ABSTRACT
The perspective I have adopted in this book has implications for several areas of reflection and criticism. First, the method of examining a social movement as a set of practices on a par with other practices within a cultural field has the advantage of approximating the point of view of people on the ground. Although a particular group activity may be understood from an academic perspective as a social movement, it is, more often than not, perceived by local people as but one of a number of concurrent, and by their lights, more or less coequal, activities occurring in the neighborhood. Grasping this phenomenological reality has positive consequences for the analysis of social movements. One of the chief aims of such analyses has been to trace the processes through which ways of thinking and living that contest socially dominant ones come into being, evolve, become influential, and move people to various kinds of social action. A problem has always been how to identify what counts as a social movement. While there have been a wide range of efforts to define the term, 1 in the absence of a fully satisfactory definition, the rule of thumb has been to focus on groups and organizations that have an explicit agenda for social change. This focus, in my view, leads to overemphasizing organizational behavior as an object of study rather than processes of change in consciousness and their concomitant forms of action. By choosing to focus on the self-identified social movement organization, the analyst in effect presumes or accepts the claim of the movement to be a privileged site in the contestation and change in social values.
