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Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, edited by Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 426 pp. $54.95 cloth. ISBN. 0-521-48039-6. $18.95 paper. ISBN: 0-521-48516-9.
With a few dramatic exceptions, the major advances in the construction of social movement theory over the last 20 years have appeared in anthologies of papers prepared initially for workshops and conferences. Nor surprisingly, given the current state of this art/ science, most of these advances have been conceptual. Thus, from the widely disparate approaches to the study of social movements that prevailed a generation ago in sociology, political science, social psychology, and history has come increasing convergence in both the United States and Europe on a common theoretical paradigm. The present volume is the most recent of these anthologies, and the most ambitious. It is the product of a 1992 U.S.-European conference hosted by the Life Cycle Research Institute at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, key contributors to the new paradigm, have organized a rich collection of papers around three interconnected concepts that they argue are central to developing a stronger empirical base through the comparative and historical study of social movements. They are joined in this enterprise by leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. From Europe comes della...