ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will discuss the capacity of the conventional theoretical endeavors to conceptualize what I have defined in the first chapter as “dissident knowledge.” In order to avoid redundancy, this review is restricted mainly to those theories that are particularly prone to focus on the ideational aspects of movements. As I will show, in spite of the recent growing emphasis on the ideational or cognitive dimension of collective action, many theoretical attempts and the studies influenced by them evidence significant problems in explaining the historical emergence and development of ideas in social movements (i.e. dissident knowledge/cognition). These problems stem from a failure at the metatheoretical level, that is, their failure to hold an integrative and holistic relation between changing social structures, dynamic patterns of experience (or historical agency) and the social consciousness of actors. As I will discuss in this chapter, this failure, in turn, is related to the overriding reductionist tendency among the theories to overlook the relatively independent position of (dissident) cognition with respect to both the practices of actors and their conditioning circumstances.
