5 page paper 27

Requirements: Five pages, fully documented, INTERNALLY AND EXTERNALLY.

Directions: Choose a social movement that is relevant to your country and examine the total life of the movement.

Discuss the type of movement that it is.

Discuss the four stages of the movement

Frame an analysis for the movement using one or more aspects of framing.

A. Examples of social movements in your nation

Public health

Woman’s rights

Children rights

Human rights

Labor rights

Ecological

Sustainable development

Responding to humanitarian crisis

Global warming

(The country I chose is Vietnam and the social movement I chose was public health

Informational Help on Social Movements

Social movements have been defined as networks of informal interactions between individuals and groups engaged in political or cultural conflicts on the basis of shared collective identities.13 They entail sustained interactions between power holders and representatives of constituencies lacking formal representation to achieve changes in the distribution or exercise of power.14 While campaigns supported by a movement can be issue focused (e.g. resisting the privatization of health services), the overall objectives of social movements are broader and transformative in intent, aiming at structural and social changes in society and institutions of governance.

Types of movements

1. Reform movements seek to change something specific about the social structure. Examples include antinuclear groups, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the Dreamers movement for immigration reform, and the Human Rights Campaign’s advocacy for Marriage Equality.

2. Revolutionary movements seek to completely change every aspect of society. These include the 1960s counterculture movement, including the revolutionary group The Weather Underground, as well as anarchist collectives. Texas Secede! is a revolutionary movement. Religious/Redemptive movements are “meaning seeking,” and their goal is to provoke inner change or spiritual growth in individuals. Organizations pushing these movements include Heaven’s Gate or the Branch Davidians. The latter is still in existence despite government involvement that led to the deaths of numerous Branch Davidian members in 1993.

3. Alternative movements are focused on self-improvement and limited, specific changes to individual beliefs and behavior. These include trends like transcendental meditation or a macrobiotic diet. Resistance movements seek to prevent or undo change to the social structure. The Ku Klux Klan, the Minutemen, and pro-life movements fall into this category.

Stages of Social Movements

A four-stage process:

1. preliminary stage, people become aware of an issue, and leaders emerge.

2. coalescence stage when people join together and organize in order to publicize the issue and raise awareness.

3. institutionalization stage, the movement no longer requires grassroots volunteerism: it is an established organization, typically with a paid staff.

4. When people fall away and adopt a new movement, the movement successfully brings about the change it sought, or when people no longer take the issue seriously, the movement falls into the decline stage.

Framing/Frame Analysis

Successful social movements use three kinds of frames (Snow and Benford 1988) to further their goals. The first type,

1. Diagnostic framing, states the problem in a clear, easily understood way. When applying diagnostic frames, there are no shades of gray: instead, there is the belief that what “they” do is wrong and this is how “we” will fix it. The anti-gay marriage movement is an example of diagnostic framing with its uncompromising insistence that marriage is only between a man and a woman.

2. Prognostic framing, the second type, offers a solution and states how it will be implemented. Some examples of this frame, when looking at the issue of marriage equality as framed by the anti-gay marriage movement, include the plan to restrict marriage to “one man/one woman” or to allow only “civil unions” instead of marriages. As you can see, there may be many competing prognostic frames even within social movements adhering to similar diagnostic frames. Finally,

3. Motivational framing is the call to action: what should you do once you agree with the diagnostic frame and believe in the prognostic frame? These frames are action-oriented. In the gay marriage movement, a call to action might encourage you to vote “no” on Proposition 8 in California (a move to limit marriage to male-female couples), or conversely, to contact your local congressperson to express your viewpoint that marriage should be restricted to male-female couples.

This frame alignment process has four aspects: bridging, amplification, extension, and transformation.

1. Bridging describes a “bridge” that connects uninvolved individuals and unorganized or ineffective groups with social movements that, though structurally unconnected, nonetheless share similar interests or goals. These organizations join together to create a new, stronger social movement organization. Can you think of examples of different organizations with a similar goal that have banded together?

2. In the amplification model, organizations seek to expand their core ideas to gain a wider, more universal appeal. By expanding their ideas to include a broader range, they can mobilize more people for their cause. For example, the Slow Food movement extends its arguments in support of local food to encompass reduced energy consumption, pollution, obesity from eating more healthfully, and more.

3. In extension, social movements agree to mutually promote each other, even when the two social movement organization’s goals don’t necessarily relate to each other’s immediate goals. This often occurs when organizations are sympathetic to each others’ causes, even if they are not directly aligned, such as women’s equal rights and the civil rights movement.

4. Transformation means a complete revision of goals. Once a movement has succeeded, it risks losing relevance. If it wants to remain active, the movement has to change with the transformation or risk becoming obsolete. For instance, when the women’s suffrage movement gained women the right to vote, members turned their attention to advocating equal rights and campaigning to elect women to office. In short, transformation is an evolution in the existing diagnostic or prognostic frames that generally achieves a total conversion of the movement.