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Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action. Edited by Mark Traugott. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. 250p. $28.95 cloth, $13.95 paper.
These seven articles on collective action in social movements all work with the concepts of repertoires and cycles of protest. The book grew out of a couple of sessions at the Social Science History Association in 1991, and all but three of the papers were previously published in volume 17 of Social Science History in 1993. The format is time-honored. Bring together the originators of important concepts and other researchers who have used those concepts, and if the mix works well, you get a creative focused discussion which advances knowledge and understanding in an area. The concepts of repertoires and cycles are particularly well paired in this kind of exercise, as they have not usually been linked, despite having some important underlying commonalities and interrelations. Charles Tilly started writing about repertoires of collective action in the late 1970s. The key observations he drew from his detailed study of newspaper accounts of unruly events in France and Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth century are, first, that each historical era and locale exhibits a relatively small number of distinct forms of action and, second, that the mix of forms of protest changes through time. Sidney Tarrow started writing about cycles of protest in the early 1980s as an outgrowth of his research on the social movements in Italy from the 1960s onward. Linking his observations of the rise and fall of various forms of action in Italy to much older accounts of the rise and fall of social movements, Tarrow argued that internal dynamics lead protest waves first to rise and then to fall.
For the present enterprise, various scholars were asked to relate the two concepts in the context of their own research. The result does not quite hang together as a coherent whole, but it certainly prompts me...