7 - Social Movement Meetings

Summary

Collective action is critical to social movements; tactics are necessary both to mobilize participants and to impact targets. Through tactics such as demonstrations, movements involve supporters and make their concerns known to bystanders and authorities, raising public awareness and influencing public policy. Some collective action occurs relatively spontaneously (Snow and Moss 2014), and social media have increased the ability to organize protests quickly when emotions are running high, as in the case of the Trump resistance movement (Meyer and Tarrow 2018). But ongoing action typically involves ongoing talk that occurs in face-to-face settings as well as online. Many important processes occur within social movement organizations (SMOs), and organizational dynamics are essential to the growth and maintenance of movements (Blee 2012; Ganz 2000; Han 2014; Lichterman 1996, 2005; Polletta 2002). Activists attend meetings, commit resources, choose leaders (or avoid doing so), plan actions, and recruit and integrate newcomers into their organizations. Yet, we still do not know a lot about how the meetings of different types of organizations facilitate or impede these activities (Baggetta et al. 2013:564); my contribution in this chapter is to show what happens at movement meetings and how they affect mobilization and strategic decision-making.