New Social Movements Theory: The Debate
The purpose of this brief report is to identify and explain the new social movements debate, focusing on its nature and primary tenets. According to Barker, the current debate in new social movements theory centers around the activist and academic forms of new social movement theorizing (1-8).
New Social Movements theory has currently been revisited in light of events that have occurred over the last decade or so. Barker states that in its more academic form, new social movements theory tended to align itself with the revolutionary, leftist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s; however, as these movements became increasingly mainstreamed (e.g., environmental causes), new notions and formulations were called for (1). The hope was that these new formulations would restore some, if not all, of the political significance which was lost as the movements shifted to the mainstream. It was this search for a new, fresher formulation from which the debate arose, with one branch of new social movements theory focusing on practical concerns and applications, and the other on academic considerations, structural requirements and postulations suitable for teaching, texts, and so forth.
In a discussion of the New Social Movements debate, Hastings stated that academics have argued that the more practically oriented theorists tend to oversimplify, provide poor and incomplete definitions, and avoid many important issues (1-5). Their boundaries are fuzzy and often the answers provided to the actual questions addressed are seldom comprehensively answered.
However, Barker notes that the practical theorists counter that their emphasis on the practical has enabled the field of social movements theory to expand considerably, so as to now incorporate global and international social movements within its models (1-8). While academic theorists may better explain the why of new social movements, it is...