When Do Leaders Matter? Hypotheses on Leadership Dynamics in Social Movements

Abstract

Leaders are central to social movements, yet scholars have devoted relatively little attention to understanding the concept of leadership or its effects on movements. In this article, we explore leadership's influence on movement dynamics by examining Nigeria's Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), the Catholic Left-inspired Plowshares movement, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and the liberation movement in El Salvador. Building on Bourdieu, Putnam, and the existing literature on social movement leadership, we argue that these movements' leaders possessed "leadership capital" having cultural, social, and symbolic components. We then turn our attention to the conditions under which leadership capital affects three key processes in movement development: mobilization of aggrieved parties, activation of third-party supporters, and responses to repression. We conclude by calling for more comprehensive, systematic, and comparative investigation of factors influencing leadership in domestic and transnational movements.

Front‐line Workers and ‘Local Knowledge’: Neighbourhood Stories in Contemporary Uk Local Governance

“…Front‐line workers were selected ‘contingently’ through existing contacts – for example, partner organizations – and also ‘serially’ through identification from preliminary documentary based research (Erlandson 1993). This meant that the front‐line workers participating were both internally and externally recognizable (Nepstad and Bob 2006); the identification and sampling of front‐line workers within this research was based on ‘position’ and ‘reputation’ (Bonjean and Olsen 1964). Stories detailed front‐line workers’ specific roles, as follows: (1) their employment and background; (2) the neighbourhood they worked in; (3) the neighbourhood management system; (4) their perception of its impact; (5) any difficulties they perceived themselves as facing in their work; (6) the responses they provided to these difficulties; (7) any recent examples of projects or initiatives they worked on; and (8) their perspectives on wider public sector reform.…”

Social movement coalitions: Formation, longevity, and success

“…Arnold (1995:277) notes, "a unique source of the difficulties in sustaining coalitions among feminists is a contradiction between the structural features of coalitions and the organizational requirements of some feminist ideologies." In addition to the importance of leaders' social ties, as discussed above, leaders' human and cultural capital can facilitate coalition formation (Bob, 2005;Nepstad & Bob, 2006). For example, Bob (2005) describes how media and messaging savvy on the part of their leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa, helped the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta gain international coalition partners.…”

A ‘New’ Social Movement: US Labor and the Trends of Social Movement Unionism

“…It is also possible that current rank-and-filers ''were strongly influenced by the social movements of their formative years and became a constituency inside their unions for change'' (Turner and Hurd 2001, 17). Shared experiences could transcend gender, racial, ethnic, and linguistic differences as Nepstad and Bob's (2006) notion of context-specific cultural capital suggests. As I move to a discussion of community-based organizing, I seek to discover how gender, racial, and ethnic boundaries are addressed.…”