|
Mass
- Power - Emotion
Abstracts (english)
Felix
Kolb
The Castor Conflict:
The Comeback of the Anti-Nuclear-Energy Movement
The article tries to
explain why, within a few months, the conflict around the transport of
nuclear waste in so-called Castor containers to the temporary storage
site in Gorleben has spurred a massive and incessant social movement.
After a brief chronological sketch of the conflict’s history, an
attempt at explanation is made using several theoretical approaches from
social movement research: relative deprivation/collective discontent,
social networks and alliance systems, resource mobilization and political
opportunity structures, framing, public relations work and the movement’s
strategies have all contributed to mobilization success. The decisive
factor behind this success seems to be the fact that the anti-Castor movement
could build on the experience and infrastructure of the old anti-nuclear
movement.
Achim
Brunnengräber
Advocates,
Experts and Heroes - NGOs and the Media
This year’s
extraordinary general assembly of the UN in New York, on the occasion
of the fifth anniversary of the Rio-process, has made the limits to
the political influence of NGOs clear. An analysis of the forms of generalized
exchange that occur between NGOs and the media, offers important clues
regarding the internal legitimation problems and the external representation
problems of NGOs. The interplay between NGOs and the media can be disclosed
through the NGO’s public roles as advocates, experts and heroes.
The paper investigates the media’s demands with regard to these
roles and the consequences of adaptation to them on the side of the
NGOs. In view of their limited political influence, NGOs will remain
dependent on professional public relations work. They should, however,
more strongly emphasize the option of protest mobilization and the concomitant
processes of internal communication within movement networks.
Helmut
König
Return of the Mass
Theme?
Can social movement
research profit from a rehabilitation of the mass concept, in order
to better take into account incalculable, spontaneous and unorganized
aspects of protest? The author’s answer to this question is an
emphatic no. The semantics of the mass discourse do not allow a productive
theoretical analysis of questions as to the relations between movement
and organization, mentality and institutions, I and we, interests and
emotions or the symbolic and the political. This conclusion can be drawn
from the history of "the mass" as an explanatory concept.
As a consequence of the differentiation of modern industrial society
(urbanization, impoverishment, geographical mobility), the mass has,
since the end of the 18th century, become a social reality. Revolt and
protest of the masses constituted it as a political reality. The semantics
of the mass concept developed in three different contexts: in political
debate (conservatism, liberalism and nationalism); in the thematization
of the mass in social theory (the discussion on poverty, Marx and Engels
as well as the analysis of mass society in the 19th and 20th centuries);
and finally, and most influentially, in psychology (from Le Bon to Freud).
In the Federal Republic of Germany after the Second World War, the concept
played an important role in the explanation of National Socialism, but
towards the end of the 1950s its importance in political debate and
social theory strongly declined due to the integrative power of the
welfare state. The welfare state has replaced the revolting mass by
the "lonely crowd" (Riesman). In sociology, the collective
behaviour approach, opposing the assumptions of irrationality in mass
psychology, superseded the mass concept, while group psychology (Hofstätter)
defined itself through a "critique of mass psychology" that
emphasized the reasonableness of the group. In view of the history of
the mass concept, social movement research would be well-advised to
acknowledge the importance of emotions and interests and thus to take
up the mass as a research theme, but to give up the semantics of the
mass in favour of more precise and subtle theoretical concepts.
Kurt
Lenk:
What Is Meant by the
End of the Masses? Three Theses on Helmut König’s "Return of
the Mass Theme"
In his reply to Helmut
König, the author argues against König’s plea for doing away with
the discourse of the mass. The concept’s vagueness is in fact the
reason behind its virulence in ideological discourse. This is not only
true for the dichotomy between elites and masses in democratic theory,
but also for the neoliberal critique of the state. The enduring importance
of the mass discourse moreover goes beyond its role as an object of ideological
critique. According to the author, König also underestimates Freud's later
work on the psychology of culture in which he analyzes the libidinal ties
between masses and leaders, as well as the analyses undertaken by the
proponents of Critical Theory that build on psychoanalysis.
Bert
Klandermans
Identity and Protest.
A Social Psychological Approach
Concepts
of collective identity occupy a central place in social movement research
to explain the emergence and persistence of unified empirical actors.
An understanding of a group's collective identity can be gained through
the analysis of its symbols, rituals and shared convictions and values.
However, social movement theories that argue only at the level of collective
identities are deficient. They neglect the process of group identification
as constituted through individual self-commitment to the group, the
individual use of symbols, as well as the individual meaning of participation
in rituals. On this individual level of analysis social psychological
concepts of social identity are helpful. The collective and individual
levels of analysis should be carefully distinguished and only their
interplay can offer conclusive answers as to the relation between identity
and protest. From this perspective, the author discusses collective
identity as conceptualized in social movement research (Melucci, Taylor/Whittier,
Gamson), social identity (e.g., Tajfel/Turner, Mummendey), and the process
of group identification that links collective and social identity.
Birgit
Sauer
A Political Science
of Emotions?
Emotions in Women's
and Gender Studies in Political Science
In political
science, emotions and rationality are seen as opposite poles. This approach
fails to take into account that politics is not a sphere devoid of emotions
and that rationality as a central element of the political process rests
on an historically grown order of gender and emotions. Comradeship,
for instance, is a typically male form of emotional bonding in politics,
while no importance is attributed to emotional forms with a feminine
coding. The author discusses the thematization of emotions in women's
studies and the women's movement, the discourse on emotions of bourgeois
modernity, as well as gender and politics and emotions and gender as
structural categories of the political. The public sphere as a sphere
of rationality and passionless interest politics is a fiction of both
contract theory and the Weberian model of bureaucracy, which is superimposed
on a substructure of suppressed and uncontrollable passions. A "political
science of emotions" that enables a new perspective on the private
and public spheres is thus far not in sight. It should clarify the connections
among emotions, gender and power from both the structural and action
perspectives. Instead of psychologicalizing or individualizing them,
it should see emotions as socially constructed. Emotions are, like rationality,
a specific form of knowledge, which codes the "politics of emotions"
in gendered ways.
Oliver
van Wersch
The Moving Power
of Imitation. Forms of Social Interaction in Robert E. Park's "The
Mass and the Public"
In his dissertation
"The Crowd and the Public" (Chicago-London 1972), published
in German in 1903, Robert E. Park, the main proponent of the Chicago
School's analysis of industrialization and urbanization, discusses the
mass-psychological discourse of the late nineteenth century. Park does
not see the mass as a phenomenon to be distrusted, but as an object
of sociological theorizing. The study contains a rudimentary theory
of collective behaviour and discusses the conceptual boundaries of the
mass and the public. According to Park, the mass is characterized by
processes of mutual reinforcement and suggestion among its members,
while the public is distinguished by reasonable, rationalized discussion
and conflict over specific themes. In Park's work, the mass and the
public are analytically relevant to the explanation of social change,
spontaneous interaction, and emotional behaviour. Among both the mass
and the public, the empathic imitation of others contributes to the
integration and mobilization of the group. Imitation may promote consideration
of others' points of view, but it may also lead to uncritical behaviour
that can be instrumentalized by leaders. Thus, Park's early work takes
a position between mass psychology and the collective behaviour approach,
which is often not sufficiently acknowledged and appreciated.
|