2 - THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GRIEVANCES

Summary

Traditional approaches to the study of collective action – be it union organizing in the cities or revolutionary mobilization in the countryside – stressed levels of discontent, or grievances, as the central explanatory factor. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the importance of motivational factors was downplayed in favor of the mobilization of resources and then the fluctuation of political opportunities and constraints. These later analytical perspectives have greatly enriched our understanding of collective action, correcting the exaggerated attention given to grievances in the earlier “traditional” model, as well as its frequent unfortunate assumption about the social disconnectedness of participants.

There certainly can be analytic utility to holding one dimension of collective action constant, such as grievances, in order to gain a better understanding of another dimension, such as the mobilization of resources. It is seriously misleading, however, to maintain that discontent is a secondary source of collective action or that discontent is a constant among underprivileged populations and therefore is not useful for explaining movement emergence. To the contrary, the principle argument of this chapter is that a full understanding of the causes, course, and consequences of contentious politics requires an integration of the older concern for grievances with attention to resources, frames, opportunities, and mechanisms. This is most especially true for understanding collective action under conditions of significant risk, which is the situation much of the time in much of the world.