Month: March 2014

• Strategic logic falls on deaf ears

  Strategic logic falls on deaf ears; upon ears that have heard enough strategic logics. From birth through youth, daily we are barraged with appeals to buy sugar cereal, candy, toys, and the latest gadgets. And before long we learn the essence of an elaborate manipulative logic whose central goals are private profit and power. We…

  Jonathan Matthew Smucker

  March 27, 2014

  Uncategorized

  clubhouse, Habermas, prefigurative politics, strategy

• The individual rational actor paradigm (is dumb)

  Boring warning: Just like yesterday’s post, this one is also boring. You have been warned. In the individual rational actor paradigm, the unit of analysis tends to be the generic, atomized, essentially selfish individual. When applied to social movements, the paradigm clumsily attempts to illuminate the “mystery” of collective action by examining the peculiar types…

  Jonathan Matthew Smucker

  March 26, 2014

  Uncategorized

  collective action, rational choice, social movement theory

• Boring ramble about levels and units of analysis for examining political contention

  Note: The word “boring” is the first word in the header; if you read this and are bored, you have only yourself to blame! For practical shorthand we treat groups as if they had coherent singular wills. A political group navigates a terrain—distinct and external to itself, ostensibly—that it finds itself situated within, in order…

  Jonathan Matthew Smucker

  March 25, 2014

  Uncategorized

  contestation, terrain

• Not all groups have strategies.

  Ah social movement theory… I get to read quite a lot of it this year. I’m enjoying it, but of course I will probably end up writing more about the things that I am critical of. For example, the often loose usage of the word strategy. Scholars often make an implicit assumption that social movements…

  Jonathan Matthew Smucker

  March 24, 2014

  Uncategorized

  social movement theory, strategy

• Political action’s psychological layer

  The “classical model” of social movement theory explains the emergence of social movements in terms of collective psychological reactions to structural changes in society. In short, people are alienated and therefore join protest movements. Hating on this approach is something of a cornerstone of the sociological canon of contemporary social movement theory. Central among the…

  Jonathan Matthew Smucker

  March 21, 2014

  Uncategorized

  alienation, anomie, classical model, collective action, Doug McAdam, OWS, social psychology