The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.
—Thucydides
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.
—Karl Marx
There is a relatively broad consensus that the emergence and success of a social movement are conditioned by a combination of resources, opportunities, and perceptions.
1 Attention to these factors is rooted in a series of progressive movements that have emerged since the 1960s. Poor people’s movements in the United States, liberation movements in former colonies, and more recent identity movements in the United States and Europe have fundamentally transformed our understanding of why people mobilize.
A trailblazing generation of social movement scholars cut their teeth representing the voice and experience of protestors. A wave of post-1968 scholarship on the civil rights movement provided an important counterbalance to the more pluralist assessments of society, protest, and change. Social movement studies came into its own in America and Europe at a point when observers were intent on demonstrating the very good reasons why the disenfranchised would engage in collective action against the status quo. This trend emphasized rational actors over emotional factors, progressive movements over conservative movements, and movement actors over their targets.
The result of this corrective is that the last time collective-action scholarship focused on movements from the adversary’s perspective was, roughly speaking, in the era between LeBon’s
Study of the Popular Mind in 1895 and Gurr’s efforts to explain
Why Men Rebel in 1970. This era was perhaps best defined by theorists who assumed that society was a well-ordered machine and thus saw protests as flaws in an otherwise just and coherent system.
2 Scholars gazed down from their ivory towers and wondered why, in the midst of opportunity for all, a few would protest. The answers seemed clear: a few bad apples, or a general madness—protestors had taken leave of their senses and were generally misguided in their critique of liberal democracies. Student protests in the 1960s, however, shed new light on this story.
Young people with direct experience in protests and movements entered universities where they confronted scholarship that fundamentally misrepresented their emancipatory efforts. These students went on to be the founding fathers and mothers of contemporary movement scholarship.
3 Their work has discarded assessments of mobilization that relied on theories of relative deprivation and collective behavior, focusing instead on the legitimacy of protestors’ claims. Along the way, elite perspectives on movements have been replaced by a view from those actually involved in social-change efforts. The critique was clear: Why would we focus our attention on those communities by and for whom history has always been written?
Within social movement scholarship, the impact has been significant: interviews with movement targets are few and far between. social movement scholars were certainly not alone in this effort to redirect attention to subjugated people and knowledges (Foucault 1980, 81). The social historian E. P. Thompson was representative of this trend: “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity” (Thompson 1991, 12). This approach, so evident across the social sciences, has increased our understanding of a previously silenced majority of downtrodden and oppressed people. But it has also narrowed our view of their oppressors.
4Viewing collective action from the perspective of its target provides valuable information about the ways core social movement factors like grievances, resources, political opportunities, and framing explain the emergence and impact of insurgent groups. Movement targets are dynamic social actors who are almost always more powerful—individually or collectively—than their challengers. That concentration of power is often the very reason social movement groups target them. It hardly needs stating that individual and institutional targets—the primary focus in this study—are often in possession of relatively more material resources and in more powerful institutional roles than are challengers. These resources are not only economic but political and cultural as well. Incumbent targets are often in active or passive control of the dominant conceptualizations of ideal social relations, i.e., the ideas that form the raw cultural material for counterframing efforts. As guardians of the status quo they often have better access to the media and may be significantly more motivated to retain existing privilege than the movement is motivated to obtain new benefits. Movement targets are also likely to have more opportunities—whether cultural, political, or economic—with which to respond to movement efforts. Finally, powerful incumbents create and reinforce broader status quo values and norms. Put another way, the values and norms held by powerful incumbents are very often the ideals that are considered more broadly to be normatively good (Fligstein and McAdam 2012).
A WORKING DEFINITION: WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?
Important definitions provided by William Gamson (1975), Dieter Rucht (2004), and Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam (2012) have laid the groundwork for this study.
5 As used in the following pages, the term
social movement target refers to an
individual, collective, or cultural target of collective challenges for resources, recognition, or change.
6 Put very simply, movements target individuals, institutions, and ideas. By
individual, I mean embodied persons, such as presidents, voters, executives, union organizers, heads of ministries, and so forth. This is a single actor against whom claims may be made and issues may be framed. By
collective, I simply mean a unit that is “united into one body.” This may be a government or regime, board of directors, union, other movement group, and so forth.
7 The term
collective describes a single collective actor that serves as the reference point for movement claims and issue frames. By
cultural, I mean any nonphysical target that lies in the cultural sphere, including identities, definitions, manners of speech, styles of dress, and so forth.
Movements target ideas, opinions, and practices. This definition of targets generally follows the approach taken by David Snow and Sarah Soule, in their definition of social movements as “collectivities acting with some degree of organization and continuity, partly outside institutional or organizational channels, for the purpose of challenging extant systems of authority, or resisting change in such systems, in the organization, society, culture, or world system in which they are embedded.” This approach emphasizes the importance of existing structures and systems of authority, whether they are found in organizations and society or are rooted in cultural practices and worldviews. In a crucial nod to the role of culture, Soule and Snow emphasize that authority is often “based on underlying sets of interconnected values, beliefs, and interpretive frameworks that rationalize the distribution and exercise of the authority and provide vocabularies of motive that can be used not only to justify adherence to the regulations or procedures but also to challenge their perceived violations” (Snow and Soule 2000).
8The term target is not accidental. It refers in common English to something you are trying to hit. That something need not be a person. The terms opponent, adversary, and elite all suggest a person, group, or institution with authority and power. Ideas have tremendous power and are infused with authority. Popular norms about human dignity or value are often the subject of a movement’s framing efforts. Any definition of the object of a movement’s efforts must include the possibility that movements focus on objects and objectives, both things and ideas.
Targets are an oft-acknowledged conceptual category but an ill-defined, rarely consulted, and seldom understood social actor. To make matters even worse, many targets are incredibly difficult to access. The result is a general absence of accounts of mobilization from the target’s perspective and a truncated assessment of the possible responses to mobilization. New work by Brayden King, Sarah Soule, Tim Bartley, Joseph Luders, and their collaborators have broadened our understanding of the larger factors that shape the responses of corporations, but we hardly ever hear directly from targets themselves.
Rucht’s definition of targets—external groups that movements perceive as opponents or adversaries—appeared in the prominent
Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, and it has been cited multiple times, but it is not utilized in any investigation of movement targets. Likewise, Gamson (1975, 29) argued that incumbents targeted by movements may attempt to co-opt, preempt, or threaten those movements. However, a review of the volume’s citation arc suggests subsequent scholarship has tended to focus more on the movement’s outcomes than on a target’s behavior. An assessment of the entire population of articles published in the social movement journal
Mobilization suggests a similar lacuna. With a handful of exceptions, mainstream movement literature has focused on countermobilization, policing, and repression dynamics from the movement’s perspective.
9 While the state is the most discussed movement target, data from those bureaucrats and politicians who comprise the state are rare.
Current studies of target behavior are characterized by two key attributes: they are predominantly quantitative, and they tend to favor institutional targets (Walker, Martin, and McCarthy 2008). These factors are self-reinforcing, as analysts have focused on institutional targets about which data is available. This work has advanced a sophisticated understanding of a number of related issues, the foremost of which is threat, introduced by Charles Tilly (1978) and later resuscitated in his collaboration with Jack Goldstone (2001).
10 New developments within organizational sociology and on corporate behavior have extended the concept of threat to include the role of reputational threat, risk perception by managers, and decreased profitability in the form of stock prices and sales, all of which raise the cost of persistence.
11Corporate sensitivities to anything that threatens public opinion and profits are important to understand, but they do not explain how specific individuals within corporations feel, nor do they tell us anything about noncorporate targets. Yet the attitudes and behavior of individuals matter, and many social-movement efforts affect other institutions, create new institutions, or aim beyond institutions altogether, hoping instead to change cultural practices and relations.
12 Qualitative approaches are necessary in order to better understand the responses of noninstitutional targets. Yet only three studies known to this author have attempted to trace target activity by actually speaking with targets themselves.
13Matthias Wahlstrom (2007) conducted interviews with twenty Swedish police officers in an attempt to understand better their decision making around alter-globalization protests. His interviews and ethnographic data provide a rare window into the complicated interplay between prior police knowledge of activists, their attempts to engage “counterpart perspectives,” and the difficulty of implementing new policies. What he finds is police joking about how hard it is to appear personable and community oriented when wearing mountains of protective gear. He also notes the ways police use stereotypes of protestors in order to maintain their own constructions of reality. While we are in possession of very good work on the policing of protests,
14 it is rare that we hear from police themselves on the matter. Wahlstrom’s most important observation lies in the way the worldviews of police officers shape their perceptions of movement challengers.
In a similar fashion, Rachel Einwohner’s (2002) work involved interviews with the hunters and scientists targeted by animal rights activism, demonstrating the extent to which activists and opponents engage one another in the same strategic action field. Hunters’ and scientists’ claims that activists are sentimental and irrational fed into the movement’s framing tactics. Activists responded with an effort to present themselves as “logical” and “rational” in future interactions with opponents. In this way, the adversary’s actions shaped not only the movement’s actions but also its identity. The qualitative data drawn from time spent with targets themselves provide a more sophisticated picture of how movement efforts are understood.
James Jasper and Jane Poulsen (1993) focus directly on the importance of target tactics. Targets, like movements and all other social actors, must work iteratively to get their response right. Initial missteps—blunders—and unique individual or corporate attributes—unpopular activities, internal factions—explain variation in the targets’ abilities to resist movement efforts. Jasper and Poulsen’s conclusion is that successful movements have the effect of solidifying the target’s resolve and triggering more strategic responses, including countermobilization. While this finding is framed in terms of the movement’s ability to succeed, it anticipates one of the key findings from my fieldwork: target actions are dynamic and iterative rather than static and fixed. First-order responses are never the last word. Targets err, adapt, and evolve.
THE IMPORTANCE OF FRAMING TARGETS
Social movement targets are culturally produced variables, not structurally embedded constants. Contentious action between incumbents and challengers is often the result of external shocks or changes that trigger a series of consolidations and reconfigurations. Cultural, economic, and political changes—in divisions of labor, in terms of norms and values, and in perceptions of structural factors—are the sources of movement demands. While a very narrow read of a very small piece of history may suggest movements tend to be about human rights, a more catholic assessment of collective action suggests movements are as likely to be motivated by conservative ideas and in favor of limiting rights and curbing debates, both in the past and the present (McVeigh 2009, Bob 2012, Parker and Barreto 2013, McAdam and Kloos 2014).
Cultural, economic, and political changes produce claimants, claims, and targets. Thus, targets are no more a fixed historical category than is any particular rights claim. Social movement targets must be created. This study sets out to explore not the broad universe of human rights violators and perpetrators but instead a particular subset: those violators and perpetrators who have been identified—
framed—as targets by social movement actors.
15 This creative work is performed by norm entrepreneurs as they construct and popularize injustice frames around previously acceptable behavior or understandings (Brysk 2013; Bob 2005; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp, Sikkink 2013). This is seldom easy.
My first and primary objective in this book is to provide a descriptive overview of how some targets view both exploitative actions and subsequent emancipation struggles. Data from targets themselves suggest that they are exposed to and experience a similar set of causal factors as movements. For scholars interested in explaining collective action, targets matter not only because they shape movement efforts but also because they act (Walker, Martin, and McCarthy 2008). Targets have their own repertoires, self-perceptions, resources, capital, and sources of legitimacy. They overreach, misunderstand, stumble, lash out, and wait patiently—they are tactically engaged social actors.
16A PARTIAL THEORY OF TARGET TACTICS AND OUTCOMES
In what follows I advance a target-centric account of the emergence of contentious action and hypothesize the individual target responses that help shape new settlements.
17 Does a shift in attention from the powerless to the powerful require new theories? I think not. Social movement targets may be accommodated through the adaptation of existing theory. The first stage of this process is a lightly modified version of the political-process approach introduced by Charles Tilly and refined by Doug McAdam and his fellow travelers (McAdam [1982] 1999; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; McAdam and Boudet 2012; Fligstein and McAdam 2012) and familiar to many sociologists and political scientists (
figure 2.1).
18 While earlier scholars sourced social movements to piecemeal accounts of structural strain or specific factors, a wave of political sociologists has specified the way that politics, economics, and culture interact to shape the emergence of contentious politics. Perhaps the most important yet overlooked component of the political-process approach lies in its recognition that targets are exposed to the same range of factors as their challengers.
FIGURE 2.1 Phase One: Onset of Episode of Contention
This study’s first and most basic contribution is an emphasis on targeted incumbents. The political-process approach has included movement targets in theoretical models for several decades (McAdam [1982] 1999). While the earliest explanations followed Charles Tilly’s (1978) emphasis on the state, subsequent efforts broadened to include elites before finally settling on the more flexible category of incumbents. Incumbent is a very broad appellation that recognizes the fact that movement targets are often (but certainly not always) “those actors who wield disproportionate influence within a field and whose interests and views tend to be heavily reflected” in broader public opinion (Fligstein and McAdam 2011). Incumbents, then, may be found anywhere—in small teams, in large corporations, and in political systems, to name but a few examples. Incumbency is a position that gives rise to certain sets of affordances and assumptions.
The second advantage of a process-oriented explanation of targets lies in its emphasis on broad and destabilizing changes within the political, social, and economic sphere. While sudden moral shocks may also trigger mobilization (Jasper 1997), destabilizing changes are likely to produce deeper and broader responses, since their influences are more broadly distributed socially, economically, and politically. Significant changes affect incumbents and challengers differently, as their structural positions shade their individual assessments of the type and severity of the impact and whether current events represent an opportunity. These are not structures of political opportunity but deeply contextual processes in which practical meaning making and resource assessment are paramount. Material and conceptual conditions matter, but there is significant variation in individual perceptions of what these conditions mean and what responses are appropriate or desirable. Large-scale change processes call the status quo into question for both the challenger and the incumbent.
The third component of this approach is an emphasis on the importance of threat and opportunity. Scholarship has tended to focus on
opportunities for movements, as if they are objective items that can be grasped (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996). Two observations must be made before we continue. First, broader assessments include threats, often operationalized as repression (Davenport 2015). Second, targeted incumbents perceive large-scale and destabilizing change processes as opportunities or threats. Joseph Luders has recently breathed new life into McAdam’s original observation that challengers desire “the ability to disrupt their opponent’s interests to such an extent that the cessation of the offending tactic becomes a sufficient inducement to grant concessions” (McAdam [1982] 1999, qtd. in Luders 2010, 2).
Movements, Luders argues, may impose two types of cost: disruption and concession.
19 Disruption costs stem directly or indirectly from movement efforts, with examples including the effect of protests on public opinion or issue salience—in simple terms, protests are costly (Luders 2010, 3). Concession costs are those real or perceived costs associated with capitulation to the movement’s demands—surrender is also costly. Targets facing a combination of high disruption and concession costs will vacillate with an “unstable mixture of minor concessions, protracted negotiation, and support for movement repression,” and they may eventually quit the targeted behavior altogether. This approach may lead a target to select a reactive tactic. Perhaps they adapt, repress, countermobilize, or quit.
At the other end of the spectrum are targets facing a combination of low disruption and concession costs—their actual and anticipated losses are minor, so they can afford to do nothing or to “resist or accept movement demands in keeping with dominant local norms” (Luders 2010, 5). Luders calls this category of targets
conformers: they take their cue from social norms rather than the movement but are not necessarily motivated to repress, since little may be protected or gained from doing so. The next two sets of responses are more straightforward, lying at the intersection of high- and low-cost configurations. Targets facing low disruption costs but high concession costs—where it costs little to protect a lot—will “offer durable opposition to the movement” in an attempt to avoid the painful sacrifices involved in concession (ibid.). These resisters, as Luders calls them, respond with repression, countermobilization, or by simply persisting in the targeted activity. Finally, where disruption costs are high but concession costs are low—where it costs nothing to avoid a significant penalty—targets will accommodate the movement and quit the targeted behavior (ibid.).
This cogent assessment of initial tactical responses sheds important light on the way threats and costs work and lays the groundwork for additional assessments of opportunities and benefits. Luders clearly specifies the cost analysis underpinning threat, yet an emphasis on perception and attribution suggests that mistakes may be made in the diagnosis of a situation and that situations may be perceived to be opportunities rather than threats.
20 Powerful movements certainly threaten targets, but they may also provide opportunities. A multinational corporation targeted because of a negative environmental record may decide substantial negative publicity is an opportunity to pivot to a new green initiative that allows it to raise prices and match the movement’s demands in one fell swoop.
21The fourth advantage of a target-centric political-process explanation lies in an inventory of the incumbent’s resources. Movement-centric explanations conceptualize resources as the economic and institutional tools and capacity available to a social movement organization (McCarthy and Zald 1977) or, more recently, as the broader ability to secure important support through “social appropriation” (Fligstein and McAdam 2012). Incumbents, however, are often vested in well-established political, economic, or social interests and thus have at hand a different suite of resources than do their challengers. These resources are often broadly held across a number of areas. Some resources are culturally embedded and subject to broad changes that the target might not have recognized given the nature of incumbency. They may be social—connected to robust status hierarchies that reinforce inequality and exploitation. Other resources may be institutional, allowing incumbents to draw strength from the state, market, local associations, and international institutions. Political resources matter as well, brokering access to decision-making mechanisms and enforcement processes. The vulnerability of economic targets—Luders’s primary focus—is critical, since economic capacity shapes an incumbent’s access to the financial resources necessary to co-opt, repress, or ignore challengers.
The fifth component—reactive tactics—emerges from the broad interpretive process that gives rise to attributions of opportunity and threat and assessments of which resources are available for appropriation. Interpretive processes are simply the continuous process of sense making and collective attribution in which all social actors engage (Davenport 2015). Practical sense making plays into both attribution of threat and opportunity as well as the appropriation of resources. The reason for this lies in the nature of incumbency. Thinking in terms of incumbency helps explain how material, ideological, and institutional processes mislead individuals and cause misperceptions about what broad changes mean and about which responses are sustainable. It may be too much to say that incumbency is a kind of false consciousness, but this analogy bears mentioning. Incumbency may produce misperceptions about the best way to respond to challengers. These interpretive processes may be rooted in any number of cultural, economic, or political assumptions about the previous status quo and about the broad destabilizing changes that are currently at play.
Initial assessments lead to reactive tactics. Reactive tactics are the knee-jerk responses that can run the gamut described by Luders. Contestation, however, is iterative rather than one-off. Once-acceptable repression may no longer be tolerated. As mentioned above, Gamson (1975, 1980) rightly argued that incumbents may choose to co-opt, preempt, or threaten movements. Luders (2010, 5) shows how costs shape whether targets conform to, accommodate, resist, or vacillate on movement demands. But first responses are not final. Tactics are not strategies. In other words, there is a round of play
after the initial threat assessment. This possibility is acknowledged by Luders (2010, 51): “although a movement might be in a stronger or weaker bargaining position at the outset, outcomes nearly always depend upon the selection of appropriate strategies, the modulation of movement demands, and the relative efficacy of countermovement opponents.” Resources, allies, abilities, and resources might need to be reassessed.
22The sixth and final component of the political-process theory is an escalation of uncertainty that results from the tactical interaction of the targeted incumbent and the challenger. Most models end here, since the independent variable—emergence of an episode of contention—has been explained. Yet if we want to take the story forward to explain outcomes, then we must recognize that contentious interactions generate new sets of realities and recognitions for both parties. Specific tactics create destabilizing changes that occur more locally than did the much broader change processes that may have triggered contention in the first place. This more local and specific tactical interaction triggers new processes that must be explained in their own right.
If first rounds are not final rounds, what does this say about movement outcomes and the target’s role in that process? With suitable modification, the existing model may be extended to include a subsequent iteration, as incumbents work to resolve and address the specific and local destabilizing changes that have resulted from contentious interaction (itself the effect of events set into motion by broad, destabilizing changes). I propose a complementary and subsequent model that takes incumbent responses seriously. A two-stage approach recognizes that target decisions about how to respond to perceived uncertainty matter at the onset of contention as well as in the emergence of new settlements. Such an incumbent-focused and process-oriented explanation of outcomes suggests that tactical interactions create specific and local destabilizing changes that require a reattribution of threat and opportunity as well as a reassessment of resources. This reappraisal leads to a more proactive and sustainable strategic response, which lays the groundwork for the new status quo (
figure 2.2).
23Adding a second phase to the traditional model allows us to link more clearly these factors to movement outcomes. The first factor—the specific and local nature of destabilizing changes—recognizes that contestation is an intimate affair. These struggles are rarely simple logistical considerations for participants on each side of the struggle. Strategic interactions are often emotional, risky, anxiety inducing, and surprising. By definition, they eschew the “business-as-usual” approach that defined the previous status quo. Sustained contention provides the incumbent with new and valuable experiences and information. Targets must now reevaluate a number of important variables, reappraising their assumptions in light of new information.
FIGURE 2.2 Phase Two: Incumbent Resolution of Episode of Contention
Recent work by Christian Davenport (2015, 43–45) points to the importance of reappraisal, as actors “identify what is taking place around them, putting the experience into the appropriate category, which then serves as the basis for subsequent action.” Davenport (2015, 44) borrows this idea from the field of psychology to show that movements with an “appropriate reading of the environment” are better able to withstand state repression. Expectations matter, but they may also be reexamined and revised. This is exactly the opportunity local destabilizing changes make available to incumbents. For example, powerful targets may ask themselves whether the state is still supportive of a particular set of economic practices and social relations, or whether foreign and domestic markets are able to bear previously widespread economic practices that have fallen out of favor, or whether a boycott by environmental activists is a chance to apologize and raise prices.
This brings us to the second and third factors, a
reattribution of threats, opportunities, and resources. Old activities must be reappraised in light of new information about the tradeoffs involved in maintaining the targeted behavior and thereby supporting the old status quo. One’s reappraisal may conclude that broad, disruptive change represents an opportunity rather than a threat. Resource portfolios may be reassessed and new permutations of economic, social, and political power may emerge. The result of this sequence is our fourth factor: the original reactive and tactical actions are replaced by a more proactive, considered, and strategic response. Jim Jasper and Jane Poulsen (1993) show that, over time, targets learn from their mistakes and are less likely to retain early vulnerabilities and repeat previous blunders. The result is a settlement representing the new status quo. The notion of a settlement, borrowed from field theorists, suggests that movements do not produce fixed outcomes but instead help produce new interim agreements that might themselves be the sites of future contestation (Fligstein and McAdam 2012).
The most important impact of this line of argument for movement scholars is that movements may push incumbents to take action based on a wide range of considerations, with the movement but one of these factors. How they ultimately respond may have less to do with the threat posed by the movement than with broader forces and factors.
24 In sum, sustained contention creates new sets of opportunities and threats for both challengers and incumbents. With new information, targeted incumbents are better able to assess the situation as it really is, rather than as it originally appeared. With the implications of broader changes in clearer view, and with the movement’s capacity and determination on better display, it is only at this point that the incumbents, whose power may by now be reduced significantly, can assess their options and act proactively and strategically.
TARGET RESPONSES
Laurie Pritchett, the police chief of Albany, Georgia, was successful in stifling movement efforts through the use of arrests rather than actions that would precipitate violence (Barkan 1984). With advanced planning, he cleared enough space in jails within Albany and the surrounding area such that the crowding of prisoners did not become a second mobilization point for the civil rights movement. Evidently, Pritchett had read “of King’s admiration of Gandhi’s method of filling the jails, and determined that this would not happen in Albany.” This tactic earned Pritchett a congratulatory telegram from Robert Kennedy, then U.S. attorney general (Barkan 1984, 557, 558).
Things turned out quite differently for T. Eugene “Bull” Connor, the law enforcement official whose infamous choice of violent tactics during civil rights efforts in Birmingham, Alabama, drove up arrests, produced shocking imagery, and invited unwanted attention from the federal government (Nunnelley 1991, Raines 1977). Pritchett and Connor doubtless chose different strategies as a result of perceived threats or opportunities, existing resources and repertoires, personality type, prior experience, and perhaps an emotional decision arrived at in the heat of the moment, what might now be called a snap decision or hot cognition. The work of Steven Barkan is particularly illustrative here: segregationists would have lost less ground had they drawn from the civil rights movement’s tactical repertoire and responded with nonviolence and legal challenges or invested in alternative institutions (Barkan 1984, Andrews 2002).
This book’s secondary objective is to draw on data from targets themselves, to suggest how they perceive and respond to movement challenges. Like most actors, targets choose from culturally available action repertoires, a fact clearly demonstrated by Pritchett’s innovative use of Gandhian means to thwart Gandhian ends. With two important exceptions, this range of motion is rarely described in the literature on target tactics. The first exception is again the work of William Gamson (1975), who proposed that movement outcomes could be explained by a combination of new acceptance and new advantages. Success was possible, but movements might also be preempted, co-opted, or threatened by targeted incumbents. Since movement outcomes were the unit of analysis, however, target decision making was not explained. Gamson did not specify whether this list was exhaustive, nor did he hypothesize how targets chose or implemented these efforts.
The second exception lies in Joseph Luders’s (2010, 5) proposal that targets respond with accommodation, resistance, vacillation, or conformity. However, his approach leaves little room for reappraisal and does not account for the possibilities of benefits and opportunities existing in addition to costs and threats. Taking reappraisal seriously affects Luders’s typology, since vacillation (“concession, negotiation, repression, quitting”) covers both process and outcome. This overlap is not problematic if we intend to explain an initial tactical response but becomes harder to work with if the unit of analysis is a new settlement. Drawing on the work of Gamson and Luders, I propose that five responses obtain in at least one of each phase of contention. These responses are admittedly not as tight as the two-by-two comparisons offered by Gamson and by Luders. They nevertheless retain some parsimony, especially considering that they cover three distinct phases in the mobilization cycle: before mobilization, during mobilization, and after mobilization. The full implication of these phases can be found in the concluding chapter.
PREEMPTION
Preemption is the act of reducing or eliminating contestable issues and is a byproduct of the conscious and unconscious exercise of power by the powerful.
25 In his seminal thesis on power Steven Lukes argues that power works in a number of ways (Gaventa 1982, Lukes [1974] 2005). At the most obvious level power may be used to overcome and overwhelm others. Less obviously, it may be used to structure the range of opinions available at any point in time. At its most sophisticated and insidious level, power is used to shape and structure desire. People get what they want, but what they want is something other than what they need. This thesis has proven difficult to verify empirically but goes some way toward explaining how it is that the powerful remain in control despite democratic institutions capable of channeling the interests of the powerful. The complex reality of this approach is emphasized in the following chapter.
COUNTERMOBILIZATION AND CO-OPTATION
If preemption is the act of preventing the emergence of issues, then countermobilization and co-optation are tactics used proactively to reduce the effects of collective action. A countermovement is a “movement that makes contrary claims simultaneously to those of the original movement” (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996, 1630). By co-optation, I simply mean those times when a movement gains acceptance but no new advantages.
26 Thus, co-optation, countermobilization, and repression occur in response to the threat of a movement gain, when the goals of a population are threatened and when political allies are available to support mobilization (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996). Recent work by Kenneth Andrews has convincingly demonstrated that it was the credible threat of desegregation, combined with resources held by both blacks and by whites, which led to the establishment of alternative schools for the education of Mississippi whites.
27 Countermobilization is filtered through civil society’s forms of organization and action. It may be that this energy emerges authentically and from the grassroots. It is also often the case that the support for such “popular responses” is championed by or interlinked with the state. Politicians, bureaucrats, or political allies may provide sub rosa support for countermovements. Indeed, it is also facilitated by institutions, as described by Jim Jasper and Jane Poulsen: New York University had already been targeted for animal testing, and it used this prior experience to go on the offensive and defensive quickly. Similarly, Southern lawmakers who relied on an all-white electorate both instigated and supported resistance to the civil rights movement.
28 Slaveholder efforts to countermobilize and co-opt are found in the fourth chapter.
A large and growing body of literature has focused on state-sponsored repression and on the mobilization-repression nexus (Davenport 2010, 2015; Lichbach 1987; Linden and Klandermans 2006; Rasler 1996). Repression is arguably the most highly visible of the options available to the state, and indeed scholarship tends to focus on state responses to collective action (Earl 2003, 2011). However, repression is rarely an option for many universities or churches and is not possible for some corporations and individuals targeted by social movement efforts in the global North. In fact, Charles Tilly’s (1978, 100) quite broad definition of repression—“any action by another group which raises the contender’s cost of collective action”—does not prescribe the presence of a state. Jennifer Earl’s (2003, 46, 49) typology of repression likewise includes private agents as potentially coercive actors alongside agents of the state. The reality of private actors involved in repression is stark. Corporate involvement in repression extends from violent union busting to systemic physical coercion. Extractive industries are regularly involved in illicit agreements with militias, juntas, semiregular military personnel, and other non–state security actors (Mouawad 2009).
Incumbents may respond with repression when they feel threatened, and there is no reason to believe that the strength of this finding disappears when sources of authority other than the state are threatened, so long as this use of violence has legitimacy in the cultural and political context (Davenport 2007). Likewise, soft repression from nonstate actors may take the form of ridicule, stigma, and silencing; these are actions intended to exclude movements and movement actors from the cultural and political spaces where they are advocates or claimants.
29RESIGNATION
From the perspective of the social movement, the cessation of the target’s behavior represents a victory, and victory may be easily contrasted with failure. Things are not so simple from the target’s perspective. Movement adversaries may assess the broader context and resign themselves to the situation, simply deciding to quit. Alternately, targeted incumbents may attempt to repress, persist, countermobilize, or adapt. Quitting, by which I mean abandoning the behavior for which one has been targeted, is a complex process and rarely the first choice. It is composed, like each of these options, of a particular set of individual decisions (whether to repress or countermobilize) and abilities (whether one has the resources and position to persist). From the outside, this may look like movement success, and this is not altogether untrue. However, there is a difference between a movement rightly claiming victory and a target owning up to defeat.
PERSISTENCE
Persistence is the continuation, in identical or nearly identical form, of the originally targeted behavior. Repression, countermobilization, and co-optation are active responses to the original mobilization. Persistence is hardly a response at all—rather, it is the simple continuation of the status quo, albeit with minor modifications. Persistence may involve modifying exploitation into a nearly identical form. Most (or all) benefits enjoyed prior to mobilization thus continue under slightly different conditions (Blackmon 2009). In other words, the target undermines the movement’s ability to exercise power, levy sanctions, and raise costs. Where repression aims to silence, crush, or arrest a movement’s activities, and where countermobilization is meant to cancel out movement gains, persistence and adaptation are focused on pursuing the status quo while avoiding conflict (Jackman 1994). A business, for example, might offer to self-police for labor rights violations in order to avoid the deeper reforms demanded by the movement. Attempts to continue near-similar work under new conditions—to pursue old goals in new ways and not get caught—is nonconfrontational and certainly less risky than countermobilization or repression. This approach may also be pursued by targets that lack the capacity or propensity to shift out of the targeted sector of the economy or by a particular type of business practice that lacks the resources to quit altogether (see McAdam 1996, 27). Those lacking alternative forms of income or those with deep levels of commitment to social dominance may choose to persist as well.
30 Persistence may be a reflexive reaction underwritten by a default commitment to an earlier set of norms and ideals. Alternately, it may be the proactive product of a longer-term and considered commitment to the cultural or economic benefits provided by the behavior in question. Here we enter the realm of motives, where I am reluctant to speculate.
TARGET RESPONSES ARE SHAPED BY FAMILIAR FACTORS
And now we come to the book’s third key objective: advancing a tentative hypothesis about why targets in this study respond as they do. I suggest that variation in response is fundamentally premised on a reassessment of the situation. Specifically, incumbents ask themselves whether the tactical interaction represents a threat or an opportunity and whether there are sufficient resources available to act on this interpretation of the situation. Strategic interactions may change interpretations, attributions, resources, or tactics, since such interactions are not one-off but take place iteratively, over time. These interactions produce emergent phenomena—new social realities that are greater than the sum of their parts. A target’s ultimate response is primarily dependent on a more accurate assessment of their own resources and whether these changes are better thought of as opportunities or threats. In emphasizing resources, I do not mean to slight ideas, attitudes, values, or norms.
31 There is every reason to believe that some targets are more willing to persist than others.
32 But on the main, targeted incumbents prefer the status quo and will try to do whatever it takes to hold on to the power and privilege of the past. In doing so, incumbents are constrained by repertoires—those responses that they know and that have obtained legitimacy in their world.
33SUMMARY
In the final analysis, while movement scholars have spent the last few decades exploring poor peoples’ movements, far less is known about how those at the top experience being targeted by such movements.
34 Oppressive attitudes and behavior are intimately connected to broader cultural systems of legitimizing myths—widespread ideas that reinforce the legitimacy of inequality (Gaventa 1982, Sewell 1992). Everyday oppressors are targeted on a regular basis. Certainly, challenges to inequality—whether through broader cultural changes or specific political transformations—affect movement challengers
and rights-violating movement targets.
While human rights violators and movement targets indeed repress and countermobilize, this is often a reactionary first-order response. In the longer term, targets must choose whether to persist, adapt, or simply quit. This process-oriented and interactive explanation sheds new light on our understanding of how some patterns of human rights violations wither and fade while others persist.
As the next three chapters show, the capacity of oppressors to resist intervention depends on their position in broader cultural, economic, and political contexts. Employers linked to thriving sectors of the economy have clear incentives to continue behavior that is working for them. After all, they have the resources and political cover to deflect challenges—most of the time. These resources may also allow them to adapt, shifting into new positions that do not carry the stigma introduced by movement efforts. Well-resourced movement targets may be contrasted with those in declining sectors of the economy. Upper-caste but rural farmers in India, for example, are decreasingly able to maintain the status quo and often lack the ability to deflect intervention attempts. This is because they are experiencing multiple, simultaneous, and costly challenges to their economic, political, or cultural power. Cultural threats come in the form of lost respect from a previously docile labor force, often as the result of a successful reframing of the status quo. Economic challenges come in the form of competition with new sites of employment. Political stagnation comes in the form of acute disillusionment with political and policy processes. Social movements often target incumbents whom the movements suspect may be vulnerable—employers in thriving or declining economic sectors of the economy differ in their capabilities to resist a worker insurgency.
35 These contexts and decisions are not isolated and discrete but instead interact with one another in complicated ways.
