Abstract
Over the last two decades, “resource mobilization” (RM) analysts have emphasized the importance of institutional continuities between conventional social life and collective protest.1 There is much about this interpretation with which we agree. It is a corrective to some of the malintegration (MI) literature in which movements are portrayed as mindless eruptions lacking either coherence or continuity with organized social life. Nevertheless, we shall argue that RM analysts commit a reverse error. Their emphasis on the similarities between conventional and protest behavior has led them to understate the differences. They thus tend to “normalize” collective protest.
Reprinted from International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 4, no. 4 (Summer 1991), pp. 435-58.
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Piven, F.F., Cloward, R.A. (1995). Collective Protest: A Critique of Resource-Mobilization Theory. In: Lyman, S.M. (eds) Social Movements. Main Trends of the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23747-0_8
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