Social Work with Communities and Social Action III: Social Movements, their Origin, Nature and Types, Theories of Movements and New Social Movements, Movement Analysis through Ideology, Structure, Leadership, Process and Outcomes, and the Ideology and Approach of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Frantz Fanon

Classical theories explained movements by strain and discontent. Mass society theory (William Kornhauser, 1959) held that isolated, rootless individuals without intermediate groups are available for extremist movements. Relative deprivation theory holds that movements arise not from absolute poverty but from the gap between what people expect and what they get; W. G. Runciman (1966) and Ted Robert Gurr (Why Men Rebel, 1970) developed it. Neil Smelser's structural strain or value-added theory (1962) listed six determinants, from structural conduciveness to the operation of social control. The criticism of all three was that discontent is common and movements are rare: something must turn grievance into action.

Resource mobilisation theory, set out by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald (1977), answered that movements depend on resources, money, members, leadership, networks and organisations, and on social movement organisations that mobilise them rationally; grievances are relatively constant, and what varies is the capacity to organise. Political process theory, developed by Charles Tilly, Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow, added political opportunity structures: movements rise when the political system opens, when elites divide or when repression weakens, and they build on existing indigenous organisations and a sense of "cognitive liberation", McAdam's term for people's belief that change is possible. Framing theory (David Snow and Robert Benford) examines how movements interpret grievances through diagnostic, prognostic and motivational frames. New social movement theory, associated with Alain Touraine, Alberto Melucci, Claus Offe and Jürgen Habermas, argued that movements since the 1960s, environmental, feminist, peace, anti-nuclear, gay and lesbian, differ from the class-based labour movement: they are concerned with identity, culture, autonomy and quality of life (Ronald Inglehart's "post-material" values), draw largely on the new middle classes, and prefer decentralised, networked and participatory organisation.

The syllabus asks for movements to be analysed on five dimensions. Ideology explains what is wrong, who is responsible and what should be done, and gives members identity and commitment. Structure concerns organisation: whether a movement is centralised or decentralised, formal or loose, built on social movement organisations, on existing networks such as churches, unions and caste associations, or on coalitions. Leadership may be charismatic, in Weber's sense of authority resting on the extraordinary qualities attributed to a leader, administrative (organisers who build and run the machinery) or intellectual (ideologues who articulate the vision); movements need all three, and the routinisation of charisma after a founding leader is a common crisis. Process refers to the movement's life course, often described in four stages, emergence (social unrest), coalescence (popular excitement and organisation), bureaucratisation (formalisation) and decline, and to its repertoire of action and its interaction with the state and opponents.

Outcomes are the hardest to assess. William Gamson (The Strategy of Social Protest, 1975) judged outcomes on two dimensions, whether the movement's organisation was accepted as a legitimate representative and whether its constituency gained new advantages, giving four possibilities: full response (both), co-optation (acceptance without gains), pre-emption (gains without acceptance) and collapse (neither). Movements may decline through success (their goal is achieved and institutionalised), failure, co-optation of leaders, repression, or by going mainstream. Outcomes also include less visible effects, changes in public attitudes, new identities, trained leaders and networks that later movements use. For a social worker, analysis on these dimensions guides decisions about whether and how to support a movement, and how to avoid weakening it by professionalising it.

Gandhi's ideology rests on truth (satya) and non-violence (ahimsa). Satyagraha, "holding firmly to truth" or truth-force, is resistance to injustice by non-violent means, including self-suffering, which aims not to defeat the opponent but to convert them, appealing to their conscience. For Gandhi means and ends are inseparable: as he wrote in Hind Swaraj (1909), the means are to the end as the seed is to the tree, so an unjust means corrupts even a just end. His other key ideas are swaraj (self-rule, both national and personal), swadeshi (self-reliance and local production), sarvodaya (the welfare of all, from Ruskin's Unto This Last), trusteeship (the rich as trustees of wealth for society) and the constructive programme (khadi, village industries, removal of untouchability, communal unity, basic education, the uplift of women). His methods ranged from negotiation and petition to non-cooperation, civil disobedience, boycott, hartal and fasting, tested in Champaran (1917), Kheda and the Ahmedabad mill strike (1918), non-cooperation (1920 to 1922), the Salt Satyagraha, whose Dandi March ran from 12 March to 6 April 1930, and Quit India (1942).

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 to 1968) joined Gandhian non-violence with Christian love (agape) and the American tradition of civil disobedience from Thoreau. He came to prominence leading the Montgomery bus boycott (1955 to 1956) after Rosa Parks's arrest, helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957), visited India in 1959, led the Birmingham campaign and wrote the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (April 1963), delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington (28 August 1963), received the Nobel Peace Prize (1964) and led the Selma marches (1965). The Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) followed. In the Birmingham letter he set out four basic steps of a non-violent campaign: collection of the facts to determine whether injustice exists, negotiation, self-purification and direct action, whose purpose was to create a "creative tension" that forces negotiation. His goal was the "beloved community", reconciliation rather than the humiliation of opponents, and in his last years he widened his cause to poverty and the Vietnam war.

Frantz Fanon (1925 to 1961) was a psychiatrist from Martinique who worked at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria and joined the Algerian National Liberation Front in the war of independence. Black Skin, White Masks (1952) analysed the psychological damage of racism and colonialism: the colonised internalise the coloniser's contempt, develop an inferiority complex and seek to wear a "white mask". The Wretched of the Earth (1961), with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, argued that colonialism is itself violence, maintained by force, and that "decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon". For the colonised individual, Fanon wrote, violence is a cleansing force that frees them from their inferiority complex, despair and inaction. He saw the peasantry, not the urban working class, as the revolutionary force in colonies, warned against a national bourgeoisie that would simply replace the colonisers and exploit the people, and called for a new humanism. His psychiatric chapters on the mental disorders produced by colonial war are a direct link to social work practice with survivors of violence.