(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
Until recently, those who study protest movements have paid little attention to the role that spontaneous action plays in those movements. “Spontaneity is almost a bad word in social movement literature, as if it undermines the organizational aspect of a protest,” says Dana M. Moss, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Irvine. But Moss and her colleague David A. Snow, a professor of sociology at UC Irvine, argue that spontaneity is often a vital element of the collective action process. (Snow serves as a faculty advisor to Moss.) “We are adamant that it’s operative over the course of social movements. Until we have an understanding of what spontaneity is, scholars who study protest events are likely to dismiss or ignore it,” Moss contends.
In their study, Moss and Snow analyze a series of events that include the shooting of students at Kent State University in 1970; the Bloody Sunday massacre in Northern Ireland in 1972; the 2011 uprising in Egypt; a Ku Klux Klan march in Austin, Texas, in 1983; the student-led protests in Beijing in 1989; and the Occupy demonstrations that began in 2011. To understand those events, the researchers drew on three sources of material: ethnographic observations of protest activity by outside parties, on-the-ground observations by protest participants, and published accounts by historians, social scientists, and government commissions that have investigated protest-related incidents. Notably, they did not rely on media accounts of protests. To date, Moss says, “most research on protest events has been based on media reports and presentations, and those data are not going to be as systematic as ethnographic observation.”
Snow and Moss identified four conditions that can precipitate spontaneous protest activity. The first condition is a nonhierarchical structure. A “fl at” structure, in which participants essentially act as equals, will tend to be one that “valorizes innovation, creativity, and impromptu contributions,” Moss explains. “There’s room for spontaneity because it’s actually encouraged as part of the organizational structure.”
The second condition is “heightened ambiguity,” which occurs when the events that surround a protest movement don’t go according to a scripted plan. Snow offers an example that comes from his own participation in a rally at the University of Akron that took place a few days after the shootings at Kent State. The university hosted an open forum where people gave talks about recent events. When the last talk ended, there was a moment of ambiguity about what would happen next. “So I yelled out, ‘Strike! Strike! Shut it down!’—which was picked up among other crowd members,” Snow recalls. Protesters repeated that chant as they marched toward a campus administration building and attempted to shut it down. “It was totally unplanned,” Snow says. In this instance, spontaneity enabled participants to organize around a new call to action.
The third condition is “behavioral/ emotional priming and framing,” which comes into play when members of a protest group have a preexisting sensitivity to certain kinds of stimuli. “We sometimes make decisions quickly because we’ve been primed by being immersed in an issue or by having had certain kinds of experiences,” says Snow. In the incident at the University of Akron, the language of Snow’s rallying cry (“Shut it down!”) was already familiar to student protesters, so they readily took his lead and began marching toward the administration building.
The fourth condition involves “ecological/spatial contexts and constraints”—aspects of a protest group’s physical environment that can affect human interaction. In the case of the student movement that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre, a high-density university population increased the likelihood of spontaneous action, even in the absence of extensive organizational activity. Dingxin Zhao, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and the author of a book on the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China, notes that all of Beijing’s universities were in the same district and that students were crowded into high-rise dormitories. The student protesters, therefore, didn’t really need to be organized. “Someone yelling or chanting would make noise throughout the building, and soon 5,000 people would just go out on campus [and protest],” he says.
David A. Snow and Dana M. Moss, “Protest on the Fly: Toward a Theory of Spontaneity in the Dynamics of Protest and Social Movements” American Sociological Review, 79, 2014.
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.