The Many Impacts of Social Movements

The Many Impacts of Social Movements:
Fifty Years after William Gamson’s The Strategy of Social Protest

CBSM Mini-Conference at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, Illinois, on August 7 and 8, 2025

Initially, most social movement research concerned what drove mobilization and why people participated in social movements.  William Gamson’s 1975 work stood out in seeking to address whether social movements were able to gain influence and why.  Although slow to take this lead, scholars over the last quarter century have turned attention to the potential influence of social movements and their actions over a variety of important social outcomes.  Early work concerned movements’ political and policy influence, but since then, research has expanded to other potential sites of impact.  These include social movements’ influence on nonpolitical institutions, such as business, medicine, science, religion, education, the police, and the military, movements’ cultural impacts on public discourse, media, collective memory, public opinion, and art, movements’ influence on other movements, including on broader tactical repertoires, and on movement participants’ later activism.

To take stock of these advances and highlight new research, the Collective Behavior and Social Movements (CBSM) section of the American Sociological Association is holding a mini-conference at the downtown campus of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, Illinois, on August 7 and 8, 2025 – the two days immediately prior to opening of the American Sociological Association’s national meeting in Chicago. (The CBSM section day is the first day of the conference.) Centered on the many kinds of influence that social movements have had and what drives that influence, the workshop will be organized into plenary sessions, thematic sessions, and roundtables.

The mini-conference is being sponsored in part by Northwestern University and the University of California-Irvine Jack W. Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy.

The 2025 CBSM workshop on the consequences of social movements will include invited plenary sessions, paper sessions, workshops, and meetings with editors.

For the paper sessions, we invite you to submit a complete paper or an abstract. We encourage submissions from many theoretical perspectives and using a variety of methodologies.  The workshop will also include roundtable sessions in which graduate students can discuss research with senior scholars working in their area. In addition, there will be a question-and-answer session with editors of several journals, including Mobilization, Social Movements Studies, Social Science Computer Review, and Science Advances.

To submit a paper or an abstract for a thematic session, please review the proposed session topics below and email the appropriate organizer with a paper or an abstract by March 14, 2025. You may also indicate whether the paper might fit one or more of the other sessions.  If you have a paper or an abstract about the impacts of social movements that does not seem to fit the topic of any thematic session, please send it to Edwin Amenta (ea3@uci.edu).

The Impacts of Social Movements on Politics and Policy

Much of the earliest work on the impact of social movements focused on politics and on government policies, including legislation regarding civil, political, and social rights, and on various regulations, as well as different stages of the policy process and across sub-national divisions of countries.  In their political campaigns, social movements also seek to go beyond changes in policy to influence political institutions, including extending democratic practices to new groups to creating new political parties.  How and why have social movements driven policy across different types of policies, polities, and parts of political processes?  What do new cases and analyses add to our existing knowledge? How do bids to make political institutional change differ from those that have influenced policy?  Please send a paper or abstract to Edwin Amenta (ea3@uci.edu)

The Impacts of Social Movements on Businesses, Corporations, and Markets

Although the initial scholarship on social movements’ impacts focused on politics, it was soon expanded to address impacts on businesses and corporations.  Social movement contention regarding economic institutions has taken many forms from boycotts and buycotts to insider activism and the creation of new markets.  What are the different ways movements have sought to influence economic institutions, which ones have proved influential, and why do some movements and strategies effect change in economic institutions and others do not?   Please send a paper or abstract to Brayden King (b-king@kellogg.northwestern.edu)

The Impacts of Social Movements on Non-Political and Non-Business Institutions

Scholars have long noted that social movements target all manner of institutions, not just political and business ones, and increasing attention has focused on movements’ bids to influence universities, science, religious organizations, the law, and military institutions among others. These institutions work differently from ones led by elected officials or motivated by profit and the types of movement organizations, collective actions, and contexts needed to influence these institutions accordingly differ.  Can we extend theories developed to account for movements’ impact on governmental policy to these kinds of impacts? Or do we need to draw on other theoretical sources? This session focuses on the research surrounding movement bids to influence these institutions. Please send a paper or abstract to Ruth Braunstein (ruth.braunstein@uconn.edu).

Social Movements and News and Social Media

Social movements almost always seek to influence the way their issues and constituents are represented in the public sphere. Extensive research has been undertaken to examine when protest events appear in news accounts, and recent research has addressed news attention garnered by other kinds of movement actions. What accounts for the amount and quality of news attention that movement actors gain, especially in a dramatically changing media ecosphere?  When have movements been successful in social media campaigns? Which capacities do movements need beyond those valuable in gaining mainstream news to gain internet and social media coverage?  How have the changes the media context, which now is greatly decentralized and marked by right-wing disinformation media as well as social media, altered the possibilities for influence of the movements of the left and right?  Please send a paper or abstract to Neal Caren (neal.caren@unc.edu).

Social Movements and Entertainment Media

The public sphere does not consist of news media alone.  Social movements have long targeted the movie and television industry to gain more favorable depictions of their constituents and more serious treatments of their issues.  Movements today have worked through the entertainment based social media to get across their messages and heighten awareness of their constituents and issues.   What accounts for the amount and quality of attention that movement actors gain in these venues?   If your work addresses movement actors seeking influence in entertainment media, please send a paper or an abstract to Francesca Polletta (polletta@uci.edu).

Strategies and the Impacts of Social Movements

Strategy, strategic interactions, and strategic capacities are central to social movements’ bids for influence.  For any movement, these interactions often range across many institutions and engage a wide variety of targeted actors.  This session addresses the influence of strategy on the impacts of social movements. What are the most valuable strategic capacities for movements, and how does their value vary across different contexts and targets?  Are some strategies mainly winning ones, while others are typically losing ones?  Movements often face dyadic strategic dilemmas in which each choice has advantages and disadvantages, but do certain characteristics of movements lead them to choose one or another of these options?  Please send a paper or an abstract to James Jasper (jjasper346@gmail.com).

Social Movements and Public Opinion

It is often argued that for social movements to be influential in politics and in other institutions they need first to change public opinion.  We have seen major shifts in opinion central to movement issues, such as interracial marriage and marriage equality.  This session addresses the evidence about whether social movements have been able to influence public opinion and what it takes for social movements to change it.  What are the difficulties in examining the impact of social movements on public opinion when public opinion is understood as public opinion polling?  Please send a paper or abstract to Edwin Amenta (ea3@uci.edu).

Social Movements and Collective Identities and Collective Memories

Although social movement campaigns often target political and other institutions to gain material benefits or changes in policies, many also seek to change “hearts and minds.” This session seeks to engage scholars seeking to understand and analyze collective action geared toward challenging norms, values, and beliefs, especially in collective identities and collective memories in the wider public.  Have social movements been able to make progress in these cultural realms and what drives that progress when it happens? Please send a paper or abstract to Hajar Yazdiha (hyazdiha@usc.edu).

Methodological Advances and the Impacts of Social Movements

Scholars have been advancing our methodological toolkit for analyzing movement impact, using methods ranging from qualitative comparative analyses to topic modeling to content analysis and process tracing. Papers in this session will advance new methodological techniques and approaches as they have been applied to these issues. Please send a paper or abstract to Jennifer Earl (jearl@udel.edu)

The Impacts of Black Lives Matter

The mass protests and other actions of Black Lives Matter in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 have resounded in many ways.  These influences have ranged from shifts in public opinion to changes in policing practices, to changes in policies and practices in institutions, such as corporations and universities.  This session will include papers that assess these impacts and address why some changes rather than others occurred and why some cities and institutions changed in the direction of the movement’s appeals, while others did not, as well as worldwide influences.  Please send a paper or abstract to Kenneth Andrews (ktandrews@wustl.edu)

The Impacts of Major Progressive Social Movements and their Current Challenges

Worldwide, some of the most important movements have been those surrounding women’s rights, the labor movement, peace movements, LGBTQ movements, and environmental movements.  What have been some ways that one or more of these movements have been influential and what accounts for their influence?  What lessons does the experiences of these movements and the research on them hold for other, less well-organized movements?  And what challenges and opportunities have new conservative populist movements set out for these movements? Please send a paper or abstract to David Meyer (dmeyer@uci.edu).

The Impacts of Right-Wing Movements

Early social movement research focused on right-wing, populist, and authoritarian movements of the 1930s and 1940s and this emphasis has returned as right-wing movements have surged across the world.  What are the different impacts made by these movements and why have they been able to make strong gains in some countries, in some times, and over some issues rather than others?  In which ways are their paths to influence different from and similar to those of progressive movements?  This session will address the impact of these movements. Please send a paper or abstract to Rory McVeigh (rmcveigh@nd.edu)

Reforming Authoritarian Polities

Most research on the impact of social movements on politics concern their influence in democratic polities. However, many movements around the world must contend with authoritarian polities lacking basic democratic rights, including often rights to assembly.  Often the only means of influence come through forms of protest that are treated as illegal. In which ways have these movements and protest been influential? What are their routes to influence and how does protest work differently in authoritarian contexts than in democratic ones?  Please send a paper or abstract to Dana Moss (dmoss2@nd.edu).

Social Movements’ Impact in Mainland China and Hong Kong under Communist Authoritarianism

Among authoritarian countries, China has received extensive attention among scholars. In which ways have movements and protest been influential in China at different historical moments? What specific obstacles to movement influence does the Chinese polity and society pose to reformers and what accounts for when social movements have gained traction in this setting?  Please send a paper or abstract to Yang Su (su.yang@uci.edu).

Rebellions and Revolutions

Some of the most far-reaching impacts of movements have come by way of rebellions and revolutions, both armed and unarmed. Scholars have examined the classical democratic revolutions, the Communist revolutions in Russia and China, anti- and post-colonial revolutions, Eastern European “refolutions,” and the Arab Spring uprisings, among others. This session addresses research on rebellions and revolutions, including the different ways they have been conceptualized and understood; the relationship between rebellions, revolutionary situations, and revolutionary outcomes; and why rebellions and revolutions succeed or fail along different dimensions. Please send a paper or abstract to Jeff Goodwin (jgoodwin.nyu@gmail.com).

The Biographical Impacts of Movements

Some of the most profound changes caused by movements happen in the people who participate in them. Movements also sometimes change the fates of non-participants in communities where they were most active.  This session addresses those influences. Which sorts of movements and movement experiences have led and lead to lifelong movement and other political engagement by their participants, or other important life changes, such as in political views or career paths?   Please send a paper or abstract to Marco Giugni (marco.giugni@unige.ch).

The Impacts of Social Movements on Arts, Music, and Other Cultural Objects

Although all social movements produce artifacts to mobilize supporters and increase solidarity among them, sometimes these artifacts break out in the wider culture, as in the case of music and film.  This session addresses this issue and examines research about when social movement artifacts that make wider impressions and what accounts for why some of them break through and others do not.  Please send a paper or abstract to Nella Van Dyke (nvandyke@ucmerced.edu)

The 2025 CBSM Workshop Committee also invites all interested graduate students to register for a roundtable discussion with a senior social movements scholar. This is an opportunity to gain feedback from seasoned researchers. Student participants should be prepared to talk about their current research for five or so minutes. If you would like to attend the roundtable sessions, please send a short description of your research along with your first, second, and third choice scholar. [Participating scholars TBA.]

There will also be an information question and answer session with editors and members of editorial boards from relevant journals.  The editors will include Neal Caren and Kelsy Kretschmer (Mobilization), Katrin Uba (Social Movement Studies), Deana Rohlinger (Social Science Computer Review), and Jennifer Earl (Science Advances)