Alexander Hensby

Resisting the ‘protest business’: bureaucracy, post-bureaucracy and active membership in social movement organizations

Over the past few decades, the legitimacy of membership-based social movement organizations (SMOs) has been called into question (Bosso, 2005; Jordan and Maloney, 1997, 2007; Putnam, 2000). As professionally-run institutions, SMOs have been accused of a preoccupation with maintaining income through membership marketing at the expense of fostering active participation among their members. In a nutshell, SMOs are seen to be self-serving ‘protest businesses’ which contribute little to social movement activism, and civic engagement in general. Our research into student members of a leading SMO takes issue with this assertion. Whilst organizationally SMOs can appear bureaucratic and impersonal in their marketing strategies, it cannot be assumed that this approach is only capable of attracting passive ‘chequebook activists’. Our findings suggest that younger members feel a sense of loyalty and trust towards the SMO as an effective ‘brand leader’ in its field, though this is by no means unrelenting. As reflexive consumers of activism, members have also grown more accustomed to the flexibilities of emerging post-bureaucratic ‘DIY’ activist groups. In sum, SMOs would benefit from a stronger and more consistent ‘feedback loop’ between the organization and its younger and more active members, as this will help provide scope for greater innovation whilst resisting tendencies towards self-serving ‘bureaucratized activism’.

Theorizing Global Studies

Introduction Globalization Liberalization Polarization Americanization McDonaldization Creolization Transnationalization Balkanization Conclusion

Networks of Non-Participation: Comparing ‘Supportive’, ‘Unsupportive’ and ‘Undecided’ Non-Participants in the UK Student Protests against Fees and Cuts:

As a topic in its own right, political non-participation is under-studied in the social sciences. While existing approaches have tended to focus on the gaps between engagement patterns and public policy, or the rational disincentives to an individual’s participation, less attention has been paid to the explanatory power of socio-cultural factors. Taking its lead from studies by Oegema and Klandermans and Norgaard, this article uses recent student protests in the UK as a case study for exploring non-participation. Drawing on survey and interview data, findings indicate that whereas network access and collective identification are commonly seen as helping produce and sustain political participation, networks of collective dis-identification might help to produce and sustain political non-participation.

Open networks and secret Facebook groups: exploring cycle effects on activists’ social media use in the 2010/11 UK student protests

Abstract Much has been written in recent years about the growing impact of social media on social movements. While authors have extolled the virtues of Facebook and Twitter as organisational and informational tools for a range of movements from the Arab Spring to Occupy, evidence remains patchy as to under what conditions social media is most effective at engaging and mobilising the wider public. Drawing on the work of Tarrow, this article considers the impact of cycle effects on the effectiveness of social media as a mobilising and organising tool for the 2010/11 U.K. student protests. Although preceding the broader ‘movement of the squares’ contention cycle, the protests made similar use of social media for generating mass participation. Yet, its mobilising power was dependent on a number of temporal factors, including amplification through mainstream media and the urgency of its initial campaign goal. Moreover, towards the end of the cycle, activists were found to be using social media – via ‘secret’ Facebook groups – in ways that reinforced emerging group hierarchies, arguably contradicting their initial commitment to open-access networks and participatory democracy.

Campaigning for a Movement: Collective identity and Student Solidarity in the 2010/11 UK Protests against Fees and Cuts

Despite its ubiquity as the term, ‘student movements’ are not easy to build or sustain. This is because campus activism typically features a diversity of political views and tactical preferences, and is organisationally restricted by the constant turnover of graduating cohorts. This chapter uses the 2010/11 UK student protests to explore some of the challenges students face in building a wider student movement. United initially by a common grievance of rising tuition fees, students responded quickly with a multi-repertoire mass campaign. Yet its tactical breadth generated diverging collective experiences and identities, and once the fees were passed by Government these identities proved difficult to unite as an overarching movement.

The shock of the new? Democratic narratives and political agency

Political parties were at the heart of the traditional narrative of British democracy. But parties as agents of political mobilisation are in decline. By contrast, membership of political pressure groups and social movement organisations has grown considerably. This shift in political activism is considered by some, but by no means all, to offer a radical alternative narrative of democratic participation. This article examines the organisational changes taking place behind this shift; and explores the extent to which more traditional models of political agency can be reformed in ways that supports and sustains the political activism at the core of a healthy democratic society.