ZALD: Let me introduce our speakers, and then I want to say a few - PDF document

ZALD: Let me introduce our speakers, and then I want to say a few words more of introduction. And then we’ll turn it over to the speakers, who will each have about 20 minutes to speak. The three speakers today are Doug McAdam and Dave Snow and Erica Summers-Effler. I always start to turn it around, but I’ve got it right. Okay. And I knew, and I think most of you knew Dave and Doug from their long association with the, and distinguished service in sociology. For me, they’re my junior colleagues. Anybody under 70 is my junior colleague, and only a few of you who escape that. But I did not, I must, so I’m not going to say anything more about Dave and Doug. They, you all know their work that’s much more than just social movements. They’re each known for a very distinctive contribution in the social movements literature, Doug, mainly, in the political opportunities, literature, and later on the and political process, later on contentious politics, Dave for framing and the immense growth of interest in frames and framing, the cognitive representation and transformation tied to ideology in some ways, but having its own life to the society and to the culture. But I didn’t know Erica’s work. And so I immediately went to the started looking at it, and then I found out why he had, why Randy had asked her to serve, present. She represents the up-and-coming generation. She has a terrific new book that basically bridges a kind of organizational dynamic with both emotions and collective identify so that if you have a movement, or a movement organization is failing, that is pushes a certain emotional set of reactions, but then has further consequences for the life and commitment of the organization. This book came out in 2010, University of Chicago Press, and remind me of the title. SUMMERS-EFFLER: Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes. ZALD: Did you all hear that? SUMMERS-EFFLER: Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes. ZALD: Thank you. And so she really represents the unfolding, further unfolding of the discipline, kind of the new wave of not just taking a new concept, but seeing how it attaches to older concepts in the field. And it's a terrific book, and you will hear more about that in a little while. I wanted to pick up a couple of the things that Randy said in his talk, in his letter, and just elaborate them a little bit. I want to give one anecdote from an unnamed assistant professor in 1970, whose name I don’t want to mention because he didn’t give me permission to tell the story. So he was an assistant professor working at what I think most of us who have, who came into the new field, the redefined arena, as he was one of the, could be considered one of the founders of the new field of the resource mobilization branch collective action with a slightly rationalistic flavor, some people more formal in that rational connection than others. And he was at a major Ivy League school, and whose chairman I know, I knew, who was a former president of the American Sociological Association and somebody I ¡ 1

had a great deal of respect for, told him that he should not be able to count on tenure at this school, but his work was too marginal to the effort. And so I think that was not unlike many people’s view of collective behavior at that time. And then I want to just give you a couple indicators of centrality. One intellectual is that there was a kind of break off, not full severing, but there is a movement away from the tie of collective behavior social movements as tightly integrated to a much more loosely integrated relationship to what had been collective behavior fields. At the same time, because of developments in political sociology, there was a movement of the field much more towards a political view of movement than their connections. And then, at a later time, it becomes a little bit of a liability for some people. But, nevertheless, as that move then opened us up to almost any movement because every new social issue generates supporters and opponents and gets into a mobilization political process effort, and, therefore, it makes this, our work, central, more central. Another indicator, one I’m proud of on the snob side of the scale, three vice presidents of the ASA, one president of the ASA, one member of sociology who had become, became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and four members who became members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences were leading people in the new sociology of social movements. And that’s quite a record, I think, for a growing field. These people made it and enhanced the field, and they are, they have been very important to our advancing. I want to say a word about growth. It’s astonishing, the growth of social movement interests. The number of papers that were given at the CBSM workshop this week, two days, in two days more papers were given than would have been given in four years, say in the years 1960 to '64. Just, and good papers, papers with all interesting titles, hard, well thought out papers. So on that side, the growth has been terrific. There has been a terrific growth internationally. Early on, the closest connections were made to research in Europe, and so there’s a very heavy American-Europe connection in the area of social movements, including a major annual conference in Manchester every year on social movements. New journals. And then a growth that, for me, has been an enormous shock, I played some role in it, but I never thought I would see the day when the study of social movements was a major topic in business schools. And a little indicator of the quality of that is that the two most recent editors of the Administrative Science Quarterly , which is the lead organization studies journal, are both people who have made major contributions to the study of organizations, business, and social movements. So the outgoing editor is Hayagreeva Rao, known to many of you. The incoming editor is Gerry Davis, also known to many of you. So that gives you a feel to where we’ve come. The field has continued. One other thing. The field has continued to do something that really shows kind of a scholarly growth. At the beginning, there was a lot of attempt to say which field, which approach is better, political process or resource mode or framing. And there were theory contests, you might say. And that went on for a while, and those were interesting papers, and a lot of good research was done. Homelessness, Dave had a series of papers with Dan Kress and ¡ 2