Since Charles Tilly’s path-breaking work on the emergence of the modern pro- test politics during the historical transformation from an old to a new repertoire of contention (Tilly 1984, 1986 and 1995), social movements have been conceptualised as being inherently national or sub-national phenomena. Now, things seem to have changed. Over the past few years, transnational contention has increased considerably and a new collective actor has emerged. This new collective actor – which is defined variously as the no-global movement, anti-globalisation movement, alter-globalisation movement, global justice movement (GJM), movement for a globalisation from below, among other labels – includes a wide range of groups, mobilises various social networks and addresses many different, albeit interrelated issues relating to the struggle against neoliberalism (Sommier 2003). The most salient issues bear on social and economic injustice, North-South inequalities, international trade rules and barriers, fair trade, global environmental problems, sustainable development and so forth.1 We use the label ‘global justice movement’ as we think that what unites the various organisations and groups mobilising on these issues is their willingness to bring about a new world order based on justice.
As sociological neo-institutionalist theories have shown, social and political institutions are not only a set of rules, procedures, organizational routines and governance structures (see March and Olsen 1984), but they also provide norms and habits that determine individual choices and behaviours. in this chapter, we would like to apply this line of reasoning to propose a theoretical framework for the study of collective action in the field of unemployment politics. We propose a framework for analysis based on the idea that the form and content of political claim-making on issues relating to unemployment are influenced in important ways by the prevailing conceptions of the welfare state and the consequent institutional approaches to unemployment.
Scholarship has left the study of the consequences of social movements in the background for a long time, focusing instead on movement emergence, characteristics, and dynamics. Since the mid-1970s, however, scholars have paid an increasing interest in how social movements and protest activities may produce change at various levels. The existing literature can be ordered according to the kind of consequence addressed. In this regard, one can roughly distinguish between political, biographical, and cultural outcomes. Political consequences are those effects of movement activities that alter in some way the movements’ political environment. Biographical consequences are effects on the life course of individuals who have participated in movement activities, effects that are at least in part due to involvement in those activities. Although their contours are less easily defined, cultural outcomes can be seen as the impact that social movements may have in altering their broader cultural environment. The bulk of the existing works have dealt with policy outcomes, which can be considered as a subcategory of political outcomes. Biographical outcomes are less numerous, but they form a substantial and quite coherent body of literature. Cultural outcomes have been studied much less often. More recently, scholars have started to investigate the effects that social movements and protest activities may have on other aspects of society, such as the economy and market-related institutions, or on other movements. In addition, one should also consider the distinction between internal and external outcomes as well as that between intended and unintended consequences. Both distinctions partly cross-cut the typology of political, biographical, and cultural outcomes, although one might think of political outcomes as mostly external and more intended, biographical outcomes as mostly internal and unintended, and cultural outcomes as both internal and external and mostly unintended.
