Original scientific paper

Resource Mobilization Theory of Social Movement

Milan Mesić ; Department of Sociology, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract

The author first introduces us to research on social movements as eminently modem social phenomena. The emergence of mass social movements towards the end of the 1960s called fora new theoretical-methodological framework for their explanation and understanding, since the formerly reigning paradigms proved to he inappropriate. The theory of resource mobilization is one of the two new paradigms in research on social movements, that appeared und developed in the USA. It first appeared in opposition to the classical paradigm of the Chicago social-psychological school. The author gives a critique of its genesis and development. Its advantages in regard to the earlier research programmes
are described, and it is compared with competing European paradigms of "new social movements". The criticism of instrumental rigidity and
motivational reductionism of the original resource-mobility model, that was based on rational choice theory, is quickly brought to further elaboration and revision. The question remains as to whether the theory of resource mobilization can integrate identity and other concepts in research on social movements, as
some of its avid proponents believe.

Keywords

social movements; theory of choice; resource mobilization theory; new social movements

Hrčak ID:

154536

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/154536

Publication date:

31.12.1996.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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