Author Description

Social movements around the world have used a wide variety of protest tactics to bring about enormous social changes, influencing cultural arrangements, public opinion, and government policies in the process. This concise yet in-depth primer provides a broad overview of theoretical issues in the study of social movements, illustrating key concepts with a series of case studies. It offers engaging analyses of the protest cycle of the 1960s, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian rights movement, the environmental movement, the new American right, and the global justice movement. Author Suzanne Staggenborg examines these social movements in terms of their strategies and tactics, the organizational challenges they faced, and the roles that the mass media and counter-movements played in determining their successes and failures. Ideal as a core text for courses in social movements/collective behavior and political sociology/social change, Social Movements is brief enough to be easily supplemented by a reader containing primary documents.