Social Stratification and Social Movements: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on an Ambivalent Relationship 9780367227746, 9780429276774

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Social Stratification and Social Movements

This volume addresses the contested relationship between social stratification and social movements in three different ways: First, the authors address the relationship between social stratification and the emergence of protest mobilization. Second, the texts look at social stratification and social positions to explain variations in political orientations, as well as differing aims and interests of protestors. Finally, the volume focuses on the socio-structural composition of protestors. Social Stratification and Social Movements takes up recent attempts to reconnect research on these two fields. Instead of calling for a return of a class perspective or abandoning the classical social movement research agenda, it introduces a multi-dimensional perspective on stratification and social movements and broadens the view by extending the empirical analysis beyond Europe. Sabrina Zajak is leader of the Department Consensus and Conflict at the German Center for Integration and Migration Research, Berlin, and Assistant Professor for globalization conflicts, social movement and labour at the RuhrUniversity Bochum, Institute for Social Movements, Germany. She is the author of Transnational Activism, Global Labour Governance, and China. Sebastian Haunss is founding member of the Institute for Social Movement Studies (ipb) and Professor of Political Science at the University of Bremen Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy (SOCIUM) where he leads the research group on Social Conflicts. He is author of Conflicts in the Knowledge Society: The Contentious Politics of Intellectual Property.

The Mobilization Series on Social Movements, Protest, and Culture

Published in conjunction with Mobilization: An International Quarterly, the premier research journal in the field, this series publishes a broad range of research in social movements, protest and contentious politics. This is a growing field of social science research that spans sociology and political science as well as anthropology, geography, communications and social psychology. Enjoying a broad remit, the series welcome works on the following topics: social movement networks; social movements in the Global South; social movements, protest, and culture; personalist politics, such as living environmentalism, guerrilla gardens, anticonsumerist communities, anarchist-punk collectives; and emergent repertoires of contention. Series editor: Professor Hank Johnston, San Diego State University, USA. Activating China Local Actors, Foreign Influence, and State Response Setsuko Matsuzawa Social Movements, Nonviolent Resistance, and the State Edited by Hank Johnston When Citizens Talk About Politics Edited by Clare Saunders and Bert Klandermans Social Stratification and Social Movements Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on an Ambivalent Relationship Edited by Sabrina Zajak and Sebastian Haunss Protesting Gender The LGBTIQ Movement and its Opponents in Italy Anna Lavizzari For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/TheMobilization-Series-on-Social-Movements-Protest-and-Culture/book-series/ ASHSER1345

Social Stratification and Social Movements Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on an Ambivalent Relationship Edited by Sabrina Zajak and Sebastian Haunss

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Sabrina Zajak and Sebastian Haunss; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sabrina Zajak and Sebastian Haunss to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-22774-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-27677-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

In Memory of Britta Baumgarten

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Foreword Acknowledgements 1 Social stratification and social movements: an introduction

ix x xi xiv xvii 1

SEBASTIAN HAUNSS AND SABRINA ZAJAK

2 Social movements, stratification, and international political economy: integrating insights

8

SABRINA ZAJAK AND CHRISTOPH SORG

3 Social movement unionism: theoretical foundations and empirical evidence

30

KLAUS DÖRRE

4 New cleavages in the knowledge society?: social movements and the production, use, and valorization of knowledge

48

SEBASTIAN HAUNSS

5 Class counts, but social background matters: habitus-structure conflicts and social inequality in protest research

67

LARS SCHMITT

6 Crowd-cleavage alignment: do protest issues and protesters’ cleavage position align? MARIE-LOUISE DAMEN AND JACQUELIEN VAN STEKELENBURG

82

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Contents

7 Adapting environmental and climate justice to local political struggles in South Africa

109

MELANIE MÜLLER

8 Movement goals and recruitment strategies: how mitigation and adaptation shape inclusion in climate justice projects

126

JOOST DE MOOR

9 Mobilization of the most deprived: insights from Brazilian movements of homeless people and recyclable materials collectors

146

BRITTA BAUMGARTEN

10 Social movements and intersectionality: the case of migrants’ social activism

168

KATARZYNA WOJNICKA

Index

185

Figures

6.1 Institutionalized class cleavage versus non-institutionalized class cleavage, based on Hutter (2013) 10.1 Brighton Beach Pride 2018 (Katarzyna Wojnicka)

91 180

Tables

3.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 6.13 8.1 8.2 9.1

The new conflict formation as seen in labour conflicts in 2015 Overview of the demonstrations per issue and country How many demonstrations and participants (between brackets) in which issues and countries? Indexes class cleavage strength SES: Oesch-scale CCC demonstrators’ anti-austerity issues vs. socio-political and cultural issues (%) Political values: CCC demonstrators’ anti-austerity issues vs. socio-political and cultural (means) Organizational embeddedness: CCC demonstrators’ anti-austerity issues vs socio-political and cultural issues (% membership) SES: Oesch-scale demonstrators anti-austerity issues vs. GP (%) SES: Oesch-scale demonstrators socio-political and cultural issues vs GP (%) Political values: demonstrators anti-austerity issues vs. GP (means) Political values: demonstrators socio-political and cultural issues vs. GP (means) Organizational embeddedness: demonstrators anti-austerity issues vs. GP (% membership/belonging) Organizational embeddedness: demonstrators socio-political and cultural issues vs. GP (% membership/belonging) Overview of the main results Overview of participant observation moments (2017) Interviews with organisers conducted by the authors Summary of the potential effects of living rough

39 89 90 93 95 96 97 98 99 101 102 103 103 104 145 145 148

Contributors

Britta Baumgarten ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology Britta Baumgarten graduated in 2009 from the University Duisburg-Essen with a PhD thesis on interest representation of the unemployed. Until her death in October 2018, she worked at CIES, Lisbon on current Portuguese social movements against austerity, movements of the poor in Brazil and the changed frameworks for action of these movements over time. Her research interests were transnational cooperation of movement activists and the political participation of groups usually excluded from political decision-making. Christoph Sorg New York University, Department of Sociology Christoph Sorg finished his PhD at the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences (BGSS) at Humboldt University Berlin (and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence) and is currently a post-doc visiting scholar at the Department of Sociology at New York University. His work links critical political economy and economic sociology with social movement studies, with a particular focus on theories of capitalism, financialization, debt, markets, globalization and contentious politics. Jacquelien van Stekelenburg VU University Amsterdam, Department of Sociology Jacquelien van Stekelenburg (1966) holds a chair in Social Change and Conflict in the department of Sociology of the VU-University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She studies the social psychological dynamics of moderate and radical protest participation with a special interest in group identification, emotions and ideologies as motivators for action. She got her PhD in 2006 (cum laude) from the VU-University. Jacquelien’s research interests are social movements, online and offline participation and mobilization, intergroup conflict, identity and emotions and societal polarization. She has published on these topics in journals such as: the Journal of Social Issues, the American Sociological Review and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements. Furthermore, Jacquelien is a member of the Dutch Association

xii Contributors for Social Psychology (ASPO), the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) and the American Sociological Association (ASA). Marie-Louise Damen Norwegian Police University College Marie-Louise Damen is an associate professor at the Norwegian Police University College. Together with Jacquelien van Stekelenburg at the department of Sociology of the VU-University in The Netherlands, she studied street demonstrations through the len of cleavage theory. In the Dutch NWO-funded project “Fighting at the fault lines of society” she investigated the impact of contextual variation on the dynamics of protest by comparing demonstrations in different countries and mobilizing contexts. Joost de Moor Stockholm University, Department of Political Science Joost de Moor is a postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University’s Political Science department. He has published on social movements and political participation in various edited volumes and academic journals, such as Theory and Society, Environmental Politics, Acta Politica, Mobilization, Parliamentary Affairs, and Journal of Urban and Regional Research. His research interests include environmental and climate activism, political consumerism and lifestyle politics. In his current projects, he looks at the impact of climate change on activism, the Fridays for Future school strike movement, and the expansion of political participation repertoires. Katarzyna Wojnicka German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), Centre for European Research at the University of Gothenburg Senior Researcher at DeZIM – Deutsches Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung in Berlin, Germany and Research Associate in the Centre for European Research at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She holds a doctoral degree in sociology from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. Her research falls in the intersection of critical men and masculinities studies, gender studies, migration studies and social movements’ research. Her work has been published in various internationally recognized outlets such as Palgrave MacMillan; Routledge; Men and Masculinities; Social Movement Studies and others. She studied sociology and gender studies in Poland, Germany, USA and Spain. Klaus Dörre Professor at the Institute of Sociology, Chair for Sociology of Work, Economic and Industrial Sociology, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena Klaus Dörre is Chair for Sociology of Work, Economic and Industrial Sociology at the FSU Jena, is one of the directors of the DFG-Research Group on PostGrowth Societies and is co-editor of the Berliner Journal für Soziologie (BJS) and Global Dialogue. His research focuses on theory of capitalism/ financial market capitalism, precarious employment, strategic unionism, digitalization and right-wing populism.

Contributors

xiii

Lars Schmitt University of Applied Sciences Duesseldorf, Institute of Social and Cultural Sciences Lars Schmitt is Professor for Political Sociology at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf. His research interests are Social Inequality, Conflicts and Participation above all in contexts of Higher Education and Social Movements. He developed the Methodology of Habitus-Structure Conflicts to uncover Social Inequality. Melanie Müller German Institute for International and Security Affairs Melanie Müller works as a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, SWP). Her regional focus is on Southern Africa, with a focus on political and social developments, as well as migration and conflicts over raw materials in sub-Saharan Africa and responsibility in the mining supply chain. She studies political science and received her PhD in sociology from Free University Berlin. In her dissertation, she had focused on the impact of international conferences on social movements in South Africa. Sabrina Zajak German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), Ruhr University Bochum Sabrina Zajak is professor of “globalization conflicts, social movements and labor” at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Institute for Social Movements. Currently, she leads the department of Consent and Conflict at the German Center for Integration and Migration Research. She mainly works on issues of Social Movements and activism; civil society; globalization, political economy and as well as current struggles for social inclusion in Germany. She is a founding member of the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Research in Berlin and vice president of the Research Committee 47 “Social Movements and Social Classes” of the International Sociology Association. Sebastian Haunss University of Bremen, SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy Sebastian Haunss is professor in political science and head of the research group on social conflicts at the Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Bremen (SOCIUM). His research interests are social movements, political mobilizations, social networks global health politics. He is a founding member of the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Research.

Foreword

Editors and contributors to this volume explore the relationship between social stratification in a diverse and refreshing way. The articles discuss in depth the socio-structural substratum for the emergence of conflicts and mobilizations and the influence of inequalities and social positions in both the emergence and the development of protests and social movements. In addition, they address how social movements can affect social stratification in different ways, changing worldviews and policies that change or at least make social injustices, inequalities and the logic of power visible. The message is clear: we cannot understand social movements without analyzing what we might call “societal configurations,” that is, the main matrices and cleavages that structure social dynamics. Social stratification is a key element of a societal configuration, since it deals with classes, status, mobility and power. In turn, social movements are important “thermometers” of these configurations, alerting society as a whole to conflicts, injustices and alternative life horizons. This means that social movements are central actors in social change, but obviously not everything that moves within a society is a movement. The process of social change has been analyzed from multiple perspectives on modernity. Those interested in social movements emphasized class conflict, emancipation, identities, and social justice. Meanwhile, scholars of social stratification focused mainly on the structure of society and its displacements. Classical sociology has never strictly separated these discussions. Marx and Weber created the basic foundations for the discussion of both social movements and stratification. After this, there were many authors who, recovering, deepening or criticizing them, continued to treat these discussions in an articulated manner. The problem begins when specialized fields of discussion begin to institutionalize at Western universities, defining more delimited and autonomous agendas. The effect is quite ambivalent: on the one hand, much progress has been made in specific knowledge about certain topics, objects and realities. On the other hand, certain codes, languages and grammars of each area were created generating boundaries, sometimes rigid, between one field and another. One of the mains effects of the institutionalization and professionalization of the different research fields is not only the difficulty in dialoguing with other

Foreword xv fields, but also the inability to frame broader issues of society as a whole. Both social movements studies and the “stratification area” have become very specialized in recent decades, albeit in different ways. The stratification discussion was institutionalized before and, despite Piketty’s sales success, is now more closed than the porous discussion of movements. For the most radical practitioners of the stratification debate, it has practically become synonymous with quantitative methods. A social movement scholar will hardly be able to understand the multiple types of linear regression and sophisticated techniques that seem to bring some social stratification debates closer to statistics or econometrics than sociology. The difference in approaches is visible if we visit some of the best-known journals in the respective fields, such as Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Mobilization or Social Movement Studies. We could put it all aside and argue that what really matters are the concepts and the elements that unite the discussion in a substantive way. But even here, other issues emerge. Such a central notion as social class is generally used quite differently in our two fields of debate. In the case of social movements studies, it is more dynamic and still closely linked to political action, whereas for social stratification scholars it has been empirically used as a “stratum.” But there is also a second implication of the institutionalization of these fields of debate. In the case of social movements, the official narrative is limited to the United States and Europe and ignores a rich literature from the periphery of the world that discusses the relationship between social stratification and social movements for decades. For many Latin American colleagues, it may not make much sense to call for “bringing Stratification back in” because, in fact, it has never been absent. In the 1970s, while the most influential studies in the US began to isolate social movements from social cleavages, and the debate of the “new social movements” in Europe took a more cultural course, leaving aside the earlier concern for social stratification, social movements scholars in Latin America devoted much attention to the uneven conditions of development, and the struggles for material claims (housing, land, territory). Prior to this, the theories of marginality, internal colonialism, or dependence, for example, sought in different ways to articulate social movements and stratification. To move forward on the stratification agenda within social movement studies, we therefore need to look more at other fields of discussion (such as stratification itself) as well as elsewhere in the world, considering the Global South not only as an empirical laboratory, but also as a territory for the production of knowledge and theories about social movements and stratification. A creative and dynamic (re)reading of Marxism and critical thought it’s also essential. These will be a task for other books yet to come. Meanwhile, through rich empirical analysis, the present volume, advances significantly in understanding the social and political forces underlie contemporary conflicts and the system of oppression and privileges, the relationship between social movements and multiple forms of inequalities (not only class based, but also racial and gender), the power dimension of social stratification, as well as the relationship between social position, cleavages, classes and protest. Hence, in this book “economy”

xvi Foreword or “stratification” is considered not as mere context or background for collective actions, as often happens, but rather as constitutive elements of social movements and social change. Breno Bringel, Institute of Social and Political Studies, State University of Rio de Janeiro and president of the research network on Social Movements and Social Classes of the International Sociology Association.

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book resulted from a workshop we organized in Florence, back in 2014, and took shape over the following years. The authors would like to thank several people for their feedback, help and support in the process of creating this book. First we are grateful to all the members of the German Research Council (DFG) scientific network “New Perspectives on Social Movements and Protest.” The network organized several workshops and events, and exchange among the members continued beyond those meetings, resulting in two edited volumes so far and several co-authored papers (for an overview see http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~netzsozbew/netzpubl.htm). Special thanks go to Jochen Roose for his great efforts in creating and maintaining the network. Although funding for the network ended, cooperation between its members has continued, leading to this edited volume. We would also like to thank all the contributors to this volume for their continuous effort and willingness to rewrite their papers and work with us. We remember very well Britta Baumgarten (1975–2018), a dear friend and wonderful colleague who left us far too soon. Britta had been a vital, inspiring and very important part of the network. Her article is included in this volume. She had wanted to further revise and improve it, but we are convinced that in its current form it is already an important contribution and reflection of her work. Finally we would like to express our gratitude to the members of the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Studies Berlin (ipb), in particular Simon Teune and Moritz Sommer who supported the whole production process.

1

Social stratification and social movements An introduction Sebastian Haunss and Sabrina Zajak

Bringing stratification back into social movement research Several prominent social movements of the last decade have addressed different aspects of stratification. The Occupy movement in the US criticized in its slogan “We are the 99%” not only a lack of democratic representation but even more pronounced economic inequality (Gaby and Caren 2016). This combination of representational and economic claims is also prominent at the protests of the “Yellow Vests” in France (Rucht 2019). Other aspects of stratification, especially gender and race, were at the center of the #metoo movement, the women’s marches (McKane and McCammon 2018), the “Black Lives Matter” mobilizations (Williamson et al. 2018) and the #unteilbar [#indivisible] demonstration in the conflict over migration politics in Germany. The forceful return of (economic) inequality as a movement issue during the Great Recession and in its aftermath point to a connection between individual or collective life chances and protest. This challenges to some degree the movement society thesis (Neidhardt and Rucht 1993; Meyer and Tarrow 1998) which assumes that protest in current societies is ubiquitous and not necessarily related to societal cleavage structures. Looking at the current landscape of research and protest, one may get the impression that, although different aspects of stratification are addressed by social movements, social movement studies tend to separate identity issues from economic concerns, largely abandoning a holistic look at the link between movements and stratification.

Why has social movement research largely abandoned research on social divisions and differentiations in societies? That social movement scholars neglect research on stratification was not always the case. When researchers started to write about the then “new” social movements of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s (Melucci 1980; Habermas 1981; Offe 1985; Raschke 1985; Touraine 1988) the issue of class and social stratification was quite prominent: The new movements were discussed as signs or results of new societal lines of conflict representing the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial society. From a perspective that tried to understand social movements

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within a wider theory of society, neo- or post-Marxist scholars searched for new antagonisms or cleavages that would displace the core conflict of the industrial age: the conflict between labor and capital. In this perspective social structure was seen as creating and altering conditions for social conflict and social movements. The strength of such a theoretical perspective is that social movements are not seen as isolated and largely disconnected phenomena, but as interrelated expressions and manifestations of social conflicts rooted in large-scale processes of social change. But the obvious shortcoming of such a perspective is that it is incapable of accounting for the actual empirical diversity of protests and social movements that do not necessarily address societal cleavages. From the pluralist perspective that started to dominate social movement research from the 1970s in the US, and also later in Europe, social movements are not linked to societal cleavages but seen as the expressions of grievances of actors, actor coalitions, or populations. Turner and Killian’s famous dictum that there is always enough discontent in a society to feed social movements (1972: 251) strengthened the notion that social movements should not be seen as irregular exceptions in democratic societies, and made the question which role social stratification might play in structuring conflicts and for explaining protest less relevant. The “classic social movement [research] agenda” (McAdam et al. 2001: 14) of political process and framing approaches further decoupled movement emergence, forms, and outcomes from societal cleavages by focusing instead on opportunities, mobilizing structures, framing, and repertoires of contention as the determinants of mobilization strength, political success and the factors affecting the rise and decline of social movements. In most of the research, when social change was still present, it was only as an innocuous background condition, or as an outcome of mobilization. In a way this was an important step toward establishing social movement studies as discipline – leaving aspects of stratification to other fields of research like industrial relations, milieu and lifestyle studies, or inequality research. But the consequence was that during a time when rising inequalities and fundamental social restructuring due to globalization were being discussed everywhere, a large body of research on a core actor fighting global inequalities – the Global Justice Movement – was produced in the field of social movement studies without directly linking this research back to stratification. There are various explanations for that. Apart from path dependencies of the discipline that had established other explanatory categories for movement emergence and success than social structural ones, one important aspect is that the ideas of stratification and class are often at least implicitly linked to national populations. The already diffuse concept of society usually presupposes a national container. But with the emergence of the Global Justice Movement the nation-state no longer seemed to provide the appropriate frame of reference for understanding the more and more transnational forms of protest. Social movement researchers instead focused their attention on the chances and problems of internationalization and cosmopolitan activism and thus issues of stratification were pushed even further in the background (della Porta and Tarrow 2005; Tarrow 2005).

Social stratification and social movements

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Bringing stratification back in One important contribution of stratification analysis is to see how social inequalities persist and endure even within social movements. In most protest events in Europe and the US, participants predominantly come from the middle class and have a higher than average educational background (Andretta and della Porta 2014). Thus, going to university, not only opens the door to good jobs but also makes it more likely that one participates in protest events. Economic stratification never ceased to be addressed in numerous protests about social policy cuts and in trade union and labor movement mobilizations. In particular, research on social movements in the Global South continuously debates issues of exploitation structural deprivation and struggles against neoliberal hegemony (Motta and Nilsen 2011). In the Global North, it forcefully gained salience and prominence again with the anti-austerity protests in southern Europe. Movement scholars began to reintegrate the debates about the structuring force of capitalism into social movement studies (della Porta 2015; Roose et al. 2018; Zajak et al. 2018) and Thomas Piketty and his collaborators contributed to put inequality back on the research agenda. Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014) is a forceful reminder that the labor capital cleavage is still salient, and that growing economic inequalities are still a potent source for social conflicts. But it is not only the resurgence of inequality that merits a renewed attention to stratification, social cleavage structures, and social movements. Social movements sometimes politicize latent cleavage structures and thus make them the object of manifest social conflict. Paulo Gerbaudo for example argues that those protests within the new anti-austerity protest cycle which have been identified as “the movement of the squares” or “occupy” protests should actually be interpreted as movements for popular sovereignty that address a new central conflict of current societies, the conflict between the citizens and oligarchies (Gerbaudo 2017: 77). Looking at a different set of protests, Sebastian Haunss argues, that the series of mobilizations around issues of intellectual property claims address a new cleavage of the knowledge society, a conflict about the generation, valuation, appropriation, and use of knowledge (Haunss 2013). So, there is on the one hand with the return of inequality renewed attention to the old cleavages of the industrial age and on the other hand a re-appraisal of the idea that we should pay closer attention to the emergence of new cleavages and their relation to current protests. This renewed attention to stratification and social movements was accompanied and facilitated by another development in the area of methods and data production. A growing data source resulting from protest surveys enables researchers to pose questions about the social background of protesters which they were previously not able to answer. For most historical social movements, data about the social composition of their constituencies are not available or only for core activists or organizational members. A rare exception is the data on volunteers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project (McAdam 1986). But since the 2000s protest surveys have

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been widely employed, and they provide data on regular protest participants (Walgrave et al. 2016).1 Based on this data it is now possible to go beyond the often quite superficial notion that new social movements are dominated by the middle class – and it may just be that they now can substantiate the claim of middle-class dominance in many current protests. Based on protest surveys, thus a bottom-up perspective allows researchers to identify the social groups or classes from which the movements draw their constituents. This book follows such recent attempts to reconnect social movement with stratification research. It neither calls for the return of a class perspective nor does it negate the merits of the classical social movement research agenda. The book’s main contribution is its multi-dimensional perspective on the stratification and social movements we are going to outline next.

Different approaches to study social movements and stratification Throughout this book, we distinguish between three different perspectives linking social movement and stratification research. Most contributions speak to more than one perspective: but we believe it has an analytical value in its own right to make explicit the different dimensions and reflect about and theorize their relationship. 1) The first perspective takes stratification as a starting point for understanding the emergence of several mobilizations sharing a common socio-structural trait. Research using stratification to explain the emergence of social movements, their goals, and their interests with general patterns within society usually starts with an analysis of these patterns, and a theory of society. Sebastian Haunss for example sees the emergence of protest mobilizations around issues of online privacy, internet regulation, and intellectual property rights tightly intertwined with structural social changes associated with the development of (post-)industrial societies into knowledge societies. Sabrina Zajak and Christoph Sorg view society through the theoretical lenses of international political economy. They argue that capitalism and the continuing commodification of labor and live worlds shapes the way movements think and act within society. Katarzyna Wojnicka uses an intersectional perspective to explore how the combination of certain social categories is linked to movement emergence – e.g. that marginalization of women is linked not only to their gender but also to other factors, such as race, social class, citizenship status, sexual identity, age, (dis)ability, and others. Lars Schmitt draws on Bourdieu’s theory of structure and habitus to explain movements and protests. He argues that not only class but also embodied and internalized values (habitus) shape conflicts within society. Melanie Müller links the analysis of social class with social differentiation by ethnicity and looks for re-uniting narratives bridging the distance between the two. And Klaus Dörre discusses the consequences of changing labor conflicts that increasingly become transnational for the emergence of

Social stratification and social movements

5

new forms of social movement unionism and the transformation of institutionalized labor relations in Germany. 2) The second perspective looks at the stratified nature of social movements and protest events. The structure of social inequality in a society can help to understand how movements set their goals and develop their strategies. Research focusing on this perspective is interested in the social positions of protesters and systematic variation between protest participants and the general population. Key questions driving this research are, “Who protests? Are protest events representing the citizens of the country or is a particular crowd protesting?” The assumption is that the social composition of protesters is telling us something about the protest, beyond the claims made by the participants. In their contribution Jacquelien van Stekelenburg and Marie Louise Damen compare multiple European countries to show that in countries with a salient class cleavage, demonstrations will each attract their own specific target groups resulting in a selective protest crowd. In countries with a pacified class cleavage, social movement organizations attempt to mobilize a more diverse constituency, thus use broader mobilizing frames, leading to less alignment between issue and crowd. Looking at mobilizations of homeless people in Brazil, Britta Baumgarten picks up the old debate about the effect of stratified access to resources on social movement mobilization. Based on her case studies she concludes that one key element to overcome the obstacles of “poor peoples’ movements” is an organizational structure that is in continuous and direct contact with its constituency, organizes regular activities of interest for them, and producing visible short-term successes. Joost de Moor discusses how stratification has consequences both for recruitment and for the definition of movement goals. Based on a study of two climate justice social movement organizations (SMOs) he shows how the choice between climate change mitigation vs. climate change adaption strategies interacts in complex ways with a recruitment-focus on groups with higher socioeconomic status and beliefs about good (and radical) climate change policies. Of course, there is an immediate relation between the first and the second perspective. By mobilizing social cleavages, movements can also contribute to change the social stratification of society or even overcome existing cleavages. 3) The third perspective looks at stratification as an outcome. Social movements are not only deeply embedded in the social relations which structure our societies, they also shape and restructure social relationships. Their impact on the stratification of society can be significant and yet remains often unacknowledged. They do so in at least two ways: First by addressing the state to introduce politics of redistribution, of recognition and of inclusion. Second through re-shaping identity perceptions and inventing frames that bridge divisions across categorical boundaries thereby creating solidarity across individuals and groups and thus also society.

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Most contributions in this book touch upon the issue of consequences and outcomes of the movements on various dimensions of stratification. Klaus Dörre in his contribution considers how trade unions ally with social movements in fights and bargaining over workplace regulation in an increasingly deregulated context. Sorg and Zajak show that movements are capable to reshape local, national, and international institutions regulating capitalism, but also use the political-economic perspective to point toward the (unintended) consequences and system-stabilizing effects of social movement activities; intersectionality as a political strategy. Katarzyna Wojnicka shows how intersectionality as a political strategy can create narratives of the very marginalized, making multiple dimensions of their exploitation and discrimination visible. This helps to produce alternative knowledge, challenging dominant frames within society and creating more opportunities to challenge unequal power structures.

Note 1 In Germany, the Institute for Social Movement Studies conducted for example six surveys at large protest events including at a Friday for Future demonstration, Anti TTIP and G-20 protest or wright wing mobilization (Pegida) https://protestinstitut.eu/pro jekte/demonstrationsbefragungen/

References Andretta, Massimiliano and Donatella della Porta. 2014. “Surveying Protestors: Why and How”. In Methodological Practices in Social Movement Research, ed. Donatella della Porta. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 308–334. della Porta, Donatella. 2015. Social Movements in Times of Austerity. Cambridge: Polity Press. della Porta, Donatella and Sidney G. Tarrow, eds. 2005. Transnational Protest and Global Activism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gaby, Sarah and Neal Caren. 2016. “The Rise of Inequality: How Social Movements Shape Discursive Fields”. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 21(4): 413–429. Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2017. The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism, and Global Protest. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. “New Social Movements”. Telos 49: 33–37. Haunss, Sebastian. 2013. Conflicts in the Knowledge Society. The Contentious Politics of Intellectual Property. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McAdam, Doug. 1986. “Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer”. American Journal of Sociology 92(1): 64–90. McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKane, Rachel G. and Holly J. McCammon. 2018. “Why We March: The Role of Grievances, Threats, and Movement Organizational Resources in the 2017 Women’s Marches”. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 23(4): 401–424. Melucci, Alberto. 1980. “The New Social Movements. A Theoretical Approach”. Social Science Information 19(2): 199–226.

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Meyer, David S. and Sidney Tarrow, eds. 1998. The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Motta, Sara and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, eds. 2011. Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development and Resistance. Springer. Neidhardt, Friedhelm and Dieter Rucht. 1993. “Auf dem Weg in die “Bewegungsgesellschaft”? Über die Stabilisierbarkeit sozialer Bewegungen”. Soziale Welt 44(3): 305–326. Offe, Claus. 1985. “New Social Movements: Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics”. Social Research 52(4): 817–868. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Raschke, Joachim. 1985. Soziale Bewegungen. Ein historisch-systematischer Grundriß. Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus. Roose, Jochen, Moritz Sommer and Franziska Scholl, eds. 2018. Europas Zivilgesellschaft in der Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Rucht, Dieter. 2019. Die Gelbwestenbewegung. Stand und Perspektiven. ipb working paper 1/2019, Berlin: Institut für Protest- und Bewegungsforschung, https://protestinstitut.eu/ wp-content/uploads/2019/02/dieter-rucht-gelbwesten.pdf (last accessed August 5, 2019). Tarrow, Sidney. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Touraine, Alain. 1988. Return of the Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial Society. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, Ralph H. and Lewis M. Killian. 1972. Collective Behavior. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Walgrave, Stefaan, Ruud Wouters and Pauline Ketelaars. 2016. “Response Problems in the Protest Survey Design: Evidence from Fifty-One Protest Events in Seven Countries”. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 21(1): 83–104. Williamson, Vanessa, Kris-Stella Trump and Katherine Levine Einstein. 2018. “Black Lives Matter: Evidence that Police-Caused Deaths Predict Protest Activity”. Perspectives on Politics 16(2): 400–415. Zajak, Sabrina, Giulia Gortanutti, Johanna Lauber and Anna-Maria Nikolas. 2018. “Talking about the Same but Different? Understanding Social Movement and Trade Union Cooperation through Social Movement and Industrial Relations Theories”. Industrielle Beziehungen 31(4): 98–105.

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Social movements, stratification, and international political economy Integrating insights Sabrina Zajak and Christoph Sorg

Social movements and what kind of capitalism? This article puts forward a political-economic perspective on social movements and inequality. Since the austerity politics in Europe at the latest, the “strange disappearance of capitalism in social movement research” (Goodwin and Hetland 2013: 10–11) ended. Researchers re-discovered capitalism in their analysis (Della Porta 2015). But while various authors are now bringing capitalism back into the study of social movement research (Barker et al. 2013), there is still a focus on a particular understanding of the Marxian class-based version of capitalism. A class-based perspective locates the reasons for social mobilization in the exploitation of labor, the formation of classes, and the structural contradictions inherent to capitalist modernity. Varieties of Marxian theory have produced useful analyses of capitalism at large, its reproduction, and its transformation over time (e.g. Postone 1980; Holloway 2002; Jessop and Sum 2013). For stratification and movement research, this was important as it re-included class as core explanatory factors for how and why movements adopt certain ideologies, aims, and political orientations (Walder 2009). Still an underlying problem resurfaced, that Marxists theories tended to over predict radical working-class movements and assume grievances to directly translate into collective action. Social movement scholars disagreed and started to look for other variables (resources, strategies, opportunities) that seemed to better explain mobilization. As a consequence, recent research started to broaden the perspective looking for additional theories the extensive literature and various innovations in political economy including post-operaism/autonomous Marxism (Hardt and Negri 2000), cultural political economy and cultural capitalism (Jessop and Sum 2013; Reckwitz 2018) (see also Sorg 2019). This article contributes to this endeavor to enrich and enlarge the perspective on social movements from international political economy1 (IPE) point of view, focusing on the specific contribution it makes to increase our understanding of social movements, and stratification. It starts with an understanding of capitalism as a historic, context specific, and continuously changing set of institutions – therefore stressing the role of institutions as outcome and expression of capitalist struggles, which again impact the stratification and inequalities in societies.

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This is important for social movements and stratification as the social structuring force of capitalism is mediated through institutions in modern societies. We suggest that research should pay stronger attention to the nexus between capitalism, institutions, social stratification, and social movements for the following reasons: First, capitalists are always forced to engage in a never-ending process of capital accumulation that often run counter to the needs of workers and society, and indeed occasionally to the reproduction of capitalism as a whole. But instead of understanding surplus extraction and accumulation as being governed by objective laws, this article uses an institutional political-economic perspective and understands capitalism as a set of interrelated social institutions, and as a historically specific system of structured as well as structuring social interaction within and in relation to an institutionalized social order (Streeck 2013). Thus the form and context of capital accumulation and the type of critique it produces is subject to (historical) change as well as to place/spatial context.2 Second, integrating political-economic insights into social movement research also helps to shed light on the relationship between social movements and social stratification. In general, social stratification can be understood as the relationship between different groups in society (Geißler 2001). The relation between different groups can, for example, be differentiated along gender, ethnic divides, ability, sexuality, demographic criteria, or the class divide. Classical social structural analysis has been greatly inspired by the Marxian approach, as scientists began to understand the tight interconnectedness between a change of production and broader changes within society, including class structure but also changes in the structure of education, family, or gender relations. These relations are not equal, but usually connected to power imbalances and hierarchies. A political-economic perspective focuses on the structuring forces of capitalism and, thus, the relations between those who are working for the spread and consolidation of capitalism and free markets, and those who try to tame and regulate these forces. This is a broader approach than class-based perspectives on stratification. Instead of focusing on the conflict between capital and labor (the class conflict), it differentiates between those who mobilize in favor of and those who mobilize against capitalism. These battles between market-making, market-regulating, and market-transforming forces shape the institutions structuring our society and generate equality or inequality among different groups. The institutionalization of (in)equality is considered to be the result of struggles between movements against or within capitalism. Institutionalized inequalities affect the grievances of society, but also what movement scholars have summarized under the label of political opportunity structure, which again impact conflicts and patterns of mobilization. Third, analyzing social movements from a political-economic perspective essentially entails tracing how capitalism and social movements influence each other. In other words, we need to ask to which extent movements respond to the destructive forces of capitalism, and to which extent mobilization and activism contribute to taming capitalism and, in doing so, through reshaping the

10 Sabrina Zajak and Christoph Sorg various institutions that govern our capitalist society and the inequalities they produce today. This resituates the debate on social movement consequences within the broader context of market-making and market-shaping regulation. In social movement research, social movement outcomes are primarily discussed in the much narrower context of the political consequences of social movements (stemming from the political process perspective) (Tilly 1999). In contrast, the IPE perspective looks at the social movement contribution to balancing inequality in societies through institutionalizing alternative ideas, values, and practices. Overall, IPE helps to go beyond the focus on state-society interactions, and situates social movement studies in the triangular relationship of state, society, and the economy, providing a more holistic view on social movements’ role in capitalist societies. IPE theories can contribute to reframing and presenting alternative explanations for social movement emergence and the broader societal consequences of social movements, beyond the rather narrow approaches of political opportunity structure, resource mobilization, and framing theories. It allows for the re-evaluation of the role of social movements for capitalist societies as a whole, re-connecting social movements to theories of society at large. While this article primarily focuses on the IPE contribution to social movement research, we believe the cross-fertilization of both disciplines can make important contributions to the understanding of the political economy as well. An IPE-social movement integrated perspective is not only about the interaction of politics and the economy but it is also important to take into account the societal preconditions and how civil society actors influence and shape politicaleconomic behavior (Strange 1994: 18; Watson 2005). Combining insights from both disciplines means bringing contentious politics and the societal forces driving it back in into the study of the political economy. In order to do so, we distinguish between three perspectives on the relationship between movements, the political economy and stratification: social movements contribution to regulating and (re-)embedding markets or how they fail in the context of national economies (Section 2.1); and through comparative capitalist lenses (2.2) and in the context of global economic governance (2.3).

Social movements, stratification, and national economies Social movements can impact the structure of inequalities in society through national institutions. Social movement scholars do pay considerable attention to the effects of mobilization on state politics (Giugni et al. 1999; Tilly 1999; Amenta et al. 2010). An IPE perspective shifts away the attention form political process theory, dominant in the discussions about social movement outcomes, to social movement effects on the (re-)embedding of markets. The idea of the institutional embeddedness of markets is a fundamental idea in political economy and economic sociology alike and Karl Polanyi and his work on “the Great Transformation” (Polanyi 1957 [1944]). Karl Polanyi, to a great extent, based his analysis on Marx’s idea of fictitious commodities that cannot be completely commodified Labor, for example,

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cannot be completely subsumed by the capitalist logic of accumulation (e.g., working 24 hours per day), as this would ultimately destroy the human ability to reproduce and survive. This is why there can be only different degrees of the commodification of labor. If commodification goes too far it triggers a counterreaction (countermovement) to protect from complete destruction. But, in contrast to Marx, Polanyi does not focus on class struggle, but on a broader “movement of societal self-protection” against the expansion of markets. Polanyi argued in “The Great Transformation” that the creation of markets requires states, but states also have to intervene in markets in order to prevent social chaos (Polanyi 1957 [1944]).3 A disembedding of markets would lead to the subsumption of the substance of society to market logics – what he calls the “satanic mill” – which grinds away the foundation of society, if not safely contained by institutions. This could ultimately lead to the destruction of society and markets (Polanyi: 108). In Streeck’s words, Polanyi sees a “fundamental tension between stable social integration and the operation of self-regulating markets, the later inevitably eating away at the former unless society mustered the capacity and the will to put markets in their place and keep them there” (Streeck 2009: 253). Polanyi-inspired research argues that economic liberalization brings about political conflict and counter-movements that aim at re-embedding the market (Munck 2004; Buğra and Ağartan 2007; Burawoy 2010). Interestingly Karl Polanyi is much less well-received in social movement research than Karl Marx even though he talks about movements (Císař and Navrátil 2017; Zajak 2019). This is also connected to the fact that he uses the concept of a movement in very different ways to the definition of social movements today. He speaks of a double movement, where one movement follows the principle of economic liberalism and laissez-faire and aims at creating self-regulating markets, and the other movement is based on the idea of the protection of society: For a century the dynamics of modern society was governed by a double movement: the market expanded continuously but this movement was met by a countermovement checking the expansion in definite directions. Vital though such a countermovement was for the protection of society, in the last analysis it was incompatible with the self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself. (Polanyi 1957 [1944]: 135) Making the idea of embeddedness fruitful for the analyses of social movements and stratification is not that simple as the concept itself remains vague. Gemici (2008), for example, shows that Polanyi uses very different meanings of the word “embeddedness.” Embeddedness can be a theoretical concept that describes the position of the economy in politics and society at a given point in time; but it can also be a holistic, methodological principle in which economy is by definition constructed by social relations and institutions and is thus inseparable from them (Halperin 2004: 266; Gemici 2008: 23).

12 Sabrina Zajak and Christoph Sorg But despite such criticism, various political economists have followed Polanyian ideas and thoughts (Piore 2009). In short, there is a general agreement among political economists that we see a continuous wave of disembedding since roughly the 1970s, including the demise of “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1997), the spread of neoliberal ideology manifest in global economic governance institutions (Mudge 2008), and the restoration of capitalist class power. The movement toward neoliberalism, which argues that governments should not interfere with the self-regulating forces of the market is driven by transnational companies, investment banks, and international economic institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, or WTO, as the major actors of the movement for liberalization (Crouch 2011). Large companies, in particular, use their economic power and transfer it into political power through lobbying, donations, and intensive networks. Following Schumpeter, Streeck links these deinstitutionalization processes to the individual acts of capitalists who always reinterpret or undermine constraining institutions in order to accumulate profit (Streeck 2009: 256–257). Thus, the movement toward liberalization is driven by individual capitalist entrepreneurs who produce change without the need to act collectively. On the contrary, capitalists generate higher profits when they move alone; others will ultimately follow, even if it undermines the very foundations upon which their operations are based. In this way they always have an advantage vis-à-vis citizens and civil society which have create collective action to produce change. As a consequence, national regulation and the welfare state as a core mechanism for redistribution were put under pressure, leading to a continuous weakening of domestic institutions and redistributive structures. Reregulation, privatization, and liberalization became major policies to increase economic efficiency. During the 2008 crisis and its aftermath, the economic dominance over politics reached such an extent that, even in public discourse, legitimacy by the trust of people was replaced with arguments in favor of winning the trust of markets, even if that meant acting counter to the demands of citizens (Streeck 2013). This characterizes an epochal shift from organized capitalism during Fordism and Keynesianism toward the disorganization of capitalism as intensified commodification and liberalization (also compare Offe and Keane 1985; Lash and Urry 1987). The five key institutions governing capitalism – collective bargaining, intermediary organizations, social policy, public finance, and corporate governance – continue to weaken and become increasingly unable to stabilize each other (Streeck 2009: 276). The disorganization of capitalism is also linked to rising populism, extremisms, and the fragmentation of societies – developments Polanyi had already predicted. What exactly can social movement research learn from these insights? First of all, linking political-economic thought with current analysis of social movements might lead to a fundamental re-evaluation of the role and history of the so-called new social movements. These movements emerged at the height of economic embeddedness, with social-democratic, communist, and national

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liberation movements frequently taking power in what was then called the First, Second, and Third World (Wallerstein 2002). New social movements perceived these “old” movements as producing only limited success and criticized their vertical organization. Related to this, they rebelled against the notion that issues of gender, sexuality, and civil rights, among others, had to wait until after revolution, if they were considered relevant at all (Wallerstein 2011). The relative success of “old” social protection movements frequently led to the scientific perspective that class, social inequalities, and unequal redistribution stopped playing a prominent role, at least in the Global North. Social movement research began to look at the sphere of reproduction and issuespecific identity politics of the women’s, sexuality, environmental, and peace movements. The economic foundations of those movements – more specifically, the historically unique set of institutions embedding and constraining capitalism following the World Wars – became neglected. Maybe social movement researchers have been “blinded,” similar to other sociologists, by what Max Haller called the dominant “social stratification ideology,” the dissolution of classes and inequality (as put forward in arguments about the “nivellierte Mittelstandsgesellschaft”) (Braun 1989). This rendered invisible the role of new social movements in processes of deinstitutionalization and disorganization. It seems puzzling that scholars began to proclaim the successes of new social movements in their fight for more equality (e.g., gender, race, global justice) without considering and conceptualizing the link to rising economic inequalities and the failure of established institutions to reduce inequality. Even more so since these issues have been central for the movements themselves. Why did social movements – old and new – fundamentally fail in saving institutions that protect society from the destruction of capitalist forces? How did capitalism coopt moderate fractions of identity movements while rejecting economic and radical claim-making? The link between cultural chance through activism and the rise of cultural capitalism (Jessop and Sum 2013) has rarely been discussed. Research has analyzed the frames, counter-visions, and neoliberal and capitalist criticism of various movements (Rucht 2006; Fominaya and Cox 2013). Cox and Nilsen hint at various ways the movement could contribute to the transformation of capitalism: What the ‘movement of movements’ seeks to do in opposing the process of neoliberal globalisation is, precisely, to challenge and remake the same forms and institutions that the literature takes as its parameters and axioms. By its own bottom-up construction of alternative structures, media and ways of being, it also poses an implicit challenge to the world. (Cox and Nilsen 2007)4 As Cox and Nilsen don’t spell out how social movements actually remake institutions, we have to look elsewhere on the construction and refabrication of institutions from below.

14 Sabrina Zajak and Christoph Sorg How social movements – albeit unintentionally – contribute to stabilizing or strengthening capitalist forces has been discussed in the French convention theory by Boltanski and Chiapello (2001). They argued that capitalism has internalized the “artistic” critique of the ’68 generation and their demands for autonomy, authenticity, and creativity. Making concessions to its critics and accepting some demands revived and strengthened capitalism. Identity politics, the empowerment of individuals and the breaking down of “old” normative boundaries went hand in hand with ideas of the autonomous, self-realizing, and creative work which at the same time opened up new ways for increasing the self-reliance and self-exploitation of workers. This internalization of critique did not necessarily stop critique, as such, but significantly reduced its protest potential (Boltanski and Chiapello 2001: 468–469). However, there has thus far been little follow-up on research on how capitalism responds to social movements and internalizes critique (for some exceptions, see, for example, Böhm et al. 2010). But looking into the link between identity politics and the formation of the economic subjectivities is important to understand the underlying logic of how social movements transform capitalist institutions today. One example is given by Piore and Safford (2006), who have shown how the mobilization of the identity claims of the black civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, and ethnic minority rights movements, contributed to the creation of a new regime of anti-discrimination laws in the US. These laws significantly challenged the prevailing workplace regime. They presented important new forms of embeddedness, as anti-discrimination regulations decreased social inequality in terms of market access for those groups. Another important example is the work of Nancy Fraser (2013a). She suggests we adopt a Weberian distinction between class and status-group or identity, which distinguishes sources of power as deriving from the economic position within the division of labor (class) or the social recognition of a cultural status-group.5 Along these lines, Fraser (2013b) expands the double movement into a dynamic triple movement between marketization, social protection, and emancipation. The latter describes identity movements for cultural recognition, which were “highly critical of the forms of social protection that were institutionalized in the welfare and developmental states of the postwar era” (Fraser 2013b). They deconstructed the social hierarchies inscribed into social protection and demanded equal access. The more liberal fraction of this movement for emancipation, Fraser argues, has since formed a “dangerous liaison” with neoliberalism. As a consequence, the marketization movement managed to appropriate claims for emancipation in its project to dismantle social protection. Studies of financialization and debt constitute a final illustration of the constructive agency of social movements (Sorg 2019). Political-economic approaches have pointed out that the recent financialization of capitalism departed from the profit squeeze of mid-20th-century Fordism and Developmentalism (Jessop 2015). The concrete origins of the profit squeeze remain

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subject to discussion, with interpretations focusing on the monopolization of Fordist production, German and Japanese corporations catching up with their US counterparts or the increasing militancy of postwar social movements (Streeck 2009). World-systems (Silver 2003) and autonomist (Hardt and Negri 2000) approaches have argued from different perspectives that the increasing demands of feminist, workers, civil rights, and anti-colonial movements have contributed or caused the profit squeeze since the 1960s. Attempts to kickstart profitability included the slashing of social safety nets, resistance to environmental regulation and the relocation of production to the Global South (Silver 2003). All these processes have been met with social movement resistance and individual resilience, from anti-austerity protests to workers withdrawing their productivity, and were thus less successful than they set out to be (Wallerstein 2004). Due to the therefore continuous lack of profitable investment possibilities, nonfinancial corporations have successively started to channel surpluses into financial markets (Wallerstein 2004; Krippner 2011). Subaltern agency again contributed to this process of financialization in unintended ways. Faced with the threat of social degradation, households tried to maintain their living standards by expanding debtfinanced consumption (Crouch 2009; Huke et al. 2015). This contradictory process of credit-based consumption, increasing inequality and fictitious profits imploded in the financial crisis and has since provided the foundation for new waves of contention. Social movements and individual resilience have thus co-shaped financialization, a process that illustrates the dialectic interrelations of social movements and political economy. These examples illustrate the co-constitutive link between social movements and capitalist institutions. Other examples can be found in mobilization and the moral constitution of markets. Social movements could also regulate the economy by fundamentally reconstructing and reframing the moral values corporate and economic behavior rests upon. As one of the authors has argued elsewhere, social movements can reframe those legitimacy resources and, in doing so, contribute to a change in corporate behavior (Zajak 2017). This touches on broader questions about the morality of capitalism and role of institutionalized norms and values (Streeck 2007; Crouch 2012). Movements influence markets; for example, by the mobilization of consumers (Bennett 2004; Micheletti and Stolle 2007), boycotts, or shareholder activism (King 2008; Soule and King 2007). Movements also create new markets that present alternatives to the dominant economic models of competition, always lower prices, and the externalization of costs into society. The fair-trade movement is the most prominent example (Webb 2007). Still, if these are examples to re-embed markets in protective standards can be debated, as remains at the discretion of the management how the company will balance civil society demands with shareholder interests for profit maximization (Neron 2010; Crouch 2011). This section began by reconstructing major insights of the Polanyian perspective on the development of capitalist societies driven by movements in favor of liberalization and commodification and those against it. It then presented some more recent variants of Polanyian ideas and some open questions that emerge from a political-

16 Sabrina Zajak and Christoph Sorg economic perspective on social movements, in particular relating to their role in embedding and disembedding, and institutionalizing and de-institutionalizing capitalism. It gave various examples which indicate the co-constitutive effects between social movements and institutions regulating capitalism, movements therewith coshaping the structure of society we live in. However, the dynamic relations between the economy, civil society, and the state are not the same across different countries. Next, we show how social movement research could integrate insights from comparative political economy.

Varieties of capitalism and varieties of activism From an institutional political-economic perspective, it is clear that capitalism doesn’t look the same across countries.6 The idea of variant of capitalisms has been spelled out in the comparative capitalism, most prominently represented through the varieties of capitalism approach (VOC). The core argument is that nation-states with different institutional structures can nevertheless be similarly competitive. Globalization, market dynamics, or processes of disorganization do not automatically lead to the breakdown of national institutions. Instead, we can observe differences in capitalist dynamics due to the persistence of distinct sets of institutions in different national context. In the words of Polanyi, the degree and forms of embeddedness vary across countries (see Hall and Soskice 2001). There are different approaches within the comparative capitalism literature (for an overview, see Jackson and Deeg 2006). The most prominent is the VOC. In short, VOC differentiates between liberal market economies (LMEs), where market patterns of coordination and conflictual labor relations dominate, and coordinated market economies (CMEs), which are characterized by corporatist configurations of institutions (Hall and Soskice 2001). These two models form the ends of a continuum, along which nation-states can be arrayed. Overall, VOC implies that national economies develop distinct institutional configurations (in areas such as industrial relations; financial systems; education; innovation; corporate governance; inter-firm relations; or welfare systems), with specific strengths and weaknesses for certain economic actions. It implies that common pressures are “refracted” by different sets of institutions (Jackson and Deeg 2006: 6). This line of research faces problems, similar to those voiced against the political opportunity structure approach: There is no agreement on how many different types of capitalism exist, and what kind of institutions should be included in the definition of the typology. But despite disagreement about specific factors, institutions, and governance mechanisms, comparative capitalist approaches share some analytical premises. They consider the various institutions as interdependent. One of the major concepts that characterizes this interdependence is the idea of institutional complementarity. Complementarity is a functional category and means that the performance of a configuration increases when its elements assume specific properties (Höpner 2005: 333). Thus, changes in one institution affect the functioning of the other interrelated institutions. This

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interdependence is usually considered to be a major source of stability, preventing converging effects on global markets and global capitalist crises in different national systems. (Jackson and Deeg 2006: 12). The idea of multiple institutions that interact with one another resonates with the multi-institutional politics approach in social movement research, which stresses that there are multiple sources of power within society that shape social movement actions. These multi-institutional systems can create specific opportunities and threats to social movements. Social movements could, for example, “shop around” or “rapidly switch” targets according to their perceived chance of success (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008: 87). If social movements manage to trigger change then this also depends on the relations among institutions and to what extent they reinforce each other. One example is the interconnectedness of the welfare state with other core institutions governing capitalism: The type of welfare state impacts industrial relations and employment patterns, but also the shape of the financial system and corporate governance structures through a range of different mechanisms (Jackson and Deeg 2006: 19). This implies we expect different patterns of mobilization in countries where the economic crisis more strongly undermines support by the welfare state, increases the dependence of the job market on market mechanisms (and thus insecurity, precariousness, and unemployment), weakens trade unions, and leaves a small number of shareholders continuously making big profits. Bair and Palpacuer (2013) for example use VOC to explain differences in the development and consequences of anti-sweatshop activism between the US, Europe, and Canada with differences in the organization of capitalism. According to Bair and Palpacuer, differences in institutions “influences the strategies of activists, the attitudes of consumers, and the responses of corporations to the sweatshop issue” (Bair and Palpacuer 2013: 541). Overall, these are only a few examples for exploring the cross-fertilization of a rich body of literature on comparative capitalism. We believe that combining insights from the VOC or, more broadly, from the comparative capitalism approach with other existing concepts in social movement studies (such as political opportunity structure) could greatly enhance our understanding of similarities and differences between social movements and their consequences across countries. However, such an endeavor should at the same time be aware of potential blind spots of VOC approaches. When looking at national variations of institutions, we should also be aware of trans- and international processes cutting across borders in order to avoid methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). National VOC do not exist in isolation, but engage with and influence each other in open-ended processes, with international institutions and processes potentially exerting pressure for convergence or hybridization. Related to this, international hierarchies continue to exist and thus co-shape both world market and national institutions. As a consequence, a worldsystemic perspective could complement VOC and CC. World-systems theory has quite recently celebrated a small comeback in the social sciences. After having been largely relegated to post-colonial, development,

18 Sabrina Zajak and Christoph Sorg and global studies in recent decades, the European Debt Crisis rendered visible the relevance of core-periphery relations in the Global North as well. World-systems approaches tend to predict that a state’s location in the unequal division of labor impacts local grievances, social bases for protest, and the availability of resources for protest (Amin et al. 1990). These differences have shaped the history of social and national movements in Global South and North (Wallerstein 1990). For instance, world-systems scholars have argued that colonialism and imperialism have shaped 19th and 20th century Southern social structures and thwarted the formation of large working classes. Southern states and economies formed as they were integrated into the world economy as suppliers of cheap agricultural commodities. As a response, Southern mobilization tended to focus on peasants instead of industrial working classes and adopted national liberation frames instead of workerist socialism in order to achieve national sovereignty (Wallerstein 1990). While economic grievances are highest in low-income peripheral economies, world-systems approaches have argued that they lack resources for protest (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2009), thus confirming social movement studies’ notion that grievances on their own do not produce collective action. Resources for protest are more abundant in high-income Northern democracies, where imperial surpluses were used to grant benefits to labor and establish welfare systems (Della Porta 2015). Some world-systems scholars have consequently argued that protest tends to be most intense in the semi-periphery, where substantial grievances converge with resources for mobilization and rapidly transforming social structures (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2009). Recent outbursts of protest in Egypt and Tunisia, Southern Europe, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, and China, among others, seems to at least give credence to such notions, although more research is necessary. Beverly Silver (2003, 2014) has built on this body of literature and argued that world-economic developments tend to transform local class structures, which shapes the form of mobilization. In doing so, she distinguishes between “Polanyitype” and “Marx-type” labor unrest (Silver 2003: 20). Polanyi-type movements, she argues, tend to emerge when established working classes and social protections are being unmade by globalizing, self-regulating markets. Marx-type movements, on the other hand, relate to the making of new working classes as production relocates and transforms. Applying these concepts to recent waves of protest, she argues that European anti-austerity protests correspond with Polanyi-type resistance against the unmaking of social contracts. At the same time, the relocation of Northern industrial activity in search of cheaper labor has produced Marx-type protest in the Global South, such as recent strike waves of migrant working classes in China (Silver 2003: 49; see also Birke et al. 2018).

Transnational mobilization shaping the international political economy If there is little research on the co-constitutive relationship of movements, capitalist institutions, and inequality this is even more the case if we look at the configuration of the international political economy. This is even more surprising as

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one could argue that the effects of social movements is particularly significant. There are multiple studies on social movements that, at first sight, seem to be directly related to international capitalism, the global spread of markets, and the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant ideology of our time (Rucht 2004). Kouki and Romanos (2011), which oddly enough do not directly relate their analyses to socio-economic structures, class cleavages, and capitalist dynamics as a whole. Goodwin and Hetland state: “The results are clear and ironic: During an era in which global capitalism became ever more powerful ( … ) it also became increasingly invisible to scholars of popular movements” (Goodwin and Hetland 2013: 13). Instead of viewing global economic governance institutions as the result of struggles between market-regulating and market-making forces, social movement research tends to interpret governance beyond borders as a problem of the transformation of the state, political denationalization, and political integration (Smith et al. 1997). Resistance to international organizations is considered a response to the increasing scope and authority of international decision-making and its perceived legitimacy deficit. This is linked to social movement researchers’ turn toward international relations scholars in order to theorize about transnational advocacy networks (TANs) (Keck and Sikkink 1998) or transnational activism (Tarrow 2005; Piper and Uhlin 2009; Zajak 2017). But while this research acknowledges context of “complex internationalism,” characterized by fragmented institutions that provide differentiated opportunities to external actors (Della Porta 2011: 203), its major concern is to understand the relationship between political openings and closures in multilevel governance arrangements, and how and why movements externalize their claims and shift scales (Giugni et al. 2006), neglecting their impact on global economic governance institutions. Rodriguez-Garavito’s pointed out that research on transnational mobilization “need[s] to theorize and empirically document its interaction with concomitant processes of economic and regulatory integration” (Rodriguez-Garavito 2007: 3). Grugel and Uhlin argue: There is the danger of a disconnect between critical analysis of global capitalism, on the one hand, and bottom-up studies of organisation by and for “ordinary people”, some of whom, moreover, are vulnerable in ways that go beyond their position in labour markets and production processes. (Grugel and Uhlin 2012: 1704) This is different in the abundant literature on labor internationalism and transnational labor rights activism which explores how the reorganization of production, the rise of global supply chains, and industrial restructuring have not only created grievances and threats to labor organizing but also opportunities for counter-organization (Anner 2007; Merk 2009, 2011; Evans 2010; Zajak et al. 2017). To give some examples: Bartley (2007) has shown how transnational mobilization has contributed to the emergence of new forms of transnational private regulation. In the area of copyrights, Dobusch and Quack have shown

20 Sabrina Zajak and Christoph Sorg how weak, non-elite coalitions experiment with alternative forms of transnational regulation to replace other dominant institutions constructed by economic actors, and, in doing so, contribute to change within the international political economy (Dobusch and Quack 2012). Such examples are viable contributions to the transnational construction of alternative institutions from below. Strange goes a step further and treats the World Trade Organization as a discursive formation (“discursivity of global trade governance”) whose practices are to a large extent shaped by contestations of global social movements (Strange 2012). The realms of global finance and sovereign debt politics constitute other examples. For instance, Elizabeth Friesen (2012) studied how civil society contests and shapes global finance. She frames Southern challenges such as the campaign to cancel Southern debt as a Polanyian countermovement to the Washington Consensus, which attacked dominant discourses and agenda-setting. Ruth Reitan (2007) has published a comprehensive analysis of the Southern (and Northern) challenges to neoliberal globalization, from structural adjustment and sovereign debt to (unilateral) trade liberalization and multinational corporations. Resistance against the Southern Debt Crisis has received particular attention in form of case studies of national debt relief campaigns (e.g. Rustomjee 2004) or comparative analyses of different campaigns (e.g. Holmes 2006; Josselin 2007). However, this literature tends to undertheorize the “debt” in debt-centered movements, which underscores the point of this chapter. Studies treat debt as a given instead of interrogating the broader processes producing debt-related grievances via political economy and the fine-grained ways movements shape the understanding, practices and therefore the impact of debt institutions. Overall this research also poses the question whether such alternative forms of regulation really contribute to limiting global corporate power or, on the contrary, contribute to strengthening it. The difficulties to differentiate between market-regulating and market-creating rules internationally become evident.

Conclusion: a political-economic perspective on social movements The goal of this article was to further the exchange between the disciplines of social movements and political economy. In such, the article tried to build linkages between rather unconnected bodies of literature. It focused on three central areas for cross-fertilization: social movements within national systems of capitalism, a comparative approach to social movements within different systems of capitalism, and social movements within the international political economy. In doing so, the article attempted to overcome a narrower perspective on social movements and capitalism as put forward by a purely Marxian perspective. Overall this article suggests that the exchange between disciplines can enhance social movement studies and (international) political economy in several ways. A political-economic perspective that understands capitalism as a historically and context-specific set of interrelated social institutions that

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structure and are structured by social interaction, brings several ideas to social movement research: 1. All economic systems are socially and politically constructed (socially and politically embedded). There is no universal market logic leading to homogenization; free and unregulated markets are impossible to create (as this would destroy the foundations of society). Social movements shape political-economic behavior and are shaped by it. They are part of the continuing struggles between the making and re-making of markets, continuously forging new alliances, e.g. within trade unions against the liberalization of markets. A holistic approach to studying social change thus needs to take both disciplines elaborated here into account. 2. Institutions are the outcomes of power struggles and, once established, reproduce power relations and inequalities in societies. Social movements shape institutions in various ways: They create alternative institutions from below that replace, complement or challenge existing ones, they target or support them directly, or they reformulate the normative and moral basis of those institutions. The more governments shift to governance and social movements target private firms, former challengers become rule makers and rule enforcers. 3. Capitalist institutions look different across countries (liberal vs. coordinated economies), which makes certain strategies (market-oriented vs. state-oriented) , targets, or coalitions (e.g., with trade unions) more or less likely. In addition to that, the concrete position of a state in the world economy can influence local class formation, contentious strategies, collective action frames, grievances, opportunities, and threats (but does not pre-determine these). 4. There are multiple institutions that govern capitalism and interrelate and interact with each other, creating multiple opportunities (e.g., for targeting multiple institutions, venue shipping, or using them as their mobilization base) and threats (e.g., mutually reinforcing pressure of disorganization and destabilization). 5. A political-economic perspective is more sensitive to the unintended consequences and system-stabilizing effects of social movements. By mobilizing power and authority for their causes, social movements can strengthen capitalist power holders; for example, when mobilization leads to the greater political and regulative power of transnational companies in global governance structures. 6. Still, this article has explored only a few aspects, leaving others untouched. Again, (international) political economy is a broad research field with different theoretical and empirical approaches. We attempted to summarize broader trends and, on occasion, discuss more concrete examples. However, a much more nuanced and in depth look at specific theories is necessary and we thus hope there will be many other contributions to join the debate and fill other gaps.

22 Sabrina Zajak and Christoph Sorg

Notes 1 Of course there are also various different approaches and theoretical traditions in IPE (for an overview see for example Frieden and Lake 2002). This contribution uses a Polanyian-inspired institutional political economic perspective outlines in the following chapters. 2 Boltanski and Chiapello even argue that the form of capital accumulation is shaped by the amount and type of critique capitalism has faced since its beginning (Boltanski and Chiapello 2001: 68). Such a perspective relates to autonomist approaches, which argue that capital always reacts to the agency of subalterns and is thus shaped and transformed by them (Hardt and Negri 2000). 3 For Polanyi, “the great transformation” describes the development from pre-modern, embedded societies to free markets. He explains that markets do not evolve due to “natural” or given economic logics but are socially constructed and the result of politics and the state. The interpretation here is also based on the reception to “The Great Transformation” (Birchfield 1999; Halperin 2004; Beckert 2007; Buğra 2007; Buğra and Ağartan 2007; Gemici 2008). 4 However, the authors’ line of reasoning goes in a slightly different direction. They criticize social movement research for not using social movements’ own theories to theorize movements (Cox and Nilsen 2007). 5 Weber adds party as a third category to describe political power, which Fraser eventually included in her more recent work (Fraser 2013b). 6 In social movement research, the most prominent approach for explaining differences between social movements across states is the political opportunity approach. The political opportunity approach explains variations in mobilization with the differences in the political context. Political opportunities can be broadly defined as characteristics of political institutions that determine the relative ability of (outside) groups to influence decision making within that institution. They are “consistent but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national signals to social or political actors which either encourage or discourage them to use their internal resources to form social movements” (Tarrow 1996: 54). This perspective however neglects economic opportunities and threats.

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Webb, Janette. 2007. Seduced or Sceptical Consumers? Organised Action and the Case of Fair Trade Coffee. Sociological Research Online 12 (3): 1–13. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2002. Methodological Nationalism and beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences. Global Networks 2 (4):301–334. Zajak, Sabrina. 2017. Transnational Activism, Global Labor Governance, and China. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. Social Movements and Trade Unions in Cross-Movement CounterMobilization: A Polanyian View on Social Movement and Trade Union Cooperation. In Social Movements and Organized Labour, edited by Jürgen R. Grote, and Claudius Wagemann, 81–108. London: Routledge. Zajak, Sabrina, Niklas Egels-Zandén, and Nicola Piper. 2017. Networks of Labour Activism: Collective Action across Asia and beyond. An Introduction to the Debate. Development and Change 48 (5):899–921.

3

Social movement unionism Theoretical foundations and empirical evidence1 Klaus Dörre

Introduction For a long time, understanding trade unions as social movements or even speaking of a ‘social movement unionism’ was unusual in German-language industrial relations research. This is beginning to change. The main reason is changes in organised labour relations. Although the conflict potential of German industrial relations is still below average compared to other European countries, a new conflict dynamic is becoming visible – for instance in the 2018 IG Metall industrial action for a ‘short full-time’ of 28 hours with individual options for employees. Irrespective of their sheer number, the most recent wage conflicts also signal a serious change in the function of organised industrial relations. My thesis is that labour conflicts and strikes are increasingly taking place in two different worlds of organised labour relations. The bargaining parties are primarily able to exert negotiating power in the ‘first world’ of collective bargaining regulation, in which industry-wide agreements are still the norm. Beyond this, in the ‘second world’ of largely deregulated work, it is primarily the trade unions that must laboriously fight for their negotiating power on a workplace-for-workplace and company-for-company basis. The boundary between these two worlds is structurally fraught with conflict. This leads German trade unions to take up and adapt – often without acknowledging it – elements of a social movement unionism that originated in countries of the Global South. To justify this thesis, I first go into the concept of ‘social movement unionism’, which I then situate within the context of the ‘Jena power resource approach’, before exploring the new conflict formation that has developed in German industrial relations and which makes a social movement unionism approach attractive once again.

Social movement unionism Some scholars (e. g. Frege 2000) subsume approaches of extended or ‘deep’ organising under the label ‘social movement unionism’. Specifically, this denotes when trade unions seek to improve their mobilisation and conflict capacity by integrating other vital social issues into their political agenda. Originally, the

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category of the ‘movement union’ was coined for the new workers’ movements and growing trade unions in certain countries of the Global South (Brinkmann et al. 2008, 45–68). These weakly institutionalised trade unions depended on mass mobilisation, developed and cultivated a culture of participation with their membership, and organised their struggles beyond the borders of factories by developing alliances with movements outside the sphere of work as a constitutive element of their overall strategy. The concept of social movement unionism has since found its way into the German trade unions as well as trade union research, in the context of debates around ‘organising’ and trade union renewal. Authors such as Kim Moody (1997) interpret this as the development of an entirely new type of trade union, forming largely outside corporative structures. Other scholars, however, speak of an updated version of an older form of ‘political unionism’ (Neary 2002). Beyond this controversy, some researchers are making an important point confirming a strong link between ‘organising’ approaches and movement unionism (Nissen 2003, 143ff). Obviously, trade unions, which more than anything compete with company management over who can better solve workplace conflicts, find political and organisational success hard to come by these days (Cregan 2005). Moreover, in many cases interest policies which prioritise questions of social justice over economic efficiency (Aronowitz 2005) are better suited to the demands of offensive organising strategies (Fantasia and Voss 2004, 127–130) than their added-value-oriented counterparts. However, research findings in this respect are not altogether clear. As in the case of United Auto Workers (UAW) and their participation in reorganising production processes (teamwork, problem-solving teams, co-operation with the management), organising-based approaches may also be successful in the context of consensus- and competition-oriented interest policies (Hurd et al. 2003). Because movement policies ultimately cannot be maintained permanently, not only the movement unions in the South, but also the North American ‘organising unions’ struggle to institutionalise their negotiating power. Nevertheless, we find that in many cases organising strategies are embedded into interest-political strategies offensively seeking to occupy vital social issues and conflict fields. Many authors see direct membership participation as an essential politicalorganisational element of organising approaches. Fiorito (2004) views decentralisation of decision-making and thus open structures allowing for participation – ‘membership self-determination’ – as an essential precondition for successful offensive organising strategies. This insight relates not only to the extension of a trade union’s grassroots activism level. As Beaud and Pialoux ([1999] 2004) showed in their impressive study on the Sochaux Peugeot plant, the relationship between activists and ‘ordinary’ members rests on a welloperating ‘system of expectations and achievements’ (ibid., 259) which, due to changes in the work process and the employment structure, must be periodically renewed. Empirical research has proven that growing social heterogeneity among potential members does not automatically lower a union’s power to bind workers together. In fact, increased membership participation in organising

32 Klaus Dörre decisions becomes an even more essential and influential variable. According to Lévesque et al. (2005), internal union democracy and real opportunities for participation are the most effective tools in fighting off membership dissatisfaction. Markowitz (1999) shows that stabilising participative relationships between function bearers and newly recruited members is vital to retain new union members ‘after organising’. Furthermore, authors such as Clawson (2005) regard decision-making participation as the key to successfully attracting groups currently underrepresented in the trade unions (women, the precarious, minorities). According to this view, ‘face-to-face’ communication and active trade union members’ personal authenticity (as equals in the workplace and society) are decisive in changing the relationship between representatives and those being represented in a lasting way. Although such findings suggest a close link between membership participation and a given trade union’s organisational-political binding power, it remains an open question as to how a participation-oriented style of politics can be maintained over the long term. This difficulty is not only due to the gap between the participative rhetoric and centralist practice of some ‘organising unions’, to which Frege (2000) rightfully objects. We know from social movement research that it is not only difficult, but in fact veritably impossible to stabilise a high level of membership participation over a longer period of time. Often, both old and new members are only able to engage in ‘participation work’ for a limited period of time connected to specific topics and projects or if there really is something to decide upon. Thus, even the most intelligent organising approaches are repeatedly confronted with the problem that more strongly participatory and representative approaches will have to alternate and balance each other. Organising approaches are generally characterised by the flexible use of various tactics, tools, and methods. Many authors consider a strict orientation towards campaigning conducive to maintaining movement orientation and membership participation in the context of specific projects. Comprehensive campaigns stand out among the various campaigning methods, as a type of campaign in the course of which trade unions themselves change in a lasting way. Bronfenbrenner and Hickey (2004) were surprised to find that positive results depend not so much on the branch or structure of the enterprise so much as on the quality and intensity of campaigning. Most of what the two authors refer to as the essentials of a successful campaign orientation seems rather unspectacular at first sight – these essentials range from training ‘on the campaign’ to setting intermediary campaign targets. Other elements, such as the implementation of campaigns at the decentralised level – and thus avoiding intra-union organisational competition – or working on topics at the international level in the case of multi-national enterprises, appear obvious but nevertheless mark a clear contrast to the typical routines of trade union organisation. Two characteristics, however, play a particular role in campaigning. In the relevant literature, the addendum of ‘comprehensive’ denotes, initially, that

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actions shall be extended beyond the immediate adversaries, i.e. towards shareholders, suppliers, customers, or groups of customers, in order to maximise pressure on a group or on the enterprises of one branch and achieve maximum organisational success. But ‘comprehensive’ can also mean ‘understanding’ or ‘comprehending’. This means that successful campaigning requires empirical research and the analysis of power relations if it is to identify appropriate organising objectives and develop a tiered set of escalating tactics. Such an approach requires a certain degree of co-operation between social scientists and trade union activists, who, as a team, must first work out a common understanding of a branch or enterprise, as well as the groups of workers they hope to address. This requires not only a set of appropriate research methods, but also the kind of social scientist who is prepared to deal with the ‘lower levels’ of grass-roots trade union work. On the whole, relevant studies (Gall 2005) suggest that an orientation towards campaigning may mean different things in different situations. Whereas internal obstacles to successful organising (lack of tradition, internal resistance, lack of support from headquarters) are similar in many countries, in respect to external obstacles serious differences can be observed. In the US, a large majority of employers harbour deeply negative attitudes towards trade union activities; in Great Britain this is somewhat different (Heery and Simms 2007). There, organising campaigns are significantly more successful in the case of companies where employers do not pursue explicitly anti-union policies. However, the decisive question is not whether campaigns are of a more confrontational or cooperative nature, but rather whether unions understand how to effectively deploy a wide range of tactics in the respective field of conflict.

The ‘Jena power resource approach’ The fact that the German trade unions have adopted certain elements of social movement unionism (such as offensive organising, direct membership participation, campaign orientation) is linked to changes in the German system of industrial relations. In order to illustrate this, it seems convenient to resort to what has come to be referred to in the literature as the ‘Jena power resource approach’. My intention is to locate the power resource approach in the context of bodies of knowledge long taken for granted within the sociology of labour relations. These bodies of knowledge include the concept of trade unions as intermediary organisations tasked with mediating between their members’ interests and those of the system as a whole. Such an understanding implies that although trade unions oscillate between cooperative and conflictual forms of interest assertion, an institutionally generated ‘gravitational pull’ towards cooperative forms of conflict management emerges either way. Trade unions in this sense act simultaneously as both membership organisations and pacifying forces, becoming pillars of welfare state-regulated capitalism (Müller-Jentsch 2008, 78). Despite reasonable doubts concerning the sustainability of this institutional framework (Streeck 1997, S. 51–53) and taking into account the crisis

34 Klaus Dörre of trade union representation as such, some still regard the social market economy, intermediary trade unions and conflict partnership as success stories (Müller-Jentsch 2011, 193), arguing that they ought to be extended ever further (see Bolaffi 2014; controversial: Industrielle Beziehungen 2016, 23(3)). Such praise for solution-oriented conflict partnership of course suffers from its neglect of the power relations involved. The exercise of power both on behalf of, as well as over, their members ascribed to many intermediary trade unions only functions smoothly where there is at least a relative equilibrium of power between capital and labour, as many earlier versions of the concept once emphasised. Should this balance shift in favour of the capital side, then the pacifying effect of cooperative interest reconciliation becomes less attractive (at least for the more dominant actors). Adding to this is the simple fact that a ‘sword of justice’ tends to rust if not taken down from the wall and used from time to time. The capacity to reproduce trade union power is at risk if the staging of strikes remains a mere empty threat exerted over long periods of time, as both passive and potential members begin to take the successful functioning of interest representation for granted. The power resource approach takes this problematic into consideration. Power denotes ‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance’ (Weber 1978, 53). Wage-earners’ power is inherently a heterodox form of power (Silver 2005, 38) that develops in relation to the power resources of dominant capitalist actors (corporations, business federations, the state). Its exercise presupposes a common interest on the part of wage-earners to correct asymmetries in the relations of exchange between capital and labour through the collective acquisition and development of particular power resources. Wage-earners’ structural power arises out of a certain position on the labour market or within the productive process as such. Forms of labour unrest ranging from absenteeism, slowdowns, sabotage, and spontaneous actions to situational protest, revolts, and uprisings all represent variants of structural power which can also be deployed by groups lacking special qualifications or a special position in the process of production (Silver 2005, 11; 44ff.). Organisational power, then, can be distinguished from these resources, as it arises out of the association of actors through trade unions, cooperatives, or political parties. Far from reducing itself to levels of organisation, it requires in addition mobilising capacities, internal membership cohesion, and a general disposition to engage in conflict. In contrast to structural power, which is often deployed spontaneously, organisational power relies on intentional, strategically conceived development by collective actors. Institutional power consolidates and generalises the results of negotiations and/or conflicts, and then pre-determines the action strategies of works councils, trade unions, employers’ associations, and political actors, ultimately appearing as likely, obvious and binding action paths even when the balance of social forces has shifted significantly. Institutional power resources provided by labour law, co-determination structures or collective bargaining agreements can be tapped by trade unions even during times of declining

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organisational power. Of course, this is only the case to the extent that wageearners’ organisations continue to be accepted as authentic representatives of collective labour interests by the dominant capitalist actors despite a reduced ability to attract and retain members. Whether or not wage-earners’ power is publicly acknowledged depends primarily on the development of a fourth source of power, which is referred to as associative (Dörre et al. 2009, 57), communicative (see Urban 2010; Gerst et al. 2011, 141–144), or social power (Arbeitskreis 2013, 359–363) in the literature. While the category of associative power pertains mainly to the ability of trade unions and other wage-earners’ organisations to build coalitions, communicative power addresses discursive capacity and the struggle for cultural hegemony. The category of social power represents an attempt to account for both. It remains an open question whether reproductive power ought to be included as an additional source of power in its own right. Initial analyses have thus far been insufficiently attuned to the particularities of care work – a form of labour often performed informally and largely in private households or in semi-private or non-profit organisations. One characteristic feature of professional care work oriented to the well-being of others is that it requires an unquantifiable amount of time and emotional labour. The specific configuration of human relationships and associated dependencies forms an intrinsic part of care services (see Aulenbacher et al. 2014). Reproductive power is rooted in these particularities of care work. It is essential that the identification of power resources occurs within a socioeconomic analytical framework which understands the capitalist dynamic of a Landnahme2 of the social (see Dörre 2012, 2015). In its sociological application, the Landnahme theorem addresses the tendency of capitalist societies to continuously occupy and internalise ‘non-capitalist milieus’ (Lutz 1984, 57). The Landnahme of the social proceeds from organised labour relations and their embedding in the welfare state, the latter constituting the functional Other of capitalist market coordination. Enforced via numerous field-specific tests and trials, the protagonists of Landnahme are able to reinforce capitalist ownership rights, force through the re-commodification of sectors and areas of life previously exempted from the market, and bring about the subordination of economic activities to the rules of liberalised financial markets and restrictive fiscal policies. The modus operandi of these Landnahmen results in a rupture of the institutional coupling of wage labour and the corresponding social property that secures a collective level of consumption and social status (Castel 2005, 41), as well as in the selective and gradual decoupling of the latter from its welfare-state embedding. Policies which abolish obsolete compromise formulas ‘from above’ cannot simply be reversed after occupying a socially structure-forming function for a certain period of time. For our present context, two transfer mechanisms of capitalist Landnahme are of particular note, namely: the decentralisation of bargaining and the precarisation of the work-centred society [Arbeitsgesellschaft]. A wage-political interventionism seeking to increase pressure on organised labour relations has emerged at both the national and European level (see Blyth 2013; Lehndorff 2014). In

36 Klaus Dörre spite of cooperative crisis management, the German case is no exception to this rule. The weight and impact of collective bargaining agreements and compliance with such agreements has declined continuously since the 1990s (Ellguth and Kohaut 2015). In 2014, only 31 percent of employees in west German companies (2000: 45 percent) and 17 percent in east German companies (2000: 23 percent) received a wage in compliance with industry-wide bargaining agreements. While 60 percent of west German wage-earners and 39 percent of east German wage-earners still fell under the jurisdiction of collective bargaining agreements at the turn of the millennium, this was only true for 47 percent of wage-earners in the west and 28 percent in the east in 2014. As had already been the case by the year 2000, in-house and internal company-level labour agreements accounted for only 7 percent of west German and 11 percent of east German wage-earners (Ellguth and Kohaut 2015, 290–297). The erosion of collective bargaining agreements signifies the loss of an essential pillar of dual interest representation. The long-standing division of labour between works councils and trade unions is now subject to renegotiation. Wherever trade unions have lost their conflict partners above the immediate company or corporate level, institutionalised class struggle can no longer be externalised from the workplace. In some cases, negotiating partners have grown utterly incapable of acting and rely on an interventionist state to implement any kind of binding social rules whatsoever, as was recently the case with the introduction of a legal minimum wage. This is even more so the case given that the weakening of the collective bargaining system corresponds to a precarisation of labour and employment overall. The so-called ‘German job miracle’ obscures the tendency towards a precarious full-employment society, in which a decreasing volume of paid work hours is asymmetrically shared between a record number of economically active people. While the average wage-earner worked 1,473 hours annually in 1991, this number had declined to 1,313 by 2013 (Destatis 2013, 112). Although the labour volume did in fact grow in absolute terms in 2005 (and per head in 2014), the number of economically active people rose significantly faster during most of these years. Job creation occurred to a large extent via the integration of primarily female workers into precarious, low-wage jobs in the service sector (see IAB 2013; Bahl 2014; Staab 2014; Reusch 2015, 358–409). Official unemployment has artificially ‘disappeared’ through an expansion of insecure, badly paid, and socially underappreciated gainful employment at the cost of full-time employment, accompanied by strongly polarised allocations of working hours (Dörre 2015, 265–269). The weakening of the collective bargaining system, as well as precarisation, could be interpreted as the continuation of the aforementioned ‘cycle of powerlessness/crisis of trade unionism’ characterised by trade union disorganisation. Without denying the possibility of a further erosion of trade unions’ organisational power, the power resource approach emphasises unions’ strategic choice. Despite precarity and structurally imposed defensive position of the trade unions, they nevertheless generally continue to have several action options at

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their disposal. They can respond to the decentralisation of collective bargaining through workplace mobilisations, while precarity – linked to experiences of uncertainty – may serve as a point of departure for an organising drive among previously marginalised groups of wage-earners. Both strategies imply a comprehensive political-organisational renewal of the trade unions themselves. An ample amount of International Labour Studies in the early 2000s began pointing to ways in which this could succeed (see, inter alia, Voss and Sherman 2000; von Holdt 2002; Huzzard et al. 2004), as the weakening of institutional wage-earners’ power opened up opportunities for a transnational organisational learning process. A systematic evaluation of the literature allowed for the identification of innovative practices such as ‘organising’, direct membership participation, social movement unionism, campaigning, and coalition building, which had contributed to a revitalisation of the trade unions in South Africa, South Korea, and the US (Brinkmann et al. 2008, 45–60). Initial empirical studies bore evidence of a swift adaptation of locally customised variants of targeted ‘organising’ approaches by parts of the German trade unions (see Bremme et al. 2007; Dribbusch 2011). But how, then, are we to investigate specific practices which are only experimented with by a minority of people outside of wellattuned organisational routines, immune to neither failure nor setbacks? This question brings me to my third argument.

The new conflict formation: regulation of labour between two worlds In Germany, we are in the midst of a trade union comeback. The membership figures of important unions are growing, and the willingness to engage in labour conflicts is on the rise as well. What could be interpreted at first sight as a revitalisation of the ‘social market economy’ is actually a reaction to (financial) market-driven capitalism with fragmented labour relations, a capitalism that resembles the social capitalism of the past only in its – albeit crumbling – institutional façade. This capitalism’s regulation of labour relations takes place in two separate worlds. The first world includes whole industries, large, or medium-sized corporations in which industry-wide collective bargaining or company-level agreements advance the betterment of wage-earners by regulating wages, salaries, and working conditions. In this world, the institutionalisation of class conflict appears unchanged. The second world is one of outsourcing, circumvention of social and wage norms, low-wage competition, eroding collective bargaining agreements, and the abandonment of even company-wide agreements. It is a world of over-exploitation and insecure, lowlyregarded and therefore precarious gainful employment. These two worlds are not, if you will, worlds apart. The boundaries between them are fluid, while conflict-ridden movements can lead a company from one world to the other. And that is the real novelty: what is left of co-determination structures, trade union organisational power and re-distributive effects of the welfare state has become the point of departure for a conflict dynamic around restraining the new

38 Klaus Dörre finance capitalism. The steady rise in labour conflicts and the strike year of 2015 in particular bear witness to a newfound confidence among trade unionists. Some two million strike days (2014: 392,000) involving the participation of about 1.1 million wage-earners (2014: 345,000 on strike; WSI 2016) stand in stark contrast to the general decline of labour conflicts in many OECD countries. Trade unions obviously have the greatest scope of action in the first world of collective-bargaining-based regulation, in which industry-wide agreements still represent the norm. In the world of deregulated work, trade unions must conduct painstaking company-by-company struggles, or even go on strike in order to win even a modicum of such action scope. The ‘border regime’ between the two worlds is structurally conflict-prone, producing countless small-scale conflicts related to company-level and in-house wage agreements and which follow their own internal logic. Only the most spectacular cases make the headlines, and thus often go unregistered in official strike statistics. According to available figures, labour conflicts entailing strike action have almost tripled in less than a decade, from 82 (2007) to 214 (2014) (WSI 2016). More than half of these conflicts take place in the service sector and commonly involve only small numbers of workers, but also occur in core industrial areas, albeit less frequently. Although the new conflict formation only emerges in outline, identifying the pacemakers generates a conflict typology that suggests a fragmentation of social conflict (see Table 3.1). Dominant actors are the state, business and capital associations, or corporations. Subdominant actors are workforces, occupational or wage-earner groups, trade unions and – in the German case somewhat hypothetically – civil society alliances. Each group of actors has specific power resources. Workforces and wage-earner groups embody (primarily, but not exclusively) structural power; trade unions embody above all organisational power and social alliances embody essentially symbolic-communicative power. Although subdominant, labour actors can also become pacemakers of labour disputes. Accordingly, the actor constellations along with the objects and dynamics of conflict are variable. Industry-wide collective bargaining conflicts continue to be normal business for employers’ associations and trade unions. Like the warning strikes of the IGM (MuE), they take place predominantly in the world of secured collective bargaining regulations and still mobilise the majority of strikers. In the transition to the field of state-centred conflicts, however, new dynamics are emerging in industry-wide regulations. The labour dispute in Social and Educational Services (SuE) was conducted as a dispute over the upgrading of an entire occupational group and over the importance of reproductive work. In this way, it also developed a political dimension. Long prepared by the relevant trade unions, industrial action in some regions took on the character of a social movement. In the course of the strike, the pacemaker role changed from ver.di and GEW to the workforces. With the strike delegates, the educators had their own representation, which ensured that a proposal for conciliation was rejected by a large majority of those union members surveyed. Yet the striking workers lacked the

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Table 3.1 The new conflict formation as seen in labour conflicts in 2015 Conflict

Pacemaker

Object of dispute

Postal service, company, DHL top-level management German rail train drivers’ company union (GdL)

Social and childcare services Metal and electronics industry Amazon

outsourcing, wages, working conditions wages, working hours, working conditions, right to organise occupational/ recognition and wage-earner revaluation of groups, trade profession unions IG Metall wages, trade union advanced training trade union, regimes of work company and supervision

Workplace management wages as signiorganisational or staff, trade fier of the qualconflicts union ity of life

Strike function

Role of the state

economic pressure, defence, organisation

indirect, privatiser, co-owner

unlimited strike, powerful position within the logistics chain, social movement political demonstration, refusal to provide public services, social movement, organisation token strike, economic and political pressure

direct/indirect, co-owner/ legislator

demonstration strike, militant minority, organisation economic pressure, organisation

direct, employer/bargaining counterpart indirect, legitimation of wage demands indirect (location policies) indirect, political support

Source: (Dörre et al. 2017, 246; Dörre 2019, 173); the chart presents an overview of the labour conflicts investigated

capacity to exert direct economic pressure on employers; their refusal to provide their service only had effect because parents and public opinion came partly onside. Although designed as an imposition strike, the industrial action had a demonstrative function and was deliberately used by the unions involved to recruit new members. In state-centred conflicts, public employers become active as collective bargaining parties and conflict parties. As with the GdL (Train Drivers’ Union) strike, the state can also set the pace in industrial disputes, in a regulatory capacity. The GdL, for example, conducted an implicit political strike to secure freedom of association and a Collective Bargaining Law. However, it was only able to mobilise because it took up important wage-earner interests with demands for wage increases, shorter working hours, and qualitative improvements (breaks). The GdL could only exert economic pressure because it led the fight for public opinion and used communicative power resources to do so. Company-centred conflicts arise where strategic decisions in corporations influence collective bargaining standards (e.g. Deutsche Post) or where it is a question of first establishing the union as a recognised collective bargaining party (e.g. Amazon). In the former, the company was the pacemaker. By

40 Klaus Dörre spinning off the parcel delivery company DHL Delivery GmbH, Deutsche Post AG aimed to undermine existing collective bargaining agreements so as to re-employ staff at much lower cost. In order to be able to influence the company’s spin-off decision and be able to go on strike, ver.di had to resort to terminating the working time arrangement of the collective agreement. The company led the dispute offensively. The union was able to preserve the vested rights of the core workforce, though not to stop the spin-off. In this respect, such industrial action is a good example of how trade unions can influence strategic corporate decisions that force the fragmentation of industrial relations. In this case, too, the exertion of economic pressure on the company had a hidden political dimension. Deutsche Post has to compete with service providers in which trade unions are at best weakly represented and which can therefore operate with significantly lower wage and labour standards. By privatising the postal service, the state had created the conditions for such a market in service provision. At the borderline between the first and the second world of collective bargaining regulation, conflicts between companies or enterprises become the norm. In contrast to the spin-off of DHL Delivery GmbH, such disputes often have an offensive character. This means that workforces pursue conflict in order to enforce company co-determination, collective bargaining norms, higher wages, and better working conditions. With the Amazon strike, on the other hand, it is difficult to clearly identify the pacemaker. While the labour dispute was originally initiated by the service sector union ver.di, the management’s attitude has helped to escalate the conflict. As in the case of Deutsche Post, there is also a difference at Amazon between the formal reason for striking (changes to the individual wage) and the actual objective of the industrial action (recognition of the trade union as a negotiating partner, influence on the company’s labour and control regime). Even this strike, which has now been going on for more than five years, cannot have a direct economic impact, as trade union power is insufficient to block the relocation of orders in Amazon’s transnational corporate network. The industrial action is thus primarily of a demonstrative nature. It has an indirect effect; there is no end in sight. This is another reason why the ability to form alliances and communicative resources are so important for ver.di in this dispute. Above all, however, the Amazon conflict displays the decentralisation and gradual internationalisation of the strike. The decisions to go on temporary demonstration strikes are taken by the union members in the workplace and there they can draw on a centrally granted strike budget. However, decentralised decisions in the company are not preceded by a strike resolution of a central collective bargaining commission. Ver.di responds to the rapid, cross-border relocations of online traders with cross-border networking. In the meantime, various European Amazon locations have been integrated into the trade union network. This has led to the first industrial disputes in Amazon Italy. And even at the Polish sites, where the right to strike prohibits participation in Amazonstyle industrial disputes, workforces work ‘by the book’ when it comes to

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expressing their solidarity with striking workforces in other countries. Numerous company conflicts, which we have investigated in exemplary form in east German companies (IGM, NGG), are similar to the Amazon dispute in that they concern the attempt to connect to existing collective bargaining agreements and the enforcement of elementary economic and social rights by the workforce. In the process, the trade unions involved tend to become company actors and strikes become a way of first getting the other side to compromise by means of strengthened organisational power. What does all this mean for the question of elements of a social movement unionism in German industrial relations? Five phenomena stand out: (1) The new conflict formation results from the fragmentation of both labour relations as well as labour conflicts. This in turn requires the trade unions to return to their social movement role. Quite surprisingly, movement elements also influence conflicts fought by and for individual occupational groups. This is true, for instance, of the German train drivers, who are often characterised as a section of highly privileged, corporatist workers. Occupational pride and faith in one’s own professional capabilities clash with the marketand competition-driven depreciation of entire occupational groups’ labour. If used correctly, what appears as a strictly occupational consciousness can become a source of recalcitrance, protest, and collective action. A similar phenomenon can be observed in education and social services. Here, professional identity – long considered an obstacle to trade union organisation – has instilled a form of collective consciousness similar to that of other skilled labourers, which has now become the subjective driving force of an intense labour conflict. (2) This illustrates how wage-earners’ obstinacy and activists’ convictions can become an important trade union power resource. This dimension of classbased union action is not only neglected in the concept of conflict partnership, but in institutionalist approaches more generally. Collective action by wage-earners cannot adequately be grasped as mere rationalisations of an intermediary conflict logic, nor as the result of individual cost-benefit calculations. Measured by labour conflict outcomes, the strikes in the postal service, in social and educational services (kindergartens etc.) and at Amazon must appear utterly irrational from the perspective of Mancur Olson’s logics of collective action. Things look very different from the perspective of the strike activists themselves, however. Although there is certainly no political consciousness among wage-earners resembling that of a socialist workers’ movement, key active groups do exhibit some nuclei of identity and motivations which feed efforts towards an obstinate, independent assertion of trade union interest-driven politics. Subjective gains in the eyes of strike activists can include the experience of standing up to their employer, which becomes particularly important when a labour conflict does not – as was the case with the postal service and the childcare workers – end with demands being (fully) met. The question as to how those involved in a strike cope

42 Klaus Dörre with a negative outcome depends not least on how core activists interpret and collectively understand it. (3) Labour conflicts and trade union organisation drives are an expression of a Polanyian wage-earners’ reaction to unjust market-driven distribution. Wage demands often act as a trigger, ostensibly corresponding to the operating principle of intermediary trade unions and mainly addressing quantitative demands (wages). In these new labour conflicts, however, we see a different configuration: wage issues represent a mere catalyst for more qualitative demands. Wage conflicts often see the development and articulation of a critique of excessive working hours, pressure to perform, a lack of time sovereignty, and authoritarian internal regimes. Incremental wage demands can only mobilise skilled workers and qualified staff precisely because of this accumulation of experiences of injustice. Even seemingly conventional wage conflicts are thus never ‘only’ about the money, although the latter is of course very important. What wage-earners demand is more justice, more recognition, more time for friends and family, more codetermination as well as self-determination. It is a question of ‘living wages’, that is, wages informed by the standard of industry-wide collective bargaining agreements and regional average wage levels. Wages sufficient for living become synonymous with quality of life, while major differences in wages and income are obviously perceived as limitations to a selfdetermined life. Highly-skilled workers in particular complain about the treadmill of a constant ‘always more, but never enough’, which they perceive as an intensifying burden at the workplace, but also in other areas of life. This suggests that the substance of social conflict is likewise subject to change. Class conflicts become conflicts over quality of life and part of a greater socio-ecological conflict throughout society. (4) This differentiation of labour conflicts has been accompanied by a gradual functional transformation of strike action. Labour conflicts continue to offer the possibility of implementing, through economic pressure, exemplary wage agreements for entire industries. That said, they are increasingly becoming a – primarily symbolic-political – form of mobilisation which is only deployed as a last resort to strengthen trade union organisational power and thereby create the necessary conditions for negotiated conflict regulation. The functional transformation of labour conflict is not always obvious. It is more readily apparent in the world of deregulated labour, but its impact is nevertheless severe. The trade unions are less and less able to rely on their institutional power resources and depend on their capacity to engage in conflict, which in turn rests on organisational power. The capacity for collective action and strike activity must be rebuilt anew, company by company. This urgently requires organising new groups of wage-earners. Labour conflicts are becoming increasingly women-dominated as they move into the precarious sector, and are particularly fierce in the new service industries. They are based in part on conditioned forms of membership and workforce participation which in turn shape strike forms and other demands and

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objectives. Condition-bound trade union work renders the attainment of a certain level of workplace organisation the precondition for conflict activity. As a result, conflicts become less predictable. Moreover, their outcome is made uncertain by the unpredictability of the conflict parties’ action strategies. (5) Whether or not this will lead to sustained development of social movement elements within the trade unions, or an increase in their organisational power and willingness to strike as such, we cannot say. The compulsion to engage in trade union renewal while in conflict complicates interest politics. The state appears as a conflict actor in diverse contexts and with surprising frequency. Indeed, the state has itself become a conflict party. As an agent of privatisation and owner, it exerts at least partial influence at the Deutsche Post as well as Deutsche Bahn AG, thereby acting as the ultimate instance in terms of a re-definition of the rules governing labour conflict and adjusting them to structural changes in labour relations. The crucial aspect, however, is not whether the state intervenes – nor that it actually does so – but the way in which it does. Wherever the state, and with it organised labour relations, is on the retreat, standardised, regulated contestations are replaced by other forms of conflict – riots, youth unrest, spontaneous revolts, or, as in the French suburbs, religiously veiled violence. In those places where left-popular forces such as Syriza, Podemos, or the Portuguese Left Bloc unfold a democratic form of representation, this often occurs in deliberate dissociation from the old Left and partly also from established trade unions. Their right-populist counterparts, by contrast, practice a völkisch (that is, an ethnic-nationalist tainted) exclusive solidarity. Their re-interpretation of the distributional struggle as a fight for the ‘people’s wealth’, not between the top and the bottom of society but instead between inside and outside, between the ‘German people’ and the supposed migrant ‘invaders’, resonates alarmingly well with some sections of the unionised labour force. This is a further reason why the new conflict formation brings with it challenges for trade unions to exert targeted influence on the balance of power within the state apparatus in order to mobilise institutional support, without which the future of organised labour relations will likely be rather grim.

Conclusion (West) German social capitalism and its organised industrial relations are a thing of the past. Although the institutions and action strategies of the old form of conflict partnership still exist in the first world of collective-bargaining-based wage regulation, in the bigger picture a new game with different rules is emerging. The fact that we witnessed a return – albeit with little substance – to mechanisms of the social-capitalist era during the financial crisis does not contradict this assertion. Successful crisis management has consolidated Germany’s – primarily economic and therefore at best half-hegemonic – position in Europe. Nevertheless,

44 Klaus Dörre relevant actors would be unable to universalise the German system of dual interest representation on a European scale, the strength of which emanates from its core within the industrial export sector, even if they wanted to. And besides, the political will to do anything of the sort is nowhere to be found in the current constellation. Conflicts which typically develop along the fault lines between the two worlds can no longer be adequately grasped with a conceptual framework which ascribes to the trade unions a pragmatic role of intermediary between systemic and members’ interests. The new transnational conflict formation can no longer be explained with concepts of intermediarity or conflict partnership, nor can organised labour relations be fully understood if research interests are guided merely by the desire to prove their contribution to economic efficiency. As Max Weber would say, contemporary finance capitalism is of a thoroughly political nature and is thus unresponsive to such demonstrations of rationality. Wherever capitalism and economic-industrial democracy develop an antagonistic relationship, trade unions will have no choice but to reshape their dual character in the fight within as well as against the wage system. Research exploring the possibilities of corresponding strategic choices by the unions should preferably be designed in the spirit of a public sociology – as an organic public sociology founded on the closest possible interaction and exchange with the subalterns and their forms of selforganisation, so as to take into account innovative practices of trade union renewal. Whether or not such research can establish itself in the academic landscape in a lasting way remains to be seen.

Notes 1 We thank Adrian Wilding for the translation from German into English. 2 Literally translated, Landnahme means land grabbing, land appropriation, or territorial gain. It refers to internal as well as external capitalist expansion. The concept of Landnahme implies that, in the long run, capitalist societies cannot reproduce themselves on their own foundations. In order to reproduce themselves, they continuously have to occupy and commodify a non-capitalist ‘other’ (i.e. regions, milieus, groups, activities) in, so to speak, ceaseless repetition of the act of primitive accumulation. Owing to the difficulty of finding a precise equivalent in English, the term Landnahme will be used throughout the text.

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46 Klaus Dörre Frege, Carola. 2000. “Gewerkschaftsreformen in den USA: Eine kritische Analyse des ‘Organisierungsmodells.’” Industrielle Beziehungen 7 (3): 260–280. Gall, Gregor. 2005. “Organizing Non-Union Workers as Trade Unionists in the ‘New Economy’ in Britain.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 26 (1): 41–63. Gerst, Detlef, Klaus Pickshaus, and Hilde Wagner. 2011. “Revitalisierung der Gewerkschaften durch Arbeitspolitik? Die Initiativen der IG Metall – Szenario für Arbeitspolitik in und nach der Krise.” In Gewerkschaftliche Modernisierung, edited by Thomas Haipeter and Klaus Dörre, 163. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Heery, Edmund, and Melanie Simms. 2007. Employer Responses to Union Organising in the United Kingdom. Warwick: Manuskript. Hurd, Richard, Ruth Milkman, and Lowell Turner. 2003. “Reviving the American Labour Movement: Institutions and Mobilization.” European Journal of Industrial Relations 9 (1): 99–117. Huzzard, Tony, Denis Gregory, and Regan Scott, eds. 2004. Strategic Unionism and Partnership: Boxing or Dancing? London: Macmillan. Industrielle Beziehungen. 2016. Themenheft Konfliktpartnerschaft 23 (3). Mering: Rainer Hampp. Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung. 2013. IAB-Betriebspanel. Länderbericht Thüringen. Ergebnisseder 18. Welle. Berlin: IAB Institut für Arbeitsmarkt und Berufsforschung. Lehndorff, Steffen. 2014. “Die spaltende Integration Europas: Ein Überblick.” In Spaltende Integration: Der Triumph gescheiterter Ideen in Europa – revisited. Zehn Länderstudien, edited by Steffen Lehndorff, 7–32. Hamburg: VSA. Lévesque, Christian, Gregor Murray, and Stéphane Le Queux. 2005. “Union Disaffection and Social Identity: Democracy as a Source of Union Revitalization.” Work and Occupations 32 (4): 400–422. Lutz, Burkart. 1984. Der kurze Traum immerwährender Prosperität: Eine Neuinterpretation der industriell-kapitalistischen Entwicklung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus. Markowitz, Linda. 1999. Worker Activism after Successful Union Organizing. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Moody, Kim. 1997. Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy. New York: Verso. Müller-Jentsch, Walther. 2008. “Gewerkschaften als intermediäre Organisationen.” In Arbeit und Bürgerstatus: Studien zur sozialen und industriellen Demokratie, edited by Walther Müller-Jentsch, 51–86. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Müller-Jentsch, Walther. 2011. Gewerkschaften und soziale Marktwirtschaft seit 1945. Stuttgart: Reclam. Neary, Michael. 2002. “Labour Moves: A Critique of the Concept of Social Movement Unionism.” In The Labour Debate: An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work, edited by Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary, 149–178. Aldershot: Ashgate. Nissen, Bruce. 2003. “Alternative Strategic Directions for the U.S. Labor Movement: Recent Scholarship.” Labor Studies Journal 28 (1): 133–155. Reusch, Jürgen. 2015. “Basisdaten zu Arbeitsbedingungen und Arbeitsverhältnissen.” In Gute Arbeit: Digitale Arbeitswelt – Trends und Anforderungen, edited by Lothar Schröder and Hans-Jürgen Urban, 358–381. Köln: Bund-Verlag. Silver, Beverly J. 2005. Forces of Labor: Arbeiterbewegungen und Globalisierung seit 1870. Hamburg and Berlin: Assoziation A.

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4

New cleavages in the knowledge society? Social movements and the production, use, and valorization of knowledge Sebastian Haunss

Introduction On 11 February 2012 tens of thousands of protesters in more than 200 cities worldwide took to the streets to demonstrate against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) – an international treaty in which core industrialized countries, led by the USA and Europe, tried to create an international organization to strengthen and coordinate measures for the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs) (Kaminski 2011; Arthur 2012). The protesters addressed an issue which twenty years earlier was generally not seen as an area of political contention. While IPRs had been subject to international regulation for more than hundred years, until recently they were regulated behind closed doors in an administrative technocratic – and thus depoliticized (Zürn, Binder, and Ecker-Ehrhardt 2012, 73) – mode of decisionmaking. Over the last 20 years IPRs have been fundamentally politicized. This is the result of active interventions from various actors, and at the same time, the consequence of the growing economic importance of IPRs in advanced knowledge societies. In this chapter, I will argue that the emergence of protest mobilizations around issues of online privacy, internet regulation, and IPRs is embedded in and intertwined with structural social changes associated with the notion of the knowledge society. I argue that especially the conflicts about intellectual property claims are directly connected to the emergence of new societal cleavages that are expressions of large-scale social change. This chapter thus departs somewhat from the book’s focus on the impact of stratification on social movements. Instead of trying to map the constituencies of the movements studied in this chapter to the existing social strata of industrial societies, I claim that the transformation from industrial societies to knowledge societies may create new social cleavages and thus may alter the structure of stratifications that are relevant and meaningful for social movements. These new cleavages do not replace the existing cleavages of industrial societies, just like the labor-capital cleavage did not replace those of earlier societies. But social transformations create new cleavages and change the relative centrality of the older.

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In order to do this, this chapter starts with a brief discussion of the relationship between conflict and social change (1). It proceeds with an analysis of the role of IPRs in the knowledge society (2), discusses five processes that have led to the politicization of intellectual property (3), introduces important protest mobilizations in this issue area (4), and finally argues that the emerging social movements should be interpreted in relation to the processes of social change in the knowledge society (5).

Conflict and change Are the current conflicts about IPRs results of processes of social change leading to the transformation of industrial societies into knowledge societies? Do they belong to a new class of conflicts addressing new cleavages in the knowledge society, which are not represented in the cleavage structure of the (post-) industrial society? In principle there are two possible ways to find answers to these questions. The first option starts from a theory of conflicts and social change. Such a theory links general conflict lines or cleavages to social change. With regard to specific conflicts the question then only is whether or not they address one of the cleavages at the heart of the current society. If – as I’ve argued elsewhere (Haunss 2013, chap. 3) – such a theory is missing, a second option is to start from the empirical analysis of actual conflicts that address core pillars of the current social structure. In the classical theories of society, conflicts and social change are connected in a linear stage model. For Karl Marx (1961 [1859]), the emergence of capitalism had created a cleavage between capital and labor. Social conflicts that address this cleavage are therefore the results of a historical dialectical process in which societies advance from one stage to another and in which the core of social conflict is replaced by another, finally culminating in a classless society. This linear stage model of social conflicts and change is also present in the writings of other classical theorists of social change like Emile Durkheim (1933) or Talcot Parsons (1964), although there, it is not a dialectical process but a sequence of order and disorder propelled by growing differentiation that drives social development. While these theories of society differ fundamentally, their model of conflicts and social change is nevertheless structurally similar in assuming a very simple causal chain where social change leads to conflict, which leads to new social change, leading to new conflicts, and so on. While this is obviously a stark simplification and most authors realize that conflicts have many more causes than social change, and that social change has more sources than social conflict, the assumption in many classical social theories is nevertheless that there is a simple linear relation between core processes of social change and core conflicts. More recent theorists of social change in the network (Castells 1996) or postindustrial society (Touraine 1988) would not subscribe to such a simple model of social change. Instead of one conflict associated with one process of social change they see multiple conflicts that develop in parallel. This leads at

50 Sebastian Haunss a structural level to a somewhat more complex model that allows for multiple, independent conflicts. But at its core this model also remains a stage model of social history. This cumulative model and the corresponding idea of society and history in the singular has been criticized in the second half of the 20th century from various authors, who have claimed that history is neither a linear nor a unitary process, but rather develops in highly contingent and contradictory ways and is made through the concrete interaction of collective actors (e.g. Popper 1957; Nisbet 1970; Tilly 1984). Their rejection of the idea of history as a unified process with a clearly definable direction has shifted the perspective from a simple cause-and-effect model, in which conflict is seen as a direct result of social change, to more complex models in which social change alters the conditions and possibilities for conflictual interaction of various groups in society. This shift is particularly apparent in Tilly’s work that often takes a broad historical perspective. Conflict appears here neither as the consequence of the breakdown of social order in historical processes of differentiation, nor as the result of inherent social contradictions. For Tilly conflicts are rooted in concrete inequalities and power differences. Structural social changes affect the conditions for collective action, and his research tries to explain how the creation of nation-states, industrialization, and democratization enhance or restrict possibilities for collective action, and influence the forms of action and the contents of public mobilizations (Tilly 1978, 2004). By no longer asking primarily “How does society work or function?” and instead asking “How do people make history?” Tilly and other critical historians have shifted the perspective on social change and conflicts. The totalizing perspective of the classical theories of society is replaced by a detailed historical or sociological perspective that still is interested in patterns and mechanisms, but always in the plural. But in this detailed historical picture no theory emerges that would link large-scale social change to specific social conflicts. A theory of complex interactions of conflicts and social change is still missing. Such a theory would have to link in a network model conflicts with other conflicts, various processes of social change with each other, and conflicts with social change (Haunss 2013, 87). Without such a general theory no a priori claims can be made about the expected structure of changing cleavages and developing social conflicts that should be expected in the transition to the knowledge society. But even without a general theory a number of prominent conflicts can be identified that have recently begun to address a core pillar of the knowledge society: intellectual property rights. Based on an empirical analysis of those conflicts it is possible to judge, to which extent these mobilizations still fit into the cleavages and stratifications of the industrial society and to which extent the emergence of new collective actors addressing new cleavages can be observed. The empirical analysis thus can reveal underlying conflict lines and emerging cleavages beyond the concrete policy questions addressed in each conflict. From this perspective, and in line with some of the literature on the post-1960s new social

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movements (Offe 1985; Touraine 1988; Melucci 1996), social movements are interpreted as indicators of new cleavage structures in contemporary societies. Following this approach, I will present in the remainder of this chapter an empirical analysis of the three most prominent large-scale protest mobilization about issues of intellectual property and discuss to which more general conflict lines these mobilizations speak.

IPRs in the knowledge society The societal transformations at the end of the 20th century have been associated with a transition from the industrial to an information society (Lyon 1988), a network society (Castells 1996), a post-industrial society (Bell 1999 [1973]), a knowledge society (Stehr 1994), a risk-society (Beck 1986), or a programmed society (Touraine 1972). Behind this abundance of concepts lies the notion that somehow the world today seems to differ significantly from the world about half a century ago, and that this change is somehow related to the enhanced role knowledge, information, and computer technologies play in current societies. The changes that many observers describe comprise the economy, the political institutions, and the cultural realm. While nation-states still are the dominant form of social organization, their autonomy and power seem to diminish. Transnational corporations, international organizations, and other non-governmental actors are competing with governments for overlapping “spheres of authority,” which only occasionally still coincide neatly with territorial borders (Rosenau 2002). The industrial sector with its production based on the transformation of raw materials into mass-produced consumer goods is losing its role as the prime source of wealth and productivity in the countries of the Global North. Instead the service sector and the production of immaterial goods are becoming the main pillars of prosperity and economic growth (Bell 1999). Even the remotest regions of the world are subjugated under the command of the global economic order, although this integration is far from equal. Global communication networks have expanded the possibilities of information-exchange allowing the integration of financial markets in what Castells has called “timeless time” (Castells 2000, 13), and laying the ground for cultural globalization processes that detach communities from the constraints of physical proximity (Held and McGrew 2002, 3). Authors writing about the great social transformations in the late-20th and early- 21st century disagree on many aspects regarding the scope, speed, and consequences of the prognosticated social change, but even among those who criticize the labels knowledge and information society, and who argue that these terms are neither distinctive nor precise enough to characterize current societies (Kumar 2005; Webster 2006) there is widespread agreement that knowledge and information play an increasingly central role in current societies. It is admittedly true that knowledge was already important in industrial societies and that current societies are far too complex to be reduced to their structures of knowledge creation, valorization, and use. But the term knowledge society nevertheless addresses a core element of today’s social and economic structures.

52 Sebastian Haunss Using the term “knowledge society” implies that today core social dynamics depend on the production, appropriation, propertization, and distribution of knowledge. This term does not describe a finite and unitary empirical object, because societies are analytical abstractions to describe complex social structures. Like all analytical concepts they have no direct equivalence in the empirical world. In this sense knowledge society is a metaphor that tries to capture one core aspect that drives current processes of social change. Like every metaphor it is incomplete, because in any empirical social structure knowledge dynamics are never the only mechanisms that structure the relationships among actors, organizations, and institutions (Haunss 2013, chap. 3). In particular, today’s knowledge societies are also capitalist societies, in which immaterial and material property rights are the core supporting pillars of the market order. Only the propertization of goods creates the necessary precondition for their appropriation and exchange in anonymous capitalist markets. With regard to material goods the question which material goods can and should be privately appropriated to what extent and by which actors has always been subject to political struggles in modern societies. The propertization of immaterial goods has only recently become an issue of social conflicts. IPRs, the legal base of the propertization of immaterial goods, have been established and adjusted until recently in purely technocratic-administrative procedures, involving only a relatively small epistemic community of legal experts and interested parties (Hofmann 2006). IPRs are state-backed temporary monopolies to exclude others from using a patented innovation or a copyright-protected creative work without the consent of the creator. The three most important IPRs are patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Trademarks differ systematically from the other two as they do not protect innovation, but rather are in their core a mechanism to secure trust between buyers and sellers. They predate by far the other forms of IPRs and can be traced back to the Roman Empire (May and Sell 2006, 10). Other IPRs that cover industrial designs, microprocessor layouts (masks), databases, plant varieties, or geographical indications are in essence special cases of the three core rights. While a trademark may often exceed the value of any given patent, copyrights and patents are nevertheless the more important IPRs, as they occupy structurally important positions that allow them to function as regulatory mechanisms for the core processes of generating, commercializing, and accessing knowledge in current societies.

The politicization of intellectual property The last two decades saw a politicization of intellectual property (IP) which was driven by five processes: the growing economic importance of knowledgebased industries, the growing internationalization of IP, the growing attention IP issues receive in non-specialist and high-level political fora, the trend to personalize IP rules, and an increasing number of contentious mobilizations

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around IP issues. The first process is a result of changing economic structures, the second and third reflect these changes at the level of international institutions and legal norms. The fourth process connects macro-economic changes with changing social practices, and fifth brings in new collective actors and claims. I will briefly discuss the first four processes and then address in more depth the emergence of contentious mobilizations and its relation to structural changes in the knowledge society. The growing economic importance of knowledge-based industries and the resulting growing importance of IPRs has been extensively discussed in the scientific literature (Arrow 1962; Drahos 1995; Park and Ginarte 1997; May 2000; Pugatch 2004; Yu 2007, 2009). If we take the volume of the international trade in royalties and license fees as a very rough indicator for the development of knowledge-based industries, OECD statistics show a dramatic rise of the economic value of these goods in the last 30 years (OECD 2014; WTO and OECD 2018). For the USA, the volume in trade in royalties and license fees has increased by a factor of 18 between 1986 and 2016, a growth rate that is more than two times higher than that of the overall service sector, which grew in the same time by a factor of 7.6. By 2017, the US industry had received about $128 billion in revenues for royalty fees and licenses. In the EU trade in royalty fees and licenses grew even stronger than in the US but the EU remains a net importer of IP goods (Haunss 2013, 15). Even if a clear indicator that measures the share of IPRs in the economic strength of a country is still lacking, there is consensus that the economic importance of the economic sectors that rely heavily on the protection of knowledge through IPRs, has increased significantly in the last decades. The growing economic importance of IP-protected goods has focused the attention of political decision-makers and civil-society actors on the rules and legal frameworks that govern the creation of intellectual property and thus has contributed to its politicization. The growing economic importance of IP industries goes along with a growing internationalization of IP politics and rules. The institutions that govern IP are not particularly new. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works that governs copyrights and related rights came into existence 1886 and was last revised 1971, the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property that governs, among others, patents, trademarks, and designs dates back to 1883. But these international treaties did not contain binding minimum standards and have only led to a rather limited harmonization of IP laws among its member states. The real push for an internationalization of IP rules came with the 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which has substantially changed the international framework of IP regulation. Because the TRIPS agreement is an integral part of the WTO treaty, all WTO member states are now required to establish a set of substantive minimum standards of IP protection far beyond what most developing countries would have liked to provide and even exceeding the standards of many developed countries at that time (Deere 2009, 1). Several in-depth studies

54 Sebastian Haunss have analyzed the process by which the agreement was reached and its consequences for developed and developing countries (Correa 2000; May 2000; Maskus 2000a, 2000b; Sell 2003; Drahos 2005; May and Sell 2006; Deere 2009). Today a multitude of international treaties govern IPRs, and IP issues are implicated in almost every ongoing international trade negotiation. The internationalization of IP and the global strengthening of IP rules was the result of a consolidated lobbying effort of mainly US industry interest groups (Sell 1995). But this internationalization has also created political opportunities at the international level for new coalitions of actors opposing stronger IPRs, and thus has effectively contributed to the politicization of IP. The growing economic importance and internationalization of IP is accompanied by the growing attention IP issues have received in non-specialist and high-level political fora, which is at the same time a result of the first two processes and which further accelerates them. The most prominent of these high-level fora is probably the G7/G8. For most of the now more than 40 years of G7/G8 meetings IPRs did not occupy prominent positions. On the contrary: In the summit documents from 23 out of 44 meetings between 1975 and 2018 IPRs were not mentioned at all, and most of the time, even if they were mentioned, they occurred as a minor point without much emphasis. This changes in 2004 when IP starts to become an important issue, so that in the concluding statement of the 2007 G8 meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany, IPRs are addressed as the 4th topic after global growth and stability, financial markets, and freedom of investment, and before climate change, responsibility for raw materials, corruption, and trade. Under the heading “Promoting Innovation – Protecting Innovation” it is claimed that “innovation needs to be protected worldwide. IPRs are a critical precondition for innovation. The protection of IPRs is of core interest for consumers in all countries, particularly in developing countries” (G8 2007). The European Parliament is another political institution where one was able to observe the transition from IP perceived as a “technical issue” which should be handled by experts in specialist committees to an issue of general political interest which is debated in the plenary and where parliamentarians no longer blindly follow the experts’ opinion. The transition occurred during the conflict about a European directive proposed by the Commission which would have secured the legal grounds for granting software patents in Europe, but which was rejected by the parliament with an overwhelming majority and after a highly politicized conflict (Haunss and Kohlmorgen 2010). During this conflict the Commission’s and the European Parliament’s initial perception that software patents would be a highly technical, arcane, and specialist issue of patent legislation was profoundly changed after civil-society actors mobilized a successful protest campaign against the directive. The European Parliament’s rejection of ACTA shows that the politicization is sustainable and has altered the European Parliament’s perspective on IP issues. A fourth process that is driving the politicization of IP is the trend to personalize intellectual property rules so that they now directly affect an increasing number of

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citizens in their everyday practices. Traditionally IPRs regulated relationships between industrial market actors and were mainly aimed at firms, corporate actors, or at least entrepreneurs. At their core they regulated the industrial production of knowledge and information. Until recently, as James Boyle has aptly noted, for an individual citizen “it used to be relatively hard to violate an intellectual property right” (Boyle 2003, 40). With digitalization and the proliferation of the internet this has changed fundamentally, so that IP laws now increasingly target individual citizens who do not profit economically from their incriminated activities of filesharing or otherwise using and providing IP-protected content. This extension in terms of addressees makes IPRs increasingly an issue of general public interest and thus an issue that is more likely to be addressed in a conflictual political and not in an a-political mode of decision-making. The fifth process which is – like the third and fourth process – at the same time driving the politicization of IP and a result of its increasing politicization is the emergence of contentious mobilizations around IP issues. In the next section I will take a closer look at the most prominent mobilizations that emerged in the last two decades and discuss how these mobilizations are related to structural changes in the knowledge society.

Contentious mobilizations about IP In their long history intellectual property rights have often been contested and states did not necessarily support strong IPRs. Switzerland, for example, did not recognize foreign product patents for pharmaceutical products until 1977. In order to protect its emerging pharmaceutical industry it only introduced the much weaker form of process patents for chemical compounds in 1907 after considerable pressure from the USA and Germany, and pharmaceutical product patents only after the Swiss pharmaceutical industry had well established their leading position in the world market (May and Sell 2006, 113; Boldrin and Levine 2008, 216). Until recently IP conflicts usually were inter-state conflicts, or they were conflicts between competing industry interests within a nation-state. This constellation has only started to change in the last two decades with the emergence of social movements addressing issues of IP and access to knowledge. Among these mobilizations three stick out because of their mobilization dynamics and scale: The conflict about access to medicines, the mobilization against software patents in Europe, and the anti-ACTA mobilization. I will briefly introduce each of these conflicts and then discuss how they are related to structural changes in the knowledge society. Access to medicines On a global level, the broadest and most prominent conflictual mobilization about IPRs is the one about access to (essential) medicines. It addresses the effects of patents for pharmaceutical products on access to drugs for patients living in countries of the Global South (’t Hoen 2002; Mayne 2002). It was

56 Sebastian Haunss fueled, in particular, by the issue of access to HIV/AIDS medication in subSaharan Africa and Asia. The coordinates for this conflict were set by the dual dynamics of an accelerating rate of HIV infections in a number of developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America and a ratcheting up of IP protection that culminated in the 1995 TRIPS agreement (’t Hoen 2002; Sell 2002; Sell and Prakash 2004). The main claim of the access to medicines coalition is that the strengthened IPRs after TRIPS result in prices that are too high for essential medicines, making them unavailable for patients in the Global South. Instead of protecting the interests of the pharmaceutical industry by granting them far-reaching monopolies, global health and trade policies should instead give public health concerns primacy over economic interests and encourage developing countries to limit the scope of IPRs (Haunss 2013, 175f.). The driving force behind the access to medicines conflict is a coalition of NGOs that came together in the late 1990s and has remained at its core relatively constant. The literature (Sell 2002; Ford 2004; Ford et al. 2004; Munoz Tellez 2006; Matthews 2007; Kapczynski 2008; Clapham and Robinson 2009; ’t Hoen 2009; Haunss 2013) has identified a handful of core NGOs that played a central role in the conflict. These are the US-American NGO Consumer Project on Technology (CPTech), the international network of health, development, and consumer organizations Health Action International (HAI), the British NGO Oxfam, US-American and French chapters of the gay AIDS activist network ACT UP, the South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), and the international humanitarian aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Many of these groups are themselves umbrella organizations with numerous members, or organizations with regional units in many countries. The actual network of NGOs involved in the access to medicines conflict is thus significantly larger and includes organizations and individuals from the Global North and South. But the mobilization for access to medicines is not limited to this transnational advocacy network (Keck and Sikkink 1998). It also involves intensive grassroots mobilization of people living with HIV/AIDS in developing countries and large-scale protests that were supported by local unions (e.g. South Africa) or groups mobilizing against neoliberal economic globalization (e.g. Thailand). In the course of the conflict the activists from NGOs, protest mobilizations, and academia established cooperative relationships and formed coalitions with international organizations (WHO, WIPO, UNCTAD) and national administrations from developing countries and emerging economies (South Africa, Brazil, India, Thailand). Without the structural social and economic changes in the transition to a knowledge society the mobilization about access to medicines would not have happened. The growing economic importance of knowledge goods that allowed industry interest to successfully push for a strong global IP regime has created the opportunities for the access to medicines mobilization to emerge. The emerging social movement questions the foundations of the now dominant economic and political assumption that strong IPRs are in the interest of all trading partners in the global economy, and that they would foster development in the

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countries of the South. But the mobilization goes beyond the policy level and questions on a more general normative level the balance between economic and social foundations of IPRs – whether social welfare should be seen as a secondary effect of economic prosperity driven by IPRs, or whether social welfare should be considered in its own right as a possible limiting condition for IPRs. On this more abstract level the conflict questions the property order of the knowledge society. Its protagonists have a different socio-economic background than the social movement that questioned the property order of the industrial society – the workers’ movement. The conflict about the property order of the knowledge society thus creates new collective actors, representing a different cleavage than the conflict about the property order of the industrial society. The mobilization addresses an issue which had no salience in the industrial society. It politicizes a new cleavage about the limits of property in immaterial goods which emerges only as a result of fundamental changes in the current social and economic structure. It also questions the dominant mode of innovation by claiming that medical innovation should not (only) be driven by profit but by the needs of patients. The access to medicines conflict is connected to the structural changes of the knowledge society, but not in a simple cause-and-effect model but in a more complex network model of social conflict and social change (Haunss 2013, 87). Like every social movement, also this contentious mobilization is not simply a reflection of social changes and environmental conditions. It required the agency of movement entrepreneurs and their ability to frame the issue of access to medicines in a way that it became conductive for a global and diverse mobilization. Changes in the global power structure between the core industrialized countries of the north and the emerging BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) powers offered a favorable opportunity structure for this transnational mobilization that connected HIV/AIDS patient initiatives in Thailand with health officials in Brazil and academics in US elite universities. Software patents Compared to the access to medicines conflict, the conflict about software patents in Europe was more limited in its regional scope, was focused prima facie on a more limited policy issues, but was also more intense in terms of mobilization. From its beginning in 1997, to its end in 2005, a large network of actors became involved in a conflictual mobilization that brought the former arcane and specialist issue of software patent legislation into the TV evening news (Eckl 2005; Albers 2009; Eimer 2011; Leifeld and Haunss 2012; Haunss 2013, chap. 4). The conflict started in June 1997 when the European Commission published a Green Paper on the Community patent and the patent system in Europe (COM 1997). It ended eight years later on 6 June 2005 when the European Parliament rejected the directive on the patentability of computerimplemented inventions (COM 2002) with a majority of 648 to 14 votes.

58 Sebastian Haunss Between these dates lies a contentious mobilization in which new collective actors emerged and entered the arena of IP politics in Europe, and which has lastingly altered the power relations in this field. The mobilization against software patents initially started as a campaign driven by software developers working mostly for small and medium sized companies (SMEs) and with strong connections to the free and open source software (FOSS) community. A handful of activists founded at the very beginning of the conflict the NGO Federation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) which became an important hub in the activist network. This network grew quickly to comprise at the end of the conflict several hundred core activists and organizations, establishing close cooperation relationships with numerous members of the European Parliament and reaching out to tens of thousands of supporters. The activists used a broad spectrum of protest forms including petitions, lobbying, demonstrations, and internet protests. The activists’ original argument was that the introduction of software patents in Europe would benefit only a small number of large corporations and thus would destroy the business model of the many SMEs in the IT sector. During the mobilization this core story was expanded to cover the issues of monopoly power and the democratic process, thus broadening the scope of the argumentation and providing discursive access points and bridges for actors outside the IT industry. They thus developed a coherent set of frames which were shared by a large number of activists. In its center stand innovation, the competitiveness of SMEs, democracy, monopolies, and growth. These core frames were embedded in a number of broader frames that address questions of creativity, freedom of speech, consumer rights, and open access to knowledge and information. On an abstract level the conflict about software patents in Europe was at its core a conflict about innovation and transfer of knowledge, in which two clearly distinguishable models of innovation stood against each other, a model of industrial innovation against a model of open innovation. Industrial innovation, as advanced by the European Commission, the large industry associations, and transnational IT firms assumes that innovation is located (mainly) in large-scale industrial units. It is seen as the result of organized efforts of economic actors who spend significant resources to produce innovative knowledge that can be used in industrial production processes. Industrial innovation relies on exclusive access to and propertization of knowledge. The current IP system, and especially the patent system, are designed to fulfill this mission. The alternative model of open innovation was advanced by the opponents of the software patent directive and starts from a very different assumption that innovation is at its core a dispersed and distributed process without centralized control. Innovation is seen as mainly incremental and not restricted to largescale facilities. The core principle is general access to knowledge and information, because only under this premise can future innovation productively build on existing knowledge. Within the open innovation paradigm actors have a strong interest in a legal framework that supports the creation of a knowledge commons that is freely accessible for everyone.

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While the access to medicines conflict addresses primarily the limits of propertization of knowledge, the main focus of the software patents conflict is on the mode of knowledge production. In parallel to the conflicts at the beginning of the industrial age where the industrial production of material goods superseded in many areas manual production, we now have a similar conflict line in the immaterial sphere. Only this time the decentralized production model sets out to challenge the industrial model – a dynamic that is made possible by the radical lowering of transaction costs in networked social production and cooperation structures (Benkler 2006). Like in the case of access to medicines, the software patents conflict was on its surface a classical policy conflict about a very limited detail of legal regulation. But on a more abstract level it addresses a new cleavage of the knowledge society and mobilizes new collective actors. Again, it is not immediately caused by the current changes in the social and economic structure, but without these changes it would not have happened. Also, the structural changes did not just provide an immutable background for the conflict. Instead, the parties involved in the conflict have actively tried to intervene in the processes of social change and tried to shape it in ways that contradict the dominant order. While it is still too early to speculate about the chances for success of these interventions it reminds us that the relationship between social movements and structural social change are not a one-way street, but that social change can itself be shaped by social movements. The ACTA protests The protests against the ACTA show many similarities to the access to medicines and the software patents mobilization. The protests were initiated by NGOs and individuals who mostly had also been involved in the two other mobilizations, notably MSF, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI, formerly CPTech), FFII, the developing countries’ think tank and intergovernmental organization “The South Centre,” the European civil-society umbrella organization “European Digital rights” (EDRi), and the French NGO “La Quadrature du Net” – the latter two both were founded during the software patents conflict. ACTA was an attempt by core industrialized countries, led by the USA and Europe, to create an international organization to strengthen and coordinate measures for IPRs enforcement. Negotiations of the plurilateral treaty started in 2008 and were shrouded in selective secrecy. The draft text was not made publicly available, and the European Commission for a long time even denied the European Parliament access to the draft treaty whereas that information was available to the negotiating national governments and selected industry stakeholders which were invited to the negotiations. Civil-society groups initially focused on the secrecy of the negotiations, demanded access to the documents, and voiced their concerns that the treaty would target individual internet users and further restrict the availability of generic medicines (Essential Action 2008). After an early draft was leaked in

60 Sebastian Haunss May 2008 the text confirmed their concerns, as the treaty was meant to cover all acts of IP infringement, regardless of intended or realized financial gains (Kaminski 2011). In the final text the scope has been considerably reduced, targeting now only “commercial activities for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage” (Council of the European Union 2011, Art. 23.1). While civil-society groups critically followed the negotiations, protests only really gained momentum after the end of the treaty negotiations, when the participating nation-states and the European Parliament were about to ratify the treaty. These protests in the early month of 2012 profited from preexisting organizational networks from earlier campaigns on internet and IP politics (Rone 2018) and from the highly visible online-campaigns against the proposed US laws Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), in which several million US citizens contacted their representatives (Weisman 2012), and in which several prominent websites, among them the English language Wikipedia, blacked out their website for one day to protest against the legislation. Encouraged by the successful US campaign and by the surprisingly vocal protests that met the ACTA ratification in Poland, a loose network of people and organizations started to mobilize for coordinated European-wide demonstrations against the treaty, culminating in more than 200 demonstrations with tens of thousands of participants (Beckedahl 2012, 206). This strong civil-society mobilization ultimately led to European Parliament’s rejection of the agreement, and thus its de-facto international failure (Matthews 2012). The campaign addressed an issue that many citizens regarded as important enough, so that they organized and joined demonstrations at freezing temperatures. The mobilizations around ACTA in Europe and about SOPA/PIPA in the US thus reflect the changing scope of IPRs enforcement that increasingly targets individual citizens and criminalizes their practices of using and sharing digital information. The protesters see this extension of enforcement practices as an illegitimate restriction of their everyday use of knowledge goods. They combine claims for limits to the propertization of knowledge goods with claims for more transparent and more democratic procedures in the governance of knowledge goods, and with claims for digital civil rights.

IP conflicts and social change The brief empirical analysis of the three contentious mobilizations suggests that these IP conflicts are indeed related to macro-structural changes in current societies. The social movements which are driving these conflicts are not simply a result of those macro-structural social changes. But the social and economic changes that come with the transition from an industrial to a knowledge society create conditions that enable the development of these conflicts and the emergence of social movements addressing these conflicts. Beyond their concrete policy goals, the contentious mobilizations around access to medicines, software patents, and the ACTA address conflict lines that

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have only emerged in the transition to the knowledge society: the limits of propertization of immaterial goods, the mode of innovation, and the rules that govern access to knowledge. These conflicts are no longer limited to specific parts of the economy but extend to many parts of the society. IPRs are no longer only relevant for a subset of economic actors in the so-called IP industries but for all sectors in the society, and thus are prone to contentious mobilizations involving a broad constituency. These mobilizations are related to other developments that address the same issues but not in the traditional form of social movement mobilizations: The steady growth of the Creative Commons project and the emergence and decline of Pirate Parties. Creative Commons is a non-governmental organization founded in 2001 as a US charitable corporation by a group of US-American academics and intellectuals. It offers a set of copyright licenses and a web-based interface to attach these licenses to digital works, so that they can be reliably identified and searched over the internet. It builds on the concept of a “copyleft” license, the “GNU General Public license” (GPL), originally developed within the FOSS community, a license that effectively reverses the workings of the established copyrights system by granting public access instead of reserving all rights. Within ten years, Creative Commons grew from an abstract idea to a set of licenses used worldwide, making several hundred thousand documents, images, sound, and video files available for everyone to use freely and for non-commercial (and sometimes also commercial) purposes. By turning the exclusivity of the existing copyright on its head, Creative Commons has helped secure free access to all sorts of digital cultural goods, available on the internet (Lessig 2003; Bollier 2008; Haunss 2013, chap. 6). It creates an alternative governance option to the exclusive and property-centered established mode of governing the creation, use, and distribution of knowledge and counters the property narrative with a narrative of knowledge-sharing and cooperation (Aigrain 2012). Pirate Parties emerged in 2006, first in Sweden, and then in more than a dozen other countries, and have gained surprising electoral support in the 2009 election to the European Parliament in Sweden and in several state-level elections in Germany (Demker 2011; Bieber and Leggewie 2012; Haunss 2013, chap. 6; Niedermayer 2013). Their electoral success proved to be short-lived and in subsequent elections they were not able to gain enough votes to pass again the electoral threshold. Pirate parties are an attempt to address the knowledge society’s cleavages about the governance of knowledge and digital civil rights within the electoral system, but in the two countries where they had some electoral success they are still involved in extra-parliamentary protest campaigns. Together, the contentious mobilization that comprise protests, lobbying, electoral competition, and the creation of alternative governance structures, are conditioned by structural changes in the knowledge society, by the growing economic importance of knowledge goods and the resulting institutional and power-shifts. At the same time these mobilizations drive and/or accelerate the

62 Sebastian Haunss politicization of core processes and of institutional and normative frameworks of the knowledge society. They thus have the potential to alter the trajectory of social change. Whether, and to which degree, they will influence processes of social change will depend not the least on their ability to create powerful collective actors – new social movements of the knowledge society. So far the separate mobilizations have not yet established a resonating and overarching master frame connecting the different policy conflicts and providing a term for the new cleavage. The notion that “Access to Knowledge” might provide a meta-narrative for such a movement (Kapczynski 2010; Krikorian and Kapczynski 2010) is not convincing as it is too narrow to unite the critique of immaterial property, demands for alternative modes of innovation, digital civil rights, and the project of a culture of sharing. While there exists so far not one social movement of the knowledge society, there are numerous conflictual mobilizations that address the current society’s core conflict lines and that have the potential to alter its trajectory of social change. By questioning the current rules and procedures for the production of knowledge and the dominant mode of innovation, by demanding limits to the propertization of knowledge, and by developing claims for a democratic governance of (access to) knowledge, the currently visible conflicts address three aspects of a new conflict line that is no longer embedded in the cleavage structure of industrial societies and represented by established collective actors. This new conflict line does not render the old cleavages obsolete but introduces a new stratifying element to the social structure of current societies. As such it will have an impact on social movements mobilizing around other issues as well. And we can already see that IP issues are picked up in the global justice movement, in the recent wave of occupy protests, and in mobilizations about consumer protection.

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Maskus, Keith E. 2000a. “Intellectual Property Rights and Economic Development.” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 32 (2): 471. ———. 2000b. Intellectual Property Rights in the Global Economy. Washington, DC: Inst. for Internat. Economics. Matthews, Duncan. 2007. “The Role of International NGOs in the Intellectual Property Policy-Making and Norm-Setting Activities of Multilateral Institutions.” Chicago-Kent Law Review 82 (3): 1369–1386. ———. 2012. The Rise and Fall of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA): Lessons for the European Union. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. Queen Mary School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 127/2012. http://papers.ssrn. com/abstract=2161764. May, Christopher. 2000. A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosure? London and New York: Routledge. May, Christopher, and Susan K. Sell. 2006. Intellectual Property Rights: A Critical History. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Mayne, Ruth. 2002. “The Global Campaign on Patents and Access to Medicines: An Oxfam Perspective.” In Global Intellectual Property Rights. Knowledge, Access, and Development, edited by Peter Drahos and Ruth Mayne, 244–258. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Melucci, Alberto. 1996. Challenging Codes. Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munoz Tellez, Viviana. 2006. The Global Campaign on Access to Medicines: Re-Shaping Intellectual Property Rules at the World Trade Organisation. Briefing Papers of the IPNGOs project, London: Queen Mary Unversity. Niedermayer, Oskar, ed. 2013. Die Piratenpartei. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Nisbet, Robert. 1970. Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development. London: Oxford University Press. OECD. 2014. “Trade in Services – EBOPS 2010.” OECD Statistics on International Trade in Services (database). doi:10.1787/data-00583-en. Offe, Claus. 1985. “New Social Movements: Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics.” Social Research 52 (4): 817–868. Park, Walter G., and Juan Carlos Ginarte. 1997. “Intellectual Property Rights and Economic Growth.” Contemporary Economic Policy 15 (3): 51–61. Parsons, Talcott. 1964. “Evolutionary Universals in Society.” American Sociological Review 29 (3): 339–357. Popper, Karl. 1957. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge. Pugatch, Meir Perez. 2004. The International Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Rone, Julia. 2018. “‘Don’t Worry, We Are from the Internet’: The Diffusion of Protest against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in the Age of Austerity.” PhD Thesis, Florence: European University Institute. Rosenau, James N. 2002. “Governance in a New Global Order.” In Governing Globalization. Power, Authority and Global Governance, edited by David Held and Anthony G. McGrew, 70–86. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sell, Susan K. 1995. “The Origins of a Trade-based Approach to Intellectual Property Protection.” Science Communication 17 (2): 163–185. ———. 2002. “TRIPS and the Access to Medicines Campaign.” Wisconsin International Law Journal 20 (3): 481–522. ———. 2003. Private Power, Public Law. The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

66 Sebastian Haunss Sell, Susan K., and Aseem Prakash. 2004. “Using Ideas Strategically: The Contest between Business and NGO Networks in Intellectual Property Rights.” International Studies Quarterly 48 (1): 143–175. Stehr, Nico. 1994. Knowledge Societies. London: Sage. Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ———. 1984. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ———. 2004. Social Movements, 1768–2004. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Touraine, Alain. 1972. Die postindustrielle Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1988. Return of the Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial Society. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Webster, Frank. 2006. Theories of the Information Society. 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Weisman, Jonathan. 2012. “After an Online Firestorm, Congress Shelves Antipiracy Bills.” The New York Times, January 20, 2012, sec. Technology. www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/ technology/senate-postpones-piracy-vote.html. WTO, and OECD. 2018. “OECD-WTO: Balanced International Trade in Services EBOPS 2002.” doi:10.1787/Cb39dbb0-En. Yu, Peter K. 2007. “International Enclosure, the Regime Complex, and Intellectual Property Schizophrenia.” Michigan State Law Review 2007 (1): 1–33. ———. 2009. “The Global Intellectual Property Order and Its Undetermined Future.” WIPO Journal 1 (1): 1–15. Zürn, Michael, Martin Binder, and Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt. 2012. “International Authority and Its Politicization.” International Theory 4 (1): 69–106.

5

Class counts, but social background matters Habitus-structure conflicts and social inequality in protest research Lars Schmitt

Introduction – class counts, but social background matters! Pierre Bourdieu’s praxeology is a famous concept for analyzing social stratification of a given society on the one hand and theorizing social movements on the other. A brief overview of the (empirical) research on social stratification of social movements, social protest or – somewhat broader – on the social composition of political participation (be it conventional or unconventional), shows that class matters (e.g. income, educational level). Beyond these economic indicators, other components of class such as habitus and social background are, albeit considered, very rarely theorized or measured. Explanations for this may be epistemological (that if habitus is something individual, ‘it does not make any sense to talk about on a collective level’) or related to operationalization (‘how to measure habitus?’). There are practical reasons, too, given that many existing surveys do not collect data on habitus, but this should not prevent theoretical and conceptual innovation on the topic. The consequences for current empirical work into the social composition of social protest is that their analysis is reduced to a standard set of inequality variables such as income and education, age, sex and political attitudes. Social inequality research thus focuses the level of resources (economical and above all cultural capital) but the level of class-related social dispositions (habitus) is ignored. However, it is needed to fully understand, among others, the relationship between political participation and education (Bödeker 2012). The sociology of education acknowledges that two of the most significant variables for explaining political participation, i.e. income and educational level, are strongly influenced by social background. But this fact is neither empirically nor theoretically explored in research on participation (Hadjar and Becker 2007; Solt 2008; Bödeker 2012). This is surprising because the relationship of social class at the individual level (the actual social position of a person) and social background (the social position of the parents, i.e. the social conditions of growing up), is explored and intelligibly explained by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological epistemology, above all his conceptualization of habitus (Bourdieu 1984).

68 Lars Schmitt The following example might clarify on a statistical level that the social background does matter: Looking at student protests against the introduction of registration fees, we can assume that the educational level is the same. Nearly all students have a university-entrance diploma or an equivalent. Controlling for political attitudes and the subject of study, there is evidence to believe that the probability to participate depends on one’s social background, i.e. it depends on whether the student stems from an academic family or not (Schmitt 2010). An analysis of the social background of the protesting medical professionals (all of them are on a high educational level) in Germany 2006 would show the same. Those physicians not stemming from an academic milieu are underrepresented in general, and even more underrepresented in political protest. On an individual process-related level, it is plausible that habitus formation and transformation within the family context plays an important role concerning the (later) motivation and activities to become politically engaged. In addition to the acquisition of cultural capital the legitimate habitus might be more self-confident. Furthermore political interest as well as political efficacy, which are seen as moderating variables leading the high education into activity, are direct parts of the habitus formation. It makes a difference for example if political topics were debated at the family dining table or not. The aim of this article is twofold: Firstly, I stress the importance of habitus, or the embodied and internalized patterns of social existence, in explaining protest participation. Therefore I present the analytical heuristic of habitus-structure conflicts based on Pierre Bourdieu’s socio-analysis. In doing so, the second aim is to provide an interpretation frame to observe all possible societal struggles (be it individual, interpersonal or collective) through a lens of social inequality, addressing another problem of research on social stratification and protest: the difficulties in describing, separating or thinking together the different combinations of social inequality and social protest (inequality as a structural and/or sparking reason for, as a content/topic, as an attribute or as a consequence of and procedural inequality within social protest). Initially, these problems are identified, followed by an expansion on the argument that social background and habitus should be integrated in the analysis of the social composition of protest. I then propose the heuristic of habitusstructure conflicts, before summing up and concluding.

Social protest and social inequality Social inequality is related to protest and social movements in multiple ways. Firstly, the unequal distribution of resources can be the content/the topic of protest (e.g. the recent protests of the so-called ‘yellow vests’ in France). Secondly, it can be seen (at least as an external observer) as a structural factor leading to protest, even if it is not on a list of claims that protesters are calling for (e.g. the protests, often called ‘riots’ in French Banlieues in 2005). A third relationship between social protest and social inequality is the aspect of social

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stratification represented in and through social protests. This leads to the question who the protesters are, how the social structure of protest is composed and thereby asking who is included and who is excluded from protest. Thus, a fourth link is inequality as a possible outcome of protest. A fifth and last point addresses the (procedural) power asymmetries within protest movements: if there are hierarchies, how do they get established, who are the speakers and for what reasons (della Porta and Rucht 2013)? These combinations of social inequality and social protest are interconnected and should not to be analytically separated. Looking at social stratification concepts and social inequality Patterns of social stratification, or at least their analysis,1 in western societies have changed since World War II, never truly replacing the old cleavages, or their scientific descriptions. German research on social stratification is presented as an ‘evolution’ of concepts, which does not contradict the coexistence and combination of different approaches (Burzan 2011). The questions which societal groups and struggles etc. are the decisive ones to describe the structure of a society, and which goods, resources and values are seen as that worthy to look for their distribution, is a social construction that corresponds with the ‘reality’ the concepts select for research.2 Nowadays society can be observed through the lens of different approaches of social stratification: It is possible to diagnose classes, milieus, lifestyles and individualization in one and the same society. The shift from manufacturing to services, not to mention the post-industrial shift toward information technology should not be ignored in an understanding of social stratification: Due to educational expansion, globalization and technological innovation, occupations have changed and, with it, so have social groups. However, it is not always clear to which extent education is a trait that identifies an individual as belonging to a certain group, or instead a ‘good’ which can be unequally distributed between classes or groups. Furthermore at least three different ideas about what is ‘horizontal’ can be found in research on social inequality (cf. Schmitt 2019): Inequalities beyond the classical meritocratic triad of income, educational level and professional status, such as sex and age. A second meaning concerns the location of milieus in the social space. Milieus can be regarded as vertically located. On the other hand they are located horizontally, which means in this case that they differ in their degree of modernization: traditional milieus vs. modernized milieus that are more alternative-hedonistic (Vester, von Oertzen and Geiling 2001). A third meaning – to some extend corresponding with the second – is the horizontal axis of Bourdieu’s social space, that asks for the relative distribution of economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984). Admittedly, the concept of social stratification differs across country context due to contrasting developments in horizontal inequalities. The following adopts both a broad-brush approach to the overall visible trends, in conjunction with

70 Lars Schmitt an in-depth assessment of the German case, to highlight the necessity of a relational concept (habitus-structure-conflict) when explaining societal struggles evoked by social inequality. The classical Marxist concept of social stratification, classes determined by the ownership of means of production, has been modified by different authors. The development of the distinguished model of ‘Schichtung’ by Theodor Geiger (1932) is still a model of classes (Hradil 1999, 118). Distinguishing his approach from Marx and Weber, however, Geiger integrated the symbolic dimension into his conceptualization by adopting the notion of status. This dimension has been worked out more systematically by Pierre Bourdieu, introducing the notions of cultural, social and symbolic capital, adopting Weber’s idea of lifestyle (‘Lebensführung’) and analyzing the French society of the 1970s as socially stratified not only by the possession of economic, but also of cultural capital, forming three classes differentiated into distinguished lifestyle-fractions (Bourdieu 1984). Apart from Bourdieu, German research on social stratification was largely influenced by the debate of value change (Inglehart 1977; Hillmann 1986; Klages 1986) and the thesis of individualization (Beck 1983, 1986). As a consequence, diverging conceptualizations of ‘lifestyle’ and ‘milieu’ emerged, mostly locating themselves between the two constructed opposing poles of alleged structural determinism with Bourdieu as a respective representative and Beck’s thesis of individualization. However, many authors do not acknowledge the fact that Bourdieu’s approach is already located in between (e.g. Lüdtke 1989; Klocke 1994; Michailow 1994). These problems culminate with that of the lifestyle concept: Is lifestyle a person-related or a structure-related concept (Berger 1994)? Are actions predicted by lifestyle or can lifestyle in fact be defined through actions, in a performative way? Do lifestyles represent social stratification, or are they the cause for, or even a consequence of, stratification? Do they have explanatory power (as independent variables) or should they instead be explained (dependent variables) (Lüdtke 1989)? A rather disputable interpretation of the thesis of individualization led to a hastily assumption of de-structuring the social composition of western societies. The thesis originally questions the level of objective positions and not the level of subjective arrangement. Arguing that individuals are dissolved away from traditional bonds doesn’t mean that they are free to design their own life ‘ad libitum’. Individualization is a structural requirement of individuals, not an optional act to construct a subjective lifestyle (Konietzka 1994, 1995, 52–70). Lifestyles are an agglomeration of cultural preferences, performances, sometimes attitudes and values. But an intelligible concept – like habitus – that allows to show and explain linkages between attitudes and practices is missing. Why is one set of attitudes associated with one special set of cultural preferences and not with other ones? Approaches combining structure, culture and practice that do not lag behind Bourdieu are outliers: Michael Vester and his research group combined the research on lifestyle milieus with Bourdieu’s map

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of the social space. One merit of this concept and the related findings is the awareness that having milieus in a society does not contradict the hierarchically structured society. A second merit is that a historical development from traditional (with materialist values) to modern milieus (with post-materialistic values) can be observed (Vester, von Oertzen and Geiling 2001). In addition, it needs to be questioned, whether the opposition of ‘old’ redistributive struggles vs. ‘new’ struggles for recognition is adequate (Fraser and Honneth 2003). Bourdieu’s whole oeuvre teaches that something like ‘identity’ underlies a hierarchical social distribution: Values and attitudes are unequally distributed and different habitus have unequal access to goods that are regarded to be of value in a given society. Taking Bourdieu’s approach of social stratification does not solve all problems. At least two questions remain: The first one asks for the (emancipatory?) subjects of societal inequality struggles. The second addresses the fact that the concept of social space (Bourdieu’s ‘map’ of social inequality) does not allow to map the societal inequality struggles, although it integrates the space of habitus.3 Taking into account all the problems mentioned above, my proposition for the analysis of social inequality is to go with Bourdieu beyond Bourdieu. Firstly, his approach is adequate to conceptualize the so-called horizontal variables as hierarchical ones facing the principles and acts of domination. Therefore male domination and gender struggles can be considered as class struggles: dominating (here: male) vs. dominated (here: female) habitus under the roof and with the internalization of the male view as the doxa, as ‘normal’. Secondly, the notion of habitus allows an even more relational perspective than Bourdieu has already worked out. One can have a look – at the individual level – where the socially generated habitus fits to the surrounding structures and where habitus-structure conflicts arise. Both sides of these conflicts, habitus as embodied structures on the one hand and surrounding structures on the other, are related to social inequality. Subjects and objects in movement research When analyzing the relationship between social stratification and social movements from the literature on social movements, one observation requires further research. Namely, that besides the already discussed weakness of protest research, that the existing approaches are to be located on epistemologically dubious juxtapositions of actors and structure on the one hand and rationality and identity/emotionality on the other hand (Hellmann 1999; Crossley 2002; Bonacker and Schmitt 2004), with the exception of Marxist approaches, social movement research is not that interested in either social theory4 or social inequality and the social composition of movements. The US-American strand of this literature is mostly concerned with political opportunity structures, resource mobilization, collective identities and

72 Lars Schmitt framings of social movements. Only Smelser’s value-added approach integrates structural strains (e.g. inequality or injustice) as one prerequisite of protest (Smelser 1962). The European tradition is somewhat more concerned with structures of inequality and with the question who the contesting subjects are. The objects/topics of social protest can be seen as changing over time, as social inequality changed in form: From materialist-inspired class struggles focusing on solidarity and the distribution of resources to post-material protests of the so-called New Social Movements (and the corresponding scientific approach) of the 1970s and 1980s. In this latter period, the movements sought for a better world to live in, emancipation and self-actualization addressing the self-made risks of modern life, possibly constituting a protest milieu with an own place in the vertically and horizontally structured social space. The protesters have been construed as members of a new middleclass; well-educated with professions from the new social service sector (Brand, Büsser and Rucht 1986, 179–182). In this context, not only the cultural and symbolic dimension (Touraine 1981; Melucci 1985) and the colonization of lifeworld by systemic imperatives (Habermas 1985) were at the center of theoretical reflections. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus was used for analyzing social movements too, usually to show how habitus influences the organization of protest or gets shaped and transformed by participating in protest activities (e.g. Crossley 2003; Shoshan 2017). These studies could be seen in a row with Doug McAdam’s famous book ‘freedom summer’ showing biographical impacts (McAdam 1988). Angela Pilch Ortega (2018) takes the experience of precarity and social inequality as a starting point and describes how interpretative patterns reproducing social inequality can be contested in collective interaction leading to a kind of empowering habitus transformation. In the 1980s Bourdieu’s theory was used to analyze social movements and social stratification: Klaus Eder (1985) locates the new social movements between ‘moral crusade’, ‘political pressure group’ and (‘old’) social movements. He utilizes the position of protesters in social space, and argues that the respective middle-class habitus is a motor for protest. This habitus is driven by distinction toward the working class and the desire to be part of the upper class. Similarly, Michael Vester pleads for an historical approach, looking at the transformations of milieu and class relations in society (Vester 1989) to ‘locate’ (new) social movements praxeologically, i.e. neither in a pure materialist nor in a pure idealist way – an opposition that he calls ‘ideological’, in reference to Bourdieu. Vester already deconstructs the naïve differentiation between protests of the past (‘materialist’) and today (‘idealist’) theoretically and by referring to the re-emergence of struggles for distributive justice (Vester 2007). Protests today mobilize increasingly on ‘post-materialist’ (e.g. the protests against building projects like Stuttgart 21) as well as materialist issues (e.g. the French ‘yellow vests’). It is interesting that even ‘old’ materialist struggles for

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a more equal distribution of resources are mainly carried out by people with far above average educational levels (Rucht and Yang 2004). This alleged discrepancy leads to having a look at the empirical research on political participation. Looking at empirical research on political participation The myth that in western countries social protest can be seen as politics from below5 has already been deconstructed by empirical research. The rare research on social composition of protests shows that with increasing income and above all educational level (personal level of resources) the probability to participate in protest grows (Rucht 2007). Drawing on the broader literature of political engagement and participation, it becomes clear that even the degree of income inequality (structural level of resources) has a strong influence on political participation, above all on the (non-)engagement of those who represent the poorest quintile (Solt 2008). But why are less educated persons also less likely to participate politically? It is well known that unconventional political participation (such as taking part in demonstrations) is even more socially selective than classical political participation (such as participation in elections) and that the thesis that civil society is an access point for less privileged social milieus to the political arena has been empirically undermined (Solt 2008; Schäfer 2009, 2010; Bödeker 2012). We therefore still have a mandate to explore why political participation in general is socially selected (Bödeker 2012). Possible answers are usually discussed on the level of (socially structured but) personal resources and competences (Hadjar and Becker 2007; Böhnke 2011) and by referring to personality traits (Böhnke 2011). The sociological part is only seen at the level of resources (economical and above all cultural capital) as a result of education. The impact of education on political participation (conventional and unconventional) in these models is moderated by political efficacy and political interest (Hadjar and Becker 2007, 426–428). One should question why, in research on political participation – sociology is restricted to the level of resources and why the level of (social) dispositions is ignored or at least not also discussed sociologically? This restriction is even more surprising because the integration of social dispositions (habitus) can contribute to our understanding of why less educated people are not likely to protest and how these processes are shaped. Research on political participation does not deny that the social background has an important influence on educational and economical level, but these findings are usually ignored in empirical research although they are likely to have a direct impact on political behavior. This might be for methodological reasons. As already stated, the relevant surveys do not collect data on the social background of respondents and the questionnaires used in interviews at demonstrations do not either. Measuring ‘habitus’ is therefore not possible based on the available data. Reconstructing habitus quantitatively would be

74 Lars Schmitt confronted with the same tautology as the idea to predict the probability of a certain disease by different traits (male, age of 41, non-smoker, overweight and so on) in medical science. Treating this procedure to the end would mean to create the paradox map of 1:1 scale, where the number of variables is that great that one is arrived at the individual level and the quantifyingclustering act does not make sense any more (Schmitt 2014, 69). If one cannot measure habitus two options remain: (1) Measuring the social background by the educational and professional level of the parents: The social background is of course not a substitute for habitus. This notwithstanding, having information on this variable would still be a benefit for protest analyses. In combination with the educational level, one could at least estimate the distance the respective person had to bridge in the social space going from the starting point (capital level of the parents) to the actual position (capital level of the respective person). Measuring these distances could provide important information on possible habitus-structure conflicts. (2) Reconstructing habitus by qualitative interviews: Besides insights about the subjective motivation to participate in protest, this method could gather information on individual habitus-structure constellations that might be reconstructed as collective ones. This could lead to a new map of societal inequality struggles. To paint a picture of societal struggles of inequality, it is important not only to have a look at collective protest, but to gain information on those who are not likely to protest. With Bourdieu’s The Weight of the World (Bourdieu et al. 2000) and the German replication by Schultheis and Schulz (2005) an important step has been made. Johanna Klatt, Franz Walter and their team (2011) did something similar with a focus on civic engagement. They visited people in four underprivileged urban quarters in Germany, trying to find out what hinders possible engagement, and to find out whether there are alternative ways of activity that the scientific as well as the engaged discourses concerning ‘civil society’ are not able or willing to see. This offered a perspective less focused on deficiencies. Besides methodological problems there may be political reasons related to social inequality not to deal with habitus and social background: classism. Privileged people – even those who demonstrate against social inequality – often do not want to be confronted with their privileges. Wolfgang Kraushaar for example argues that, in the debate on the protests against Stuttgart 21, talking about ‘protest of the privileged’ could discriminate the protesters (2011, 17).6 In sum, looking at the relationship of social inequality and social protest from three different points of view shows that while previous scholars have theoretically acknowledged the importance of social background and habitus, these variables have not been adequately operationalized for the purpose of empirical research. The concepts worked out in the literature on social stratification provide a confusing picture that is not appropriate for empirical research on societal struggles. The theoretical approaches of movement research are not really

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interested in the social stratification of protesters. The empirical research focusing on the social selectiveness of unconventional political participation is concentrated on resources (i.e. capital), ignoring the level of social dispositions (habitus). It therefore is not able to fully address the question why political participation is socially selective.

Habitus-structure conflicts and symbolic violence as an analytical heuristic Apart from the above mentioned works of Michael Vester and Klaus Eder, other authors have already fruitfully used Bourdieu’s theory for movement analysis (e.g. Crossley 2002, 2003; Schmitt 2016). Nonetheless, a perspective inspired by Bourdieu is missing that would allow for a mapping of societal struggles grouped around social inequality. The following section sketches the outline of this research agenda. A conflict theoretical, relational perspective on the one hand must be empirically sensitive to understand individualized conflicts against the background of social inequality or power relations. On the other hand, it has to be appropriate to describe the collective conflict of social protest in its relatedness to social inequality, that is, contesting inequality on the one hand and reproducing inequality on the other hand by excluding habitually/symbolically.7 Symbolic violence can be understood as a functional principle of modern societies. It keeps conflicts associated with the unequal distribution of chances latent by masking and directing them into competitive struggles within all different social fields or within individual actors. That is what I refer to as habitus-structure conflicts, i.e. conflicts between the embodied (habitus) and the surrounding patterns (structure) (Schmitt 2006, 2016). Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic violence is comparable to but far more elaborated than Johan Galtung’s (1990) concept of ‘cultural violence’. Bourdieu identifies pillars on which symbolic violence rests and demonstrates how ‘victims’ of symbolic violence participate in their own subjugation. This makes ‘oppression a cooperative game’, as proponents of social dominance theory have aptly put it (Sidanius and Pratto 1999). The participation in that game of course is driven by social inequality, which is already shaping habitus. One of Bourdieu’s pillars is the objective fact of the symbolic. Social hierarchies are always mediated through symbols. It is via symbols that actors identify hierarchies and accept them as natural, freely chosen, earned etc. Symbols transform socially constructed (‘unjust’) hierarchies into quasi-natural (‘just’) hierarchies that can be taken for granted. Another pillar is the complicity of habitus and structure/field. There is a chance that actors who have been socialized into a deprived environment do not even perceive subsequent instances of discrimination as problematic. They may come to see it as something that fits their habitus, which is another factor leading to the relatively smooth und uncontested reproduction of social power structures.

76 Lars Schmitt Bourdieu sees the phenomenon of symbolic violence as constitutive for the whole social space and for all social fields. This means that the rules of the field always favor the ruling elite while at the same time representing the ‘doxa’, something that is unquestioned, taken for granted and which represents the limits of what is thinkable. Failing to see collective discrimination, actors are likely to believe in their individual ‘shortcomings’. Even if they are aware of the socially constructed nature of their situation, their lack of power and the resulting fear of dropping out of the game acts as a strong disincentive to challenging the rules. This is one type of what I call a habitus-structure conflict; a form of individualized competitive struggle within the fields (Bourdieu 1984, 244–264; Schwingel 1993, 85–95; Schmitt 2006, 20–24). The abovementioned type of habitus-structure conflicts does not challenge the function of ‘symbolic violence’, because actors do not connect the conflicts to power structures and social inequality. What about those cases in which, as a result of struggles within a field, the rules become the object of contestation? Bourdieu describes these struggles as ‘class struggles’ and distinguishes them from competitive struggles within the fields (Schwingel 1993, 140–150). I label these as ‘habitus-structure conflicts within the social space’, because they go beyond the field by challenging the rules governing it. In doing so, they leave the path of ‘legitimate struggles’ (legitimated by the rules within a field) by referring to the wider realm of the social space and contesting the ordering criteria of the entire society. Such a move is usually judged by the privileged as unduly aggressive and unreasonable because it does not confirm the doxa. All these types of conflicts can be understood as ‘struggles for recognition’ as conceptualized by Axel Honneth (1995), even if they are a consequence of social inequality and power relations. Honneth, however, focuses on actors who expect to be recognized and on the ensuing conflicts if this expectation is not met. Yet this does not cover all types of potential conflict around recognition. For example, it is possible that an actor within a certain field cannot even conceive of the possibility of being worthy or eligible for potential recognition. In the case of individual human actors, such a conflict is likely to remain entirely internal and will not even spill over into the realm of interpersonal conflicts. I term this an intra-personal habitus-structure conflict. Honneth’s argumentation is based on the normative assumption that people are able to sense and name their problems as a lack of recognition. This argumentation is referring to Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’ that is not based on an empirical perspective. This is an advantage of Bourdieu’s framework and the elaboration of the habitus-structure conflict heuristic. It enables researchers to break down the view from a hill to the empirical level of interaction. One can consider empirically (1) who is habitually able to constitute the ‘ideal speech situation’, (2) the lifeworld of which habitus becomes colonized by which structures, (3) which habitus struggles for recognition in which field, and (4) how governance becomes subjectivized (Foucault) by which habitus-structure constellations. ‘The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts’ (Honneth 1995) can be empirically kept as

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‘The Social Grammar of Social Conflicts’ and that is why Bauer and Bittlingmayer (2000; translation L.S.) call Bourdieu’s oeuvre ‘a continuation of the Critical Theory with other means’. Of course, the habitus concept itself needs to be bridged to the level of interaction. That would take too long here. Jürgen Witpoth (1994) has shown how to use Bourdieu to differentiate George Herbert Mead’s ideas on the interactional level e.g. of the ‘generalized other’ with Bourdieus habitus concept. I have made use of this for my empirical work on habitus-structure conflicts in the field of study (Schmitt 2010). Beyond applying Bourdieu’s concepts to movement research, with the elaboration of the heuristic of habitus-structure conflicts it becomes possible to consider protest and social movements under the roof of societal struggles that are framed by the conditions of symbolic violence. Therefore on the one hand the reaction of protest to symbolic violence; i.e. how it tries to reveal the concealed mechanisms of power; can be analyzed. On the other hand, researchers can ask which role social movements themselves play in the reproduction of social inequality through their own social structure (with their participants’ habitus) and by the symbols they use, when they suggest to represent ‘all people’ or ‘marginalized groups’. Doing so they probably conceal habitual and symbolical distances to those, on whose behalf they are speaking, suggesting participation where exclusion is found (cf. Schmitt 2004, 2007). This may be Bourdieu’s strongest contribution to movement research and above all to social movements: not to delegitimize protest, but to provide a socio-analysis, i.e. the possibility to see habitual, structural and field specific boundaries as well as symbolic exclusions. This insight is a prerequisite for a symbolic revolution, which he estimates as the basis for real change (Bourdieu 1996).

Conclusions Social class and social background are not the same. This might be obvious but this differentiation is deeply relevant for protest research. In empirical studies on political participation class is used as a core explanatory variable, but social background is almost never used. This leads to more than just a lack of information concerning the social composition of social protest and social movements, as outlined in this chapter: It detailed the shortcomings of, on the one hand, operationalizing social inequality through class-based indicators such as income, profession and educational level. On the other hand, Bourdieu’s notion of habitus in protest research is usually only used to show biographical impacts and outcomes and not to analyze aspects of social stratification. To explore why political participation in general is so socially selective, I propose the analytical heuristic of habitusstructure conflicts. Its contribution is threefold: First, social background is shown to be a core explanatory variable to be included in quantitative research on social movements. It secondly helps to explore and explain the social selectiveness of participation by analyzing differences between the symbolic dimension of contention and the habitus of (non-) protesters. Thirdly, it provides an analytical framework that allows to reconnect topics, motivations and social stratification of

78 Lars Schmitt protests and protesters to social inequality research. Additionally, individualized and interpersonal conflicts can also be seen against the background of social inequality. Finally, it engenders a research agenda in the analysis of in which ways social protest contests and/or reproduces social inequality.

Notes 1 It is epistemologically difficult if not impossible to clarify if we are talking about different cleavages and moods of social stratification in a given society or about different scientific concepts and discourses of perceiving and describing social inequality. 2 By the way: Bourdieu has argued, that social constructions, even the scientific ones, correspond to the social positions (habitus and position in social space) of the constructors. That is why he is calling for a socioanalysis, an objectifying of the objectifying subjects (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). 3 Bourdieu’s social space is a construction of three interrelated spaces (the space of status (professions and educational level), the space of lifestyles, and the space of habitus that bridges the two other ones). The three axes of all three spaces are the total volume of capital, the relative distribution of capital (rather cultural or rather economic) and a time-axis. 4 The problem of the lack of social theory in movement research has recently been picked up in a volume, where diverse social theories are made fruitful for the analysis of social movements (Roose and Diez 2016). 5 The idea that civil society engagement is something that is located ‘below’ the institutionalized political process may contribute to the masking of the social selectiveness of unconventional political participation. 6 My whole research on habitus and social background (not only in the field of protest) is attended by this phenomenon, just one example: Writing about reflexivity and symbolic violence in peace movement, I have been requested to add the subtitle ‘… to empower the movement’ (Schmitt 2004, translation L.S.). 7 The following part is a modified version of Schmitt (2016).

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80 Lars Schmitt Hradil, Stefan. 1999. Soziale Ungleichheit in Deutschland. 7th edition. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Inglehart, Ronald. 1977. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Klages, Helmut. 1986. Wertorientierungen im Wandel. Rückblick, Gegenwartsanalyse, Prognosen. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus. Klatt, Johanna, and Franz Walter. 2011. Entbehrliche der Bürgergesellschaft? Sozial Benachteiligte und Engagement. Bielefeld: Transcript. Klocke, Andreas. 1994. “Dimensionen, Determinanten und Handlungsrelevanz von Lebensstilen.” In Lebensstile in den Städten. Konzepte und Methoden, edited by Jens S. Dangschat, and Jörg Blasius, 273–285. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Konietzka, Dirk. 1994. “Individualisierung, Entstrukturierung und Lebensstile. Zu einigen konzeptionellen Fragen der Analyse von Lebensstilen.” In Lebensstile in den Städten. Konzepte und Methoden, edited by Jens S. Dangschat, and Jörg Blasius, 150–168. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Konietzka, Dirk. 1995. Lebensstile im sozialstrukturellen Kontext. Ein theoretischer und empirischer Beitrag zur Analyse soziokultureller Ungleichheiten. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Kraushaar, Wolfgang. 2011. “Protest der Privilegierten? Oder: Was ist wirklich neu an den Demonstrationen gegen‚ Stuttgart 21‘?” Mittelweg 36 (3): 5–22. Lüdtke, Hartmut. 1989. Expressive Ungleichheit. Zur Soziologie der Lebensstile. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. McAdam, Doug. 1988. Freedom Summer. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Melucci, Alberto. 1985. “The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements.” Social Research 52 (4): 789–816. Michailow, Matthias. 1994. “Lebensstil und soziale Klassifizierung. Zur Operationsweise einer Praxis sozialer Unterscheidung.” In Lebensstile in den Städten. Konzepte und Methoden, edited by Jens S. Dangschat, and Jörg Blasius, 27–46. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Pilch Ortega, Angela. 2018. Lernprozesse sozialer Bewegung(en). Biographische Lerndispositionen in Auseinandersetzung mit Erfahrungen sozialer Ungleichheit. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Roose, Jochen, and Hella Dietz, eds. 2016. Social Theory and Social Movements. Mutual Inspirations. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Rucht, Dieter. 2007. “Zum Profil der Protestierenden in Deutschland.” Forschungsjournal NSB 20 (1): 13–21. Rucht, Dieter, and Mundo Yang. 2004. “Wer demonstrierte gegen Hartz IV?” Forschungsjournal NSB 17 (4): 21–27. Schäfer, Armin. 2009. “Alles halb so schlimm? Warum eine sinkende Wahlbeteiligung der Demokratie schadet?” In MPIfG-Jahrbuch 2009/2010, edited by Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, 33–38. Köln: Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung. Schäfer, Armin. 2010. “Die Folgen sozialer Ungleichheit für die Demokratie in Westeuropa.” Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 4 (1): 131–156. Schmitt, Lars. 2004. “Kritische Wissenschaft und Friedensbewegung: Soziologische Selbstreflexion zur Stärkung der Bewegung.” Wissenschaft und Frieden 22 (3): 49–52. Schmitt, Lars. 2006. Symbolische Gewalt und Habitus-Struktur-Konflikte: Entwurf einer Heuristik zur Analyse und Bearbeitung von Konflikten. Marburg: CCS Working Papers, no. 2. Schmitt, Lars. 2007. “Soziale Ungleichheit und Protest: Waschen und rasieren im Spiegel von ‘Symbolischer Gewalt’.” Forschungsjournal NSB 20 (1): 34–45.

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Schmitt, Lars. 2010. Bestellt und nicht abgeholt. Soziale Ungleichheit und HabitusStruktur-Konflikte im Studium. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Schmitt, Lars. 2014. “Habitus-Struktur-Reflexivität: Anforderungen an helfende Professionen im Spiegel sozialer Ungleichheitsbeschreibungen.” In Habitussensibilität: Eine neue Anforderung an professionelles Handeln, edited by Tobias Sander, 67–84. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Schmitt, Lars. 2016. “Bourdieu Meets Social Movement.” In Theories and Social Movements. Mutual Inspirations, edited by Jochen Roose, and Hella Dietz, 57–74. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Schmitt, Lars. 2019. “Auf dem Boden bleiben!? Zum Studium von Bildungsaufsteiger*innen im Spannungsfeld von Sicherheit und Freiheit.” In Herausforderungen in Studium und Lehre, edited by Andrea Lange-Vester, and Martin Schmidt. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Juventa. Schultheis, Franz, and Kristina Schulz, eds. 2005. Gesellschaft mit begrenzter Haftung: Zumutungen und Leiden im deutschen Alltag. Konstanz: UVK. Schwingel, Markus. 1993. Analytik der Kämpfe: Macht und Herrschaft in der Soziologie Bourdieus. Hamburg: Argument. Shoshan, Aya. 2017. “Habitus and Social Movements: How Militarism Affects Organizational Repertoires.” Social Movement Studies 17 (2): 144–158. Sidanius, Jim, and Felicia Pratto. 1999. Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smelser, Neil J. 1962. Theory of Collective Behaviour. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Solt, Frederick. 2008. “Economic Inequality and Democratic Political Engagement.” American Journal of Political Science 52 (1): 48–60. Touraine, Alain. 1981. The Voice and the Eye. New York: Cambridge University Press. Vester, Michael. 1989. “Neue soziale Bewegungen und soziale Schichten.” In Alternativen zur alten Politik? Neue soziale Bewegung in der Diskussion, edited by Ulrike C. Wasmuht, 38–63. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Vester, Michael. 2007. “Weder materialistisch noch idealistisch: Für eine praxeologische Bewegungsanalyse.” Forschungsjournal NSB 20 (1): 22–33. Vester, Michael, Peter von Oertzen, and Heiko Geiling. 2001. Soziale Milieus im gesellschaftlichen Strukturwandel. 2nd edition. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wittpoth, Jürgen. 1994. Rahmungen und Spielräume des Selbst. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der Erwachsenensozialisation im Anschluss an George H. Mead und Pierre Bourdieu. Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg.

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Crowd-cleavage alignment Do protest issues and protesters’ cleavage position align? Marie-Louise Damen and Jacquelien van Stekelenburg

Introduction Worldwide, street demonstrations have become the modal repertoire citizens employ to demand political changes or to express indignation (Meyer and Tarrow 1998). Conflicts do not erupt randomly, but in the context of unequal power relations rooted in social cleavages in society (Kriesi 1995). This implies that demonstration issues are also connected to socio-political cleavages (Damen 2013). A cleavage is a metaphor for country-specific politicized social inequalities. Social inequality links strongly to the social stratification in a society. Cleavages are a way to describe the political landscape along the fault lines of society. They structure the organizational field and its constituency; cleavages create a supply and demand for politics (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). In this chapter, we study how social cleavages relate to the protest crowd in street demonstrations. Based upon the legacy of Lipset and Rokkan, Bartolini and Mair (Bartolini and Mair 1990) provide a commonly used definition existing of three crucial elements for a political division to be called a cleavage: 1) an empirical element which we can define in social-structural terms; 2) a normative element, that is the set of values and beliefs which provides a sense of identity and role to the empirical element, and which reflect the self-consciousness of the social group(s) involved; and 3) an organizational/ behavioral element, that is the set of individual interactions, institutions, and organizations, such as political parties, which develop as part of the cleavage. (Bartolini and Mair 1990, 215) The basic idea of a cleavage is that sharing a structural position in society (e.g. social class) aligns fears, hopes and dreams into shared political norms, values and interests. That is why social groups in society have shared norms, values and interests, which may develop into collective demands. This is what we call the demand of politics. Important though, ‘cleavages cannot be reduced

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simply to the outgrowths of social stratification; rather, social distinctions become cleavages when they are organized as such’ (Bartolini and Mair 1990, 216). When people start to organize these groups or get organizations embedded within these groups, the supply side of the cleavage forms. The cleavage concept has a central place in literature on conventional political participation, while it is hardly used in literature on unconventional political participation (but see Kriesi et al. 2008; Hutter and Kriesi 2013). In explanations of conventional political behavior, cleavage structures supposedly affect party politics and citizens’ political beliefs and attitudes (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Bartolini and Mair 1990). Transposed to non-conventional political behavior, cleavages shape mobilization potential or the ‘demand-side’ of protest and mobilizing structures or the ‘supply side’ of protest (Klandermans 2004). Thus, cleavages can be found in both conventional and unconventional politics (Damen 2013). This chapter is about street demonstrations. Who participates in which street demonstration? In this chapter, we describe how socio-political cleavages in societies relate to the composition of people in protest crowds. We describe the composition of the crowd in the Bartolini and Mair cleavage terms: the social-demographic characteristics of the participants (their social class), their political values and organizational embeddedness. The composition of a crowd is important to understand the support in society for a specific issue. How selective or diverse is the support for the issue at stake?

The formation of a cleavage In their introductory chapter of Party Systems and Voter Alignments, Lipset and Rokkan (1967) explain that national and industrial revolutions across Europe have led to long-term alignments between social groups and political parties. In the processes of nation-state building, alongside with the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, cleavages between center and periphery and between state and church are formed. Two other cleavages are products of the Industrial Revolution: the urban-rural cleavage, opposing agricultural and industrial interests and finally the class cleavage between workers and employers. Thus, traditionally, socio-political conflicts evolved around divisions between classes, religions or regions; fault lines along which opposing identities emerged and organizational fields broke up (ibid.). In the social movement literature, authors refer to the social class cleavage as ‘bread-and-butter’ demonstrations (Walgrave 2013). These demonstrations are traditionally staged by labor unions and populated by the working class. However, Western societies underwent far-reaching social and cultural transformations, with modernization and individualization as the most important transformative forces. Traditional cleavages were replaced, complemented or cut across by newly drawn cleavages, resulting from schisms between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of modernization (Inglehart and Welzel 2005), globalization and de-nationalization (Kriesi et al. 2008). Along these new cleavages new identities and grievances developed and crystallized into organizational fields bringing

84 Marie-Louise Damen and Jacquelien van Stekelenburg new groups onto the streets protecting new threats and risks and promoting new values and beliefs. Kriesi et al. (2008, xiii) argue that ‘the rise of the new social movements was intimately linked to the slow but profound transformation of the society’s conflict structure in the course of the macrohistorical process of modernization’. As a result, new social movements have been responsible for the bulk of protest events in Western Europe over the last decades (Kriesi 1995). Typically, the variety of socio-cultural and political issues within new social movements is large. They vary from issues around emancipation, peace, and the environment to human rights. In all cases the new social movement issues are not concerned with inequality in materialistic resources (such as the bread-and-butter issues), but with controversy in post-materialistic values and the newly formed inequalities other than class based. Kriesi et al. (2008) showed that the young, urban, highly educated professionals were the main participants of these demonstrations. The rise of the new social movements did however not imply that the old cleavage conflicts around class, region or religion completely disappeared from the scene. To the contrary, protests rooting in such cleavage conflicts can still be observed regularly (Walgrave 2013). Yet, the proportion ‘old’ versus ‘new’ conflicts differs from country to country (Kriesi et al. 2008; Hutter and Kriesi 2013). New social movements were, for instance, able to mobilize much more events in the Netherlands compared to France, where the old class cleavage still mobilizes many people. Kriesi and colleagues (2008) explained such inter-state differences in terms of the pacification of the class cleavage. They argue that while the structural underpinnings of the new cleavages are present in all Western European countries, the strength of ‘old’ cleavages constrains new cleavages to emerge. Pacification of the class cleavage by way of the expansion of the welfare state created ‘space’ for the articulation of new conflicts (ibid.). ‘The construction of new identities is only possible when old identities fade and lose their capacity to help people interpret the world’. Moreover, ‘the articulation of new cleavages presupposes the mobilization of resources that may not be available if mobilization on the basis of traditional cleavages is absorbing a great deal of time, money and energy’ (Kriesi et al. 2008, 4). Shortly, there exists an inverse relationship between the mobilization potential of the traditional class conflict and the mobilization opportunities of new social movements (ibid.).

Alignment of cleavages and protesting crowds The basic assumption underlying this chapter is that cleavages and protesting crowds align. We argue that specific cleavage structures in society ‘bring’ a specific demand and supply for protest on the streets. The alignment gets materialized in terms of the three crucial elements identified by Bartolini and Mair (1990) for a political division to be called a cleavage; that is social class, political values and organizational embeddedness. Hence, a climate change demonstration will primarily mobilize highly educated, left-leaning postmaterialist members of environmentalist organizations, while anti-austerity protests

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against wage restraint politics will primarily mobilize lower social class, more conservative, members of labor unions. The second idea of this chapter is that countries can deal with different cleavage structures and that this has an impact. Societies deal with several cleavages of which the class cleavage, strongly linked to social stratification, was the most prominent one in Western societies for a long time. Over time, salient cleavages can pacify. This process of pacification and the resulting cleavage structure will differ from country to country. Inspired by Kriesi et al. (2008) and Eggert and Giugni (2012), we argue that the level of pacification of the class cleavage in a country affects the composition of the different crowds in the degree of diversity vs. selectivity. Because a diverse crowd resembles the general population, its composition is more heterogeneous compared to a selective crowd. By a selective crowd we mean that an issue-specific – in other words: selective – part of the population will show up on the streets. The concepts of diversity and selectivity are akin to the idea of inclusive and exclusive crowds. As Kriesi et al. (2008) explained there is less ‘space’ in terms of mobilization potential and organizational resources for new social movements in countries with a salient class cleavage structure. In a context with a salient class cleavage, the old ‘bread-and-butter’ social movements will use their own mobilization frames and will speak to their own specific target group: the workers. The political context is polarized among social class, which leads to a strong multi-organizational field that is constituted along these lines of social class. A strong multi-organizational field uses strong and issue-specific mobilizing frames to mobilize people to protest. Next to that, a polarized context will enhance the collective identity of the groups on either side of the cleavage. This is a recurrent process: a strong collective identity is crucial for social movements to emerge and strong social movements enhance the collective identity of people. An important reason for people to protest on behalf of a group is the identification people feel with that specific group (Van Stekelenburg 2013). As such, groups with a shared and organized collective identity are easier to mobilize compared to groups without an organized identity (Van Stekelenburg 2013; Klandermans et al. 2014a). Therefore we expect that in countries with a salient class cleavage, bread-and-butter issues will attract their own specific target groups, which will lead to a selective protest crowd. An issue-specific selection of the population aligns best with the demonstration issue. It is an empirical question whether the socio-cultural or new social movements will bring a selective or diverse crowd to the streets in a country with a salient class cleavage. Both outcomes can be predicted. It could be the case that also the socio-cultural and political movements only speak to their own selective constituency, which will lead to a homogeneous selective crowd. But on the other hand, because of their restricted and limited space in mobilization potential, they could also use another strategy and try to use for example class-

86 Marie-Louise Damen and Jacquelien van Stekelenburg based frames in order to speak to a broader audience, which will lead to a more diverse crowd. We will put this empirical question to the test. In countries with a pacified class cleavage, politicized inequalities are not (anymore) organized around class-based issues and organizations. In these countries there is enough space for new or other traditional cleavages. Especially in times when new cleavages emerge, there will be a struggle for constituents. We expect that in countries with a pacified class cleavage both class-based and nonclass-based issues will use broad mobilizing frames in order to speak to a large mobilization potential. This will lead to diverse crowds in demonstrations in both types of issues. As a result, in a pacified context there is less alignment between issue and crowd.

Research questions In order to test the idea that cleavages and protesting crowds align we need to be able to compare demonstrators participating in different demonstrations rooting in different cleavage constellations (Klandermans and van Stekelenburg 2016). So far, the scarce research on cleavage-crowd alignment employs the protest event method (e.g. Kriesi et al. 2008; Hutter and Kriesi 2013). Protest event analysis have been developed to systematically map, analyze and interpret the occurrence and properties of large numbers of protests by means of content analysis, using sources such as newspaper reports. This research taught us a lot about cleavages and old vs. new protest sectors, but with an emphasis on events rather than individuals, and consequently nothing about the protesters themselves. Hence, to test the full ‘funnel of causation’ from cleavages via mobilizing potential to protesters as the ‘end product’ of the mobilization chain, one needs to research the participants of protest events. However, most research among participants in protest events concerns single case studies or general surveys retrospectively inquiring whether people have taken part in any protest event in the past so many years (but see Walgrave and Rucht 2010). Such research eliminates context from the design, either because of the absence of contextual variation (i.e. the single case study), or because the contextual variation is unspecified (i.e. general surveys like the World Value Survey). While studies based on general surveys have taught us a lot about general features of protesters (c.f. Dalton, Van Sickle and Weldon 2010), they provide no information on the demonstrations protesters participated in. These surveys allow us to compare characteristics of those who have demonstrated at some point in their lives with those who have not, but do not tell us anything about who participates in the one rather than the other demonstration. Fortunately, we can exploit a dataset ‘Caught in the act of protest. Contextualizing Contestation (CCC)’ (Klandermans, van Stekelenburg and Walgrave 2014b). This dataset comprises data on participants of street demonstrations in Europe (Van Stekelenburg, Klandermans and Walgrave 2018).

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We exploit the CCC dataset to answer the following research questions: (1) crowd-cleavage alignment Who participates in which demonstration? We expect that a cleavage specific supply will mobilize a cleavage specific demand. That is, crowds will align to the cleavage in which the protest event roots in terms of social class, political values and organizational embeddedness. (2) crowd selectivity or diversification How selective or diverse is the composition of the crowd? We expect that in countries with a salient class cleavage the composition of the crowds will be selective, in other words there will be strong alignment between issue and constituency. Contrarily, we expect that in countries with a pacified class cleavage the composition of the crowd will be diverse; there will be less alignment between issue and constituency in terms of social class, political values and organizational embeddedness.

Data Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation (CCC)1 is a comparative study of street demonstrations in eight European countries (Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, U.K. and Czech Republic) and Mexico. This chapter is based on 35 demonstrations out of four countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Great Britain) that were covered between November 2009 and June 2013. We selected the four countries that vary considerably on the salience of the class cleavage and in which we collected data on 19 bread-and-butter demonstrations and on 16 socio-cultural and political demonstrations. A total of 7,750 participants completed questionnaires distributed during the street demonstrations. All questionnaires and procedures are standardized. The same questions and indicators are employed in each country and for each demonstration (cf. Van Stekelenburg et al. 2012; Walgrave and Verhulst 2011). The protest surveys – as we called them – employed printed questionnaires (500–1000) handed out at the demonstration to be returned to the universities using prepaid envelopes. In order to control for response biases, we also conducted short (2–3 minute) interviews with a subsample of the respondents (100–200) at the demonstrations comprising questions identical to those in the printed questionnaire.2 The refusal rate for the face-to-face interviews was relatively low (10%). By comparing the answers in the face-to-face interviews with those to the identical questions in the returned questionnaires and by comparing the face-to-face interviews of those who returned their questionnaire with the interviews of those who did not, we can make fairly accurate estimates of the response bias. Overall 32% of the participants turned in their questionnaire. A comparison of those who did and did not return the questionnaire revealed

88 Marie-Louise Damen and Jacquelien van Stekelenburg that those who did return the questionnaire were on average somewhat older and higher educated than those who did not. As for the sampling of participants, we designed a sampling strategy such that each participant had the same chance to be selected. Although circumstances inevitably vary, we aimed to keep sampling procedures as identical as possible for the various demonstrations. A demonstration is covered by a team consisting of a fieldwork coordinator, 3–4 so called pointers, and 12–15 interviewers. Each pointer has a team of 4–5 interviewers. The pointers select the interviewees, while interviewers conduct the interviews and hand out the questionnaires. Separating these two roles appeared to be crucial in preventing sampling biases (Walgrave and Verhulst 2011). As interviewers tend to select people they believe to be willing to cooperate, they end up producing biased samples. The fieldwork coordinator oversees the employment of the pointerinterviewer teams. At the start of the event s/he makes an estimate of the number of participants. This defines the ratio at which participants are approached for interviews and to hand out questionnaires. In demonstrations that move through the streets, teams start at different points of the procession and work toward each other approaching every nth person in every nth row. At demonstrations that stay at the same area, the space is divided into smaller areas; in each area a pointer selects interviewees taking the density of the crowd in that area into account. The result of all this is samples that we believe to be representative of the demonstrators present.

Measurements Categorization of the demonstrations The CCC-project team agreed to observe in each country 8 to 12 demonstrations between 2009 and 2013 with at least 3,000 participants including events staged by new and old social movements, migrants and transnational protest events. But then the financial-economic crisis started. In all European countries the governments took austerity measures and in all countries protests (including street demonstrations) were organized in opposition (Giugni and Grasso 2016, 2018). A substantial part of the demonstrations we covered in the last couple of years were therefore anti-austerity demonstrations. We do qualify them as ‘bread-and-butter’ issues, since the issues are mainly concerned with materialistic topics. The second category issues we sampled regard a broad variety of socio-cultural and political issues, such as anti-abortion, anti-racism, anti-nuclear energy, language and democracy. These issues resemble the new social movement issues, all concerned with post-materialistic values and topics. Table 6.1 contains the two main demonstration categories we distinguished. The anti-austerity protests concern claims by specific groups (mostly workers and students) against austerity measures in defense of their own interests, next to protests regarding general claims against austerity measures and policies. The demonstrations against nuclear energy mostly responding to the Fukushima disaster, anti-racism marches, demonstrations against the current

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Table 6.1 Overview of the demonstrations per issue and country bread and butter: anti-austerity issues The Against increase of the retirement age Netherlands (Rotterdam) Against budget cuts in cultural sector (Amsterdam) Against budget cuts in cultural sector (Utrecht) Against budget cuts in public work (The Hague) Against budget cuts in military sector (The Hague) Against budget cuts in care & welfare (The Hague) Student demo 1 (Amsterdam) Student demo 2 (The Hague) Belgium No to austerity (Brussels) We have alternatives (Brussels) March for Work (Brussels) Non-Profit Demonstration (Brussels) Spain

Great Britain

social-cultural and political issues Anti-nuclear demo (Amsterdam) Occupy Netherlands (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam) Stop racism and exclusion (Amsterdam)

Fukushima never again (Brussels) No Government, Great Country (Brussels) Not in Our Name (Brussels) Against the Europe of capital crisis and Demonstration Against Abortion war (Barcelona) (Madrid) Against Labor Law (Madrid) Self-determination is democracy Demonstration against the new labor law (Barcelona) (Santiago de Compostela) Demonstration against language For employment, not capital reforms decree (Santiago de Compostela) defend our rights (Vigo) We are a nation, we decide (Barcelona) Real Democracy Now (Madrid) TUC’s March for the Alternative: Jobs, No to Hate Crime Vigil (London) Growth, Justice (London) Unite Against Fascism National Fund Our Future: Stop Education Cuts Demo (London) (London) Take Back Parliament (London) Second Student National Demo (London) Occupy London (London) The big if: anti-greed and corruption (London)

political culture and for more democratic societies, an anti-abortion demonstration and demonstrations regarding regional issues were categorized as socio-cultural and political demonstrations. Table 6.1 gives an overview of the demonstrations in the four countries and how they are categorized in the ‘bread-and-butter’ or sociocultural and political issues. We argue that the bread-and-butter issues are based within the class cleavage, while the socio-cultural and political issues are not. These 35 demonstrations are not a random selected sample from all protest events in our four countries. In some countries almost all demonstrations that

90 Marie-Louise Damen and Jacquelien van Stekelenburg happened in that period were covered (e.g. the Netherlands), while other countries had to select their sample (e.g. Spain). However, when comparing our sample with demonstrations that were not included in the sample, we did not reveal systematic gaps. Although we don’t have a completely random sample, we believe to show a representative picture of street demonstrations in Europe. Table 6.2 shows in addition the numbers of demonstrations and demonstrators (between brackets) that have been surveyed in the four countries around the bread-and-butter issues and socio-cultural issues. In the Netherlands, bread-andbutter demonstrations (8) are overrepresented compared to the socio-cultural and political demonstrations (3). In the other countries the difference in numbers between the two types of demonstrations are one (Belgium and Spain) or two (Great Britain). In the Netherlands, we sampled 11 demonstrations, nine in Spain, eight in Great Britain and seven in Belgium. Salience of the class cleavage A lot has been written about measuring the salience of socio-political cleavages in societies (Bartolini and Mair 1990). Most of these indexes are based on voting behavior (but see Hutter and Kriesi 2013). Among the existing indexes to measure the class cleavage we recognize the Alford index, the Thomsen index, the Lambda index and the Kappa index (Lachat 2007; Knutsen 2010). All these indexes are based on voting behavior: to what extent do people from a specific social class vote for specific political parties? The indexes form an indicator for the alignment between social classes in society and political parties. In this chapter, we are interested in the salience of the class cleavage in society in general, including the unconventional political arena. We argued that cleavages represent politicized inequalities in a country. If the inequality between social classes is large and the society as a whole is organized as such; then, we argue, there is a salient class cleavage in a country. So we need to

Table 6.2 How many demonstrations and participants (between brackets) in which issues and countries?

Netherlands Belgium Spain Great Britain total

bread-and-butter: anti-austerity

socio-political and cultural issues

total

8 (1933) 4 (639) 4 (721) 3 (456) 19 (3749)

3 (609) 3 (756) 5 (1586) 5 (1050) 16 (4001)

11 (2542) 7 (1395) 9 (2309) 8 (1506) 35 (7750)

Crowd-cleavage alignment

91

combine measurements for 1) the inequality between social classes in society and 2) measurements for the degree of organizational strength in both the conventional and the unconventional political arena along this fault line of social class. The Gini coefficient is a general accepted measurement for income inequality, which is highly correlated to social class. In our dataset (see Table 6.3), Spain has the highest score on the Gini coefficient (35.10), followed by Great Britain (34.05), the Netherlands (29.85) and Belgium has the lowest score (29.60). When the income inequality in a country is high, it is not necessarily true that the class cleavage is also salient. Other cleavages can be more important for the constituency of the political organizations like political parties and social movements. Therefore, we use additional data next to the Gini coefficient. Hutter (Hutter and Kriesi 2013) discerns the strength of the institutionalized class cleavage versus the strength of the non-institutionalized class cleavage. Notice that this categorization is not the same as the division between the conventional and the unconventional political arena. The institutionalized class cleavage is measured by an index of union density, class voting (Thomsen index) and the salience of left-right issues in party manifestos. The strength of the non-institutionalized class cleavage is operationalized by the number of working days lost due to strikes. According to Hutter (Hutter and Kriesi 2013)

1.5

institutionalized strength

1

.5 Britain · 0 Netherlands · -.5

Belgium ·

-1

-1.5 -2

-1.5

-1

-.5

0

.5

1

1.5

2

non-institutionalized strength

Figure 6.1 Institutionalized class cleavage versus non-institutionalized class cleavage, based on Hutter (2014)

92 Marie-Louise Damen and Jacquelien van Stekelenburg three out of the four countries in this chapter3 differ mainly in their scores on non-institutionalized class cleavage strength: the Netherlands has the lowest non-institutionalized strength, Belgium in the middle and Great Britain has the highest score on non-institutionalized strength. There is less variation in their scores of the institutionalized class-cleavage strength: Belgium scores lowest, the Netherlands in the middle and again Great Britain scores highest. Inspired by these measurements of Hutter we assembled existing data on the political opportunity structures and the general and issue-specific mobilizing contexts of the different countries in the CCC dataset (Table 6.3). The data are collected in general statistics and surveys like the Comparative Political Data Set (Armingeon et al. 2016), EVS, WVS and Eurobarometer. We collected data on the mean standardized unemployment rate (in the years 2009–2013), an index on strikes, the number of industrial disputes, the number of workers involved in those disputes, the number of workdays lost because of industrial disputes, the percentage of trade union members and the traditional class-based voting Alford index. Spain scores high on the standardized unemployment rate (measurement of inequality in society): 18%, compared to the Netherlands, which has an unemployment rate of 3.7% and to Great Britain and Belgium, who have unemployment rates of respectively 7.6% and 7.9%. This picture resembles most of the data on the unconventional political arena – strikes, industrial disputes, workers involved (in industrial disputes) and workdays lost. Again, for all these characteristics Spain scores highest, the Netherlands lowest and the UK and Belgium in between. However, the percentage trade union members are (according to these data) the highest in the Netherlands (22.1%), the lowest in Spain (4.3%) and the UK (6.4%) and Belgium (14.5%) in between. Looking at the conventional political arena (the class-based voting Alford index) the class cleavage seems to be highest in the UK (17.6), followed by Spain (13.9), the Netherlands (11.9) and the lowest in Belgium (10.6). The differences are however not very large. Taken together, these data tell us, grosso modo, that the social class cleavage is comparatively most salient in Spain, followed by Great Britain, Belgium and least salient in the Netherlands. After the operationalization of the salience of the class cleavage at a country level, we operationalize belongingness to social class at the individual level. We rely on the three elements identified by Bartolini and Mair (1990). As indicated, for a political division to be called a cleavage the following three elements are crucial: social class, political values and organizational embeddedness (Bartolini and Mair 1990). Social class As the measurement of the salience of the class cleavage is a topic of heavy debate in the literature, this is even more true for the measurement of the class concept itself (Wright 1997). In the protest surveys of the CCC project we asked for the current or last occupation of the respondents and their educational

Spain GB Belgium NL

35.10 34.05 29.60 29.85

18.0 7.6 7.9 3.7

Gini Unemployment rate coefficient (standardized)

Table 6.3 Indexes class cleavage strength

74.91 25.89 29.09 14.04

Strike (index) 811 144 75 21

# industrial disputes 543.00 511.20 11.48 51.90

# workers involved 1510.22 758.86 127.44 120.60

4.3 6.4 14.5 22.1

Workdays % trade union lost members

13.9 17.6 10.6 11.9

Traditional class voting Alford index

94 Marie-Louise Damen and Jacquelien van Stekelenburg level. Based on these two questions, we recoded the socio-economic status (which we assume is closely related to social class) in a scale developed by Oesch (Hylmö and Wennerhag 2015). The Oesch-scale exist of eight (nominal) occupational status groups, and students: self-employed professionals and large employers, small business owners, associate managers and administrators, office clerks, technical professionals and technicians, production workers, sociocultural semi-professionals and service workers. The occupational status groups are an indicator for social class and social stratification in society. Political values We measured the political values of the demonstrators in the protest surveys by four items which add up to two scales: left-right values and libertarianauthoritarian values. Both scales were developed by Heath, Evans and Martin (Heath, Evans and Martin 1994). Respondents could agree or disagree on the four statements on a five-point scale. The left-right value scale was measured by the following two items: 1. ‘Government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off’. 2. ‘Even the most important public services and industries are best left to private enterprise’. The libertarian-authoritarian scale was measured by these two items: 1. ‘Children should be taught to obey authority’. 2. ‘People from other countries should be allowed to come to my country and live in it permanently if they want to’. Organizational embeddedness The last element of the cleavage concept is organizational embeddedness of the participants in the demonstrations. We asked for a range of civil society organizations whether people were active or passive member in the past twelve months. In this chapter we compare the percentages members in trade unions with members of new social movement organizations (consisting of women’s, environment, LGBT, peace, anti-racism and human rights organizations).

Results In this section we describe the results of the comparisons we made between demonstration issues, followed by the comparisons of the demonstrations within and between countries. The comparisons are made in order to answer the research question on crowd-cleavage alignment: ‘Who participates in which demonstration?’, and the research questions on crowd selectivity or diversity:

Crowd-cleavage alignment

95

‘How selective or diverse is the composition of the crowd? How is this influenced by the cleavage structure in the country?’ Crowd-cleavage alignment: social economic status In Table 6.4 we compare the composition of the different socio-economic status groups (measured with the Oesch-scale) in the anti-austerity (AA) demonstrations to the composition of the status groups in the socio-political and cultural (SPC) demonstrations. If crowds and cleavages align in terms of social class, we would expect an overrepresentation of the ‘working’ class in the AA issues and an overrepresentation of the socio-cultural semi-professionals in the sociocultural issues. Although in all countries the higher professionals form the largest groups in all types of demonstrations (mean of 63.8%, 58.2% in AA, 69.1% in SPC), it is nevertheless true that the working classes (office clerks, production workers and service workers) are more represented in anti-austerity demonstrations (19.5%) compared to their representation in SPC demonstrations (10.6%). The differences between two types of demonstrations are significant for all eight status groups. We performed eleven independent T-tests, for each status group separately, and three tests for the aggregated groups (higher-level status groups, technician status groups and lower-level status groups). The T-values are mentioned in the last column of Table 6.4.

Table 6.4 SES: Oesch-scale CCC demonstrators’ anti-austerity issues vs. socio-political and cultural issues (%)

Self-employed professionals and large employers Small business owners Associate managers and administrators Socio-cultural semi-professionals Total higher professionals Technical professionals and technicians Total technical professionals Office clerks Service workers Production workers Total workers Students, not working Total % Cases (N) *** p < .000

AA

SPC

Total

T-value

4.5 1.6 28.1 24.1 58.2 5.5 5.5 4.7 6.2 8.6 19.5 16.8 100 3051

8.2 5.1 24.5 31.3 69.1 9.4 9.4 2.9 3.9 3.7 10.6 10.9 100 3190

6.4 3.4 26.2 27.8 63.8 7.5 7.5 3.8 6.1 5.0 14.9 13.8 100 6241

–5.8*** –7.6*** 3.5*** –5.6*** –6.8*** –5.5*** –5.5*** 3.8*** 4.3*** 8.1*** 10.1***

96 Marie-Louise Damen and Jacquelien van Stekelenburg The higher-level status groups (self-employed professionals and large employers, small business owners, associate managers and administrators, socio-cultural semi-professionals, technical professionals and technicians) are overrepresented in the SPC demonstrations, indicated by the significant negative T-values in Table 6.4. The significant positive T-values show that office clerks, service workers and production workers are overrepresented in AA demonstrations. This is in line with our ideas about the crowd-cleavage alignment: AA demonstrations align with lower-level status groups, while the SPC demonstrations align with the middle- and higher-status groups. Crowd-cleavage alignment: political values In Table 6.5 we compare the political values (left-right and libertarianismauthoritarianism) of the participants in AA demo’s to participants in SPC demo’s. If crowds and cleavages do align we expect an overrepresentation of mainly libertarian values in the socio-cultural demonstrations. For the left-right value scale we actually do not expect large differences between AA and sociocultural demonstrations, since we already know from earlier research that the left is overrepresented in all kinds of demonstrations. Table 6.5 shows that the participants of the two type of demonstrations do differ significantly in their political statements. With respect to the statement on the redistribution of incomes (right-left oriented, scale 1–5): participants of the AA demonstrations agree more on that statement (mean 4.03) compared to participants of the SPC demonstrations (mean 3.95). On the statement about privatization (left-right oriented, scale 1–5), we do find the same direction: participants of the AA demonstrations agree less on that statement, instead they are more politically left-oriented (mean 1.71) compared to participants of the SPC demonstrations, who are more politically right oriented (mean 1.89). The two statements on the libertarian-authoritarian scale also show significant differences between the two participant groups. The first statement ‘children should be taught to obey authority’ is libertarian-authoritarian oriented (scale

Table 6.5 Political values: CCC demonstrators’ anti-austerity issues vs. socio-political and cultural (means)

redistribute incomes privatize important public services teach children to obey allow immigrants *** p < .000

AA

SPC

Total

T-value

4.03 (1.021) 1.71 (.938) 3.39 (1.033) 3.36 (1.104)

3.95 (1.053) 1.89 (1.086) 3.23 (1.070) 3.57 (1.057)

3.99 (1.038) 1.81 (1.021) 3.30 (1.055) 3.47 (1.085)

3.2*** 6.5*** –7.5*** –8.4***

Crowd-cleavage alignment

97

1–5). Participants of the AA demo’s agree significantly more (mean 3.39) and are therefore more authoritarian oriented compared to the participants of SPC demo’s (mean 3.23) who are more libertarian oriented. The second statement on the allowance of immigrants is authoritarian-libertarian oriented (scale 1–5) and we see the same direction in differences. Participants of the AA demonstrations agree significantly less (mean 3.36) and are therefore more authoritarian oriented compared to the participants of SPC demonstrations who are more libertarian oriented (mean 3.57). These results confirm our ideas on alignment in political values of cleavages and crowds: groups with libertarian values are overrepresented in SPC demonstrations, while groups with authoritarian values are overrepresented in AA demonstrations. It appears nevertheless that participants of the AA demonstrations are more politically left-oriented, while participants of the SPC demonstrations are (a little) more politically right oriented. Crowd-cleavage alignment: organizational embeddedness To test our assumptions on crowd and cleavage alignment in terms of organizational embeddedness (the third cleavage component) we compare the percentage members in trade unions with the percentage members of new social movement organizations (consisting of women’s, environment, LGBT, peace, anti-racism and human rights organizations). If crowds and cleavages align we would expect that trade union members are overrepresented in AA demonstrations, while New Social Movements Organization (NSMO) members are overrepresented in SPC demonstrations. Table 6.6 shows that this is indeed the case. Of the participants in AA demonstrations is 58.8% member of a trade union, compared to 29.1% of the participants of the

Table 6.6 Organizational embeddedness: CCC demonstrators’ anti-austerity issues vs socio-political and cultural issues (% membership) AA Trade union NSM* Women Environment LGBT Peace Anti-racism Human rights

58.8 37.6 6.2 19.7 4.3 19.1 7.4 14.4

SPC 29.1 48.0 6.2 23.5 6.2 23.6 10.9 18.7

Total 43.5 43.0 6.2 21.7 5.3 21.4 9.2 16.6

* NSM consists of membership in women’s, environment, LGBT, peace,

anti-racism or human right organizations *** p