilize out of; (ii) culture serves as a resource that assists in movement action; and (iii) culture provides wider contexts that shape movement activity (Figure 1). This typology is not an arrangement of theories. In fact, single theories often present culture as working in multiple ways. Rather, this typology is presented to help sociologists of social movements think through our theorizing by breaking culture into analytic building blocks that can be arranged, refined, and expanded. Through examining these three analytic building blocks, I clarify how sociologists of social movements understand culture, delineate what theorists suggest that culture “does” in relation to collective action, and present possibilities for future research that consider ho wt he three elements of the typology intersect and relate.