Organizational practices of social movements and popular struggles: understanding the power of organizing from below

• Published in: Qualitative research in organizations and management Vol. 12; no. 4; pp. 250 - 261
• Main Authors: Misoczky, Maria Ceci, Dornelas Camara, Guilherme, Böhm, Steffen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bradford Emerald Publishing Limited 13.11.2017; Emerald Group Publishing Limited
• Subjects: Decision making; Ethnicity; Political representation; Politics; Social activism; Theory
• ISSN: 1746-5648; 1746-5656
• DOI: 10.1108/QROM-09-2017-1567

According to her, no organizational instance can substitute the protagonists of transformations, i.e. the organizations that are being built in popular social struggles are not the subjects of political change, but mere political and social instruments. According to Cox and Fominaya (2013, pp. 7-8), “anyone researching social movements (SMs) will find themselves hearing or reading a near-identical account, often repeated word-for-word, of how the discipline came to be.” According to McAdam and Scott (2005), in the mid-1960s, a group of young scholars (including Gamson, 1968; Tilly and Rule, 1965; Zald and Ash, 1966) began to formulate arguments to account for social unrest, converting the earlier focus on collective behavior to one on collective action, SMs and SMOs. According to Duayer (2015), this scientific practice is characterized by a tautological movement in which the researcher comprehends social processes through his own system of beliefs, ideological coordinates and ontological schema, looking for regularities and behavior patterns that fit his own presuppositions.