Introduction

Summary

The first two decades of the 21st century have been shaped by multiple intersecting financial, health, and environmental crises, and rapid social change. The financial crisis of 2008 generated economic and fiscal consequences that resulted in unemployment and austerity measures. The COVID-19 pandemic, which began at the end of 2019, reshaped our societies dramatically and revealed the challenges of dealing with a pandemic within national health systems already under strain. The ongoing environmental and climate crises threaten the homes and livelihoods of many, particularly in the Global South, but also in the Global North, and have huge ramifications on how societies across the world organise their economies and citizens live their lives. These crises have intensified global economic, racial, and gender inequalities and thus must be analysed from an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1991). Together, these intersecting crises have resulted in a wide range of mobilisations, from large-scale protests on the streets to self-help and DIY (do it yourself) mobilisations, which are less visible. This book is about the organisations and people that are responding to crises and seeking to bring about as well as resist social change. We call these organisations social change organisations (SCOs) and the people engaged in them social change makers (SCMs).

We argue that focusing on SCOs and SCMs in a historical perspective contributes to the development of a theory of social change that takes into account structure and agency. SCOs and SCMs are constrained by the contexts in which they are active, but at the same time they are contributing to the transformation of these contexts – more often incrementally than rapidly. Our approach goes beyond models of social change that focus on the dynamics between incumbents and challengers (McAdam et al, 2001; Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). We argue that it is important to broaden the perspective on efforts to bring about change beyond contentious politics (various forms of violent or non-violent protest) by paying more attention to insider activism and prefigurative politics. Insider activism refers to social change making that seeks to pressure institutions to change (or resist change) in more formal contexts than contentious politics (Pettinicchio, 2012).