A Strategic Approach to Collective Action: Looking for Agency in Social-Movement Choices

In theories of social movements, the structural models of the last thirty years may have reached the limits of their utility. Future breakthroughs are likely to arise from attention to the microfoundations of political action. The study of strategic choices may be one fruitful new path of research, especially if sociologists can develop an approach to strategy that takes cultural and institutional contexts more seriously than game theory, which has long dominated the study of strategy. As a starting point, I present several strategic dilemmas that organizers and participants face, either explicitly as choices or implicitly as tradeoffs. These choices represent agency in contrast to the structure that has interested scholars for so long. By portraying strategic players as audiences for words and actions, they are also thoroughly cultural. If we can begin to explain the choices faced and the choices made, we will go a long way toward opening up the study of social movements to strategic factors mostly ignored in the dominant models. Viewed as causal mechanisms, choices may offer the microfoundations for rethinking social movement theory.