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The Social Psychology of Protest. By Bert Klandermans. Cambridge, MA: Black-well. 1997. 257p. $21.95.
During the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of an immense and vigorous scholarship on collective action. Political scientists and sociologists working under a variety of theoretical banners (such as resource mobilization, political process, political opportunity, new social movements) have crafted diverse macrostructural accounts of the timing and social location of public protest as well as the emergence and development of social movement organizations around issues as diverse as civil rights, the environment, gender, peace, and sexual orientation. These many complementary accounts were motivated, in large part, by a rejection of the earlier, excessively psychological, and for the most part poorly documented accounts that had dominated collective action scholarship during the early Cold War. Those who claimed there was no need for a special social psychology for activists achieved theoretical dominance, despite the fact that, as John Lofland has noted, the bulk of published research remained focused upon the participation of activists.
Recently, however, a number of articulate critics of the pervasiveness of the new theoretical accounts of collective action have claimed that one risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater by marginalizing social psychological accounts of participation in public protest and social movement organizations. The accounts take mostly for granted the three key cognitive processes that underlie individual activism: (1) coming to understand that one's personal circumstances are the result of a public problem, in C. Wright Mills's classic formulation, (2) choosing to act upon such an understanding, and (3) sustaining or abandoning the new-found commitment to act.