Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics) | 
| Authors: Doug Mcadam, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 188732
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 410
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0521011876
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.484
EAN: 9780521011877
ASIN: 0521011876
Publication Date: September 10, 2001
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Product Description
Dissatisfied with the compartmentalization of studies concerning strikes, wars, revolutions, social movements, and other forms of political struggle, McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly identify causal mechanisms and processes that recur across a wide range of contentious politics. Critical of the static, single-actor models (including their own) that have prevailed in the field, they shift the focus of analysis to dynamic interaction. Doubtful that large, complex series of events such as revolutions and social movements conform to general laws, they break events into smaller episodes, then identify recurrent mechanisms and proceses within them. Dynamics of Contention examines and compares eighteen contentious episodes drawn from many different parts of the world since the French Revolution, probing them for consequential and widely applicable mechanisms, for example, brokerage, category formation, and elite defection. The episodes range from nineteenth-century nationalist movements to contemporary Muslim-Hindu conflict to the Tiananmen crisis of 1989 to disintegration of the Soviet Union. The authors spell out the implications of their approach for explanation of revolutions, nationalism, and democratization, then lay out a more general program for study of contentious episodes wherever and whenever they occur.
Book Description
Over the past two decades the study of social movements, revolution, democratization and other forms of nonroutine, or "contentious politics," has flourished as never before. And yet theory and research on the topic remain highly fragmented. The first of these divisions reflects the long-standing view that various forms of contention are indeed distinct and should be studied independent of others. A second traditional approach to the study of political contention denies the possibility of general theory, in deference to a thorough grounding in the temporal and spatial particulars of any given episode of contention. Finally, overlaid on these two divisions are stylized theoretical traditions--structuralist, culturalist, and rationalist--that have developed largely in isolation from one another.
Download Description
Over the past two decades the study of social movements, revolution, democratization and other non-routine politics has flourished. And yet research on the topic remains highly fragmented, reflecting the influence of at least three traditional divisions. The first of these reflects the view that various forms of contention are distinct and should be studied independent of others. Separate literatures have developed around the study of social movements, revolutions and industrial conflict. A second approach to the study of political contention denies the possibility of general theory in deference to a grounding in the temporal and spatial particulars of any given episode of contention. The study of contentious politics are left to 'area specialists' and/or historians with a thorough knowledge of the time and place in question. Finally, overlaid on these two divisions are stylized theoretical traditions - structuralist, culturalist, and rationalist - that have developed largely in isolation from one another.
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 Dynamics of Contention: A Great Leap Forward? April 20, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Charles Tilly and his colleagues' effort in Dynamics of Contention is a colossal one. They aim to develop a new way of looking at contentious politics and try to gauge similar patterns in what have so far been regarded as distinct phenomena. Such an effort ends up having merits as well as handicaps, though. I will try to address three issues in this paper (one merit and two handicaps).
The place of case studies in comparative research has long been an issue of debate. Given that all empirical analyses in Dynamics of Contention are eventually case studies, the virtue of the arguments developed in this book might support/undermine the overall virtue of case studies regarding comparative research. Obviously, the arguments and conclusions of Tilly and his colleagues cannot be generalized from their pair-studies, and these scholars admit this from the very start anyway. Yet if we consider theory-building a process comprising of several steps, rather than an end point where we finalize our propositions, case studies become useful tools that we can benefit from in most of the steps of theory building. What makes case studies in general and Tilly and his friends' research in particular important is that via thorough analyses of individual cases, this type of research is better equipped to capture the "mechanism" and "processes" that connect relevant phenomena. And this gives them a relative advantage over large-N studies in speculating about causal relationships. Indeed, then, if Dynamics of Contention is not a theory-building research, it is a very good hypothesis-generating one.
Yet it seems to me that Tilly et al. are doing what Sartori once criticized as excessive abstraction. The primary aim of the authors of Dynamics of Contention is to go beyond the previous static approaches and develop a dynamic approach to contentious politics. Though this sounds very exciting and promising, Tilly and his colleagues seem to achieve dynamism mostly through emptying the substantive elements of their arguments. Their relational approach focuses on the general question of "how" contentious politics influence social life; but this approach has very little to say about more concrete questions like "who", "what", or "when"; all these substantive questions are left to be answered by the specificities of "episodes". As such, all Tilly and his colleagues end up create is a model rather than a theory.
Finally, after reading the section on democratization -where I felt most at home-, I started to doubt the novelty of Tilly and his colleagues' dynamic approach. Tilly et al. criticize the previous research on democratization for focusing on conditions rather than mechanisms. They then offer a dynamic account of democratization with mechanisms operating on three domains: public politics, inequality, and networks of trust. Yet it seems to me that these three domains have already been identified by the current literature on democratization. Moore's (1966) classic book illustrates the changing public politics as a result of changing economic conditions; Rueschemeyer et al. (1992) argue that the central dilemma of a capitalist economic development -increasing inequality between the capitalist and labor classes- was the primary cause of the development of democracy in the Western world; and finally Lipset (1959) and others contend that rising civic virtues as a result of educational and demographic improvements, which alter existing relations of trust, play an important role in democratization. Tilly and his colleagues might still criticize these accounts for being partial. Yet in this case, what we need would be a synthesis of some current research, rather than a novel approach which they try to develop.
 a spectacular bellyflop September 26, 2004
17 out of 19 found this review helpful
If you are an academic involved with the field of social movements, you need to read this book, simply because so much of the current debate in the field is about it. If you are not such a person, don't bother. Dynamics of Contention is immensely disappointing. Within the field of social movement studies, the authors are supposed to be the equivalent of Olympic-level divers--but what they deliver is a spectacular bellyflop. I give the book two stars because the core ideas lying behind it are good. The authors want to break down the artificial academic barriers separating various fields that all deal with "contentious politics"--social movements, revolutions, ethnic conflict, etc. They also want to move beyond their own structurally oriented work, so central to the academic field of social movements, to try to incorporate the ideas of their cultural constructionist critics, plus introduce more of a focus on social relations. Instead of trying to create an invariant model, they want to search for patterns that recurr in widely different types of social conflicts, with different outcomes. Finally, their methodology of comparing unlike cases to find the common patterns is intriguing. Unfortunately, they never really develop a solid intellectual framework for all this. They identify some common patterns, but never explain the dynamics underlying them or why they are so common. They are rather inept in their attempts to bring culture into the picture, engaging in very thin description. In their attempt to create a more relational approach, they completely abandonn all the valuable structurally oriented work they've done. Finally, despite their attempt to focus on relationships and dynamic social actors, human agency--as in so much academic work on social movements--falls out of the picture. Although the authors obviously put a lot of work into this book, it just does not come together.
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