This paper starts from two basic observations. (1) Despite repeated lament about the lack of knowledge about internal decision-making processes in social movements, these are still today black-box processes. (2) Despite the fact that any ethnographic field work in social movement activities involves attending numerous meetings, meetings rarely figure as a prominent category in studies of social movements. The paper argues that both phenomena are due to a lack of an unambiguous conceptual framework that is capable of grasping the peculiarities of internal social movement structures, and the sets out to provide such a framework in two steps. First, it introduces the concept of meeting arena, as the structure-side of meetings and specifies mesomobilization arenas as the place where movement level coordination takes place. These meeting arenas thus constitute an important infrastructure in mobilizing processes. Second, the paper explores how meeting arenas are a source of order in social movements and finds that their structure is threefold: meetings are consciously organized, institutionalized over time, and interconnected through personal contacts. Meeting arenas hence combine and intertwine elements of organization, institutions, and networks, forming a social movement infrastructure that cannot be adequately understood in terms of either one of these forms of order alone.

Critical Mass Bulletin, Volume 41(2), Fall 2016. See page 6. "During the 2016 ASA meetings, four dozen socially engaged scholars and movement theorists met at Seattle’s Labor Temple. The topic? How movement relevant research might support current social movements and enrich social movement studies."

We develop the concept of “social movement school’ (SMS), showing how these organizational spaces are deliberately designed for purposes of educating, mentoring, training, and coordinating individuals as effective, committed movement agents. SMSs can also be important sites of prefigurative design and practice for future societal development consistent with movement goals. We motivate the theoretical significance of SMSs based on five perspectives in social movement scholarship: (1) resource mobilization; (2) cultural approaches to repertoires of contention; (3) cognitive perspective; (4) micro-mobilization; and (5) biographical consequences of participation. We then offer a typology to capture primary purposes, and spatial reach within the broad field of SMSs. Within-movement variation is illustrated by focusing on a variety of SMSs in the U.S. civil rights movement; and the cross-movement breadth of the concept is illustrated by highlighting contemporary SMS forms drawn from three very different movements–labor, radical feminism, and mindfulness meditation movements. In the interest of launching a research agenda on SMSs, we end with several key questions that could serve to guide future research. Important theoretical, empirical, and practical considerations suggest that SMSs deserve the attention of scholars and activists alike.

Information about ISA-RC47 publications and activities & the call for abstracts for the 2016 ISA Forum in Vienna

International Sociological Association. Research Committee 47 "Social Classes and Social Movements"

ISA47 activities & publications. Program for the ISA Forum, July 2016

On the one side, Schwartzman (1986) deplored that meetings are “a neglected social form in organizational studies”, a situation which has hardly changed in the last decades. On the other, social movement researchers found that “[c]ontemporary movements resemble an amorphous nebula of indistinct shape” (Melucci 1996: 114) and complained about “insufficient information on internal processes” because decisionmaking in social movements is typically “treated as ‘black box’ processes within SMOs [social movement organizations]” (Minkoff and McCarthy 2005: 289, 304). In my paper, I argue that meetings, especially inter-organizational meetings, are the place to look in order to understand internal social movement processes. While it is commonly accepted that social movements are not organizations but networks of groups, organizations, and individuals, it is also clear that social movements are nevertheless organized, or rather: engaged in organizing processes. If organizations provide the structural context for organizational processes, I contend that meetings provide the structural context for organizing and mobilizing processes in social movements. In other words, meetings constitute a core infrastructure for these processes. Yet, the importance of meetings is not reflected in the literature on social movements or on organizations. This paper makes a first step towards a better understanding of the internal infrastructure of social movements by presenting a typology of meeting arenas which helps to map this communicative infrastructure. Based on several years of participant observation in various organizing processes of the global justice movements at the local (Berlin), national (Germany), and transnational (Europe) level, the paper describes some core characteristics of social movement meetings and explores what actually happens inside them, focusing on the culturally defined role of the facilitator and how the practices of consensus decision-making is also culturally contingent.