Keep Your Eyes on the Prize: A goals-based approach to studying social movements in markets

Abstract

Prior research on social movements and markets has thus far paid only scant attention to movement goals. In the few instances that goals are considered, the focus is on how goals provide a shared purpose to movement participants, and not on their substantive nature or ‘content’. In contrast, our review of the movements and markets literature suggests that the substantive nature of movement goals is critical because it provides a more comprehensive understanding of different market-based movements and their interactions with market actors – ultimately impacting the consequences for movements and their targets. We develop a social movement typology using a goals-based perspective to distinguish between three types of movement: alteration movements, whose goal is to alter or change the practices of markets or their actors; creation movements whose goal is to create new market categories as a means of addressing their grievances; and elimination movements whose goal is to eradicate or remove products, industries, or markets altogether. We propose that the relationship between these types of movement and market actors goes through a four-stage life cycle – emergence, action, interaction and settlement – and that initial variation in movement goals shapes differences in the movement–market relationship at each stage of this life cycle.