Intricacies of Social Movement Outcome Research and beyond: “How can you Tell” Social Movements Prompt Changes?

Abstract

Most scholars of social movements have been drawn to research on the politically contentious behavior of collective actors because of the conviction that social movements sometimes generate significant historical progress and social change. Yet movement outcome research has been least developed in the literature. This irony emanates from methodological and causal intricacies that fail to clearly explicate how social movements create change. The challenges encompass the heaped typologies, mutual inconsistencies, causal heterogeneities, and conflictive evaluation criteria of movement outcomes. To overcome these quandaries, this paper proposes that (1) any attempt to find an invariant model or general theorization of a movement outcome is inevitably futile; (2) instead, attention to the specific context of time and place in which social movements produce outcomes is necessary; and (3) a comprehensive understanding of the origins of a movement outcome becomes possible when multiple variables are considered and their combined effects are analyzed.