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The Diffusion of Social Movements: Actors, Mechanisms, and Political Effects, edited by Rebecca Kolins Givan, Kenneth M. Roberts, and Sarah A. Soule. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 256pp. $26.99 paper. ISBN: 9780521130950.
In this collection of essays, editors Rebecca Kolins Givan, Kenneth M. Roberts, and Sarah A. Soule contend that social movements cannot be understood without understanding the dynamics of diffusion. Building on the social scientific literature on the diffusion of innovations, they bring together sociologists, political scientists, and historians to shed light on how the influence and range of social movements can spread. The contributors to the volume were charged to grapple with a common set of questions: what is being diffused by social movements, how does diffusion occur, and what is the impact of diffusion? Included in the collection are two fine conceptual essays by the editors and by the prominent scholar Sidney Tarrow, who served as an agenda-setter for the volume, and nine detailed case studies. The volume aims not only to present examples of contemporary social movement research employing diffusion as an explanatory factor, but also to offer a programmatic assessment of the field.
The editors begin with a useful essay surveying the literatures on the diffusion of ideas and behaviors and their application to the study of social movements. That forms of political behavior can be diffuse is hardly news to those familiar with the literatures on repertoires of collective action and protest cycles, though paying greater attention to diffusion processes is...