Evaluating Social Movement Impacts

Comparative Lessons from the Labor Movement in Turkey

Brian Mello

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781501305764
• eBook ISBN: 9781441190727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Some social movements bring in quick, radical political and social changes while others get incorporated into existing systems or subjected to harsh repression. This book examines why social movements elicit different policy responses and their varying impact on the societies in which they occur. It also seeks to understand why seemingly inconsequential movements can nonetheless have enduring effects. These issues are explored through the comparative historical analysis of four labor movements, in the UK and the U.S. in the late 1800s -early 1900s, in Japan from 1945 to 1960, and in Turkey during the mid to late 1900s, which is the book's primary case study. Turkey's labor movement, although often seen as a failure, greatly influenced state-society relations and contemporary Turkish politics. This significant study offers a new framework of analysis by focusing on social movement impacts rather than successes or failures. This leads to having to reconsider the enduring effects of repressed or failed movements. By doing so, it will help researchers study the likely impact of social movements in today's politics.

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Introduction: The Impact of Alternative Collective Subjectivities

The study of social movements has become increasingly important for sociologists and political scientists.¹ It is not difficult to tell why. Social movements challenge and seek to reshape the political status quo. In so doing social movements mobilize mass, public, political action that often draws media attention, and certainly the attention of the state. Movement activists march, strike, or conduct performative theatrical events like die-ins;² the police or the military make mass arrests, let loose dogs and fire hoses, confront protestors with tanks, or provide facilitative escorts; and the media reports and records the spectacle, which constructs a sense of meaning for public consumption (“A march and a message from union members” or “Chaos closes downtown”).³ It is these moments of contention that then draw the attention of social scientists because social movements provide empirical contexts in which to examine the dynamics of collective action, the construction and reconstruction of identity, and the possibility of social change instigated by collective action.⁴

Much of the work on social movements has focused primarily on questions involving why movements emerge and why individuals decide to participate in them. Consequently, while studying the outcomes of social movements has always been an implicit part of the analysis of social movements, this topic has only recently gained a prominent place in the literature.⁵ Those who wish to evaluate social movement outcomes must address two crucial problems—how to define movement outcomes and how then to develop specific causal links between social movement actions and the outcomes one wishes to explain. In this book, I apply an explanatory framework that articulates a set of factors and mechanisms that can be used to explain and interpret the impact that a particular movement is likely to have.

Throughout, two central questions guide this project: why and how do social movements have differential impacts on the states and societies in which they exist? And, when and how might even seemingly failed or inconsequential movements—movements that fail to achieve many, if any at all, of their ultimate goals—nonetheless matter? I explore these questions through comparative historical analysis of four cases of labor movement mobilization and state–labor relations focusing on the periods surrounding the initial formation of national labor union confederations: the British labor movement during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the American labor movement during a similar timeframe, the Japanese labor movement during the 1940s and 1950s, and my primary case, the Turkish labor movement during the 1960s and 1970s.⁶ I concentrate most directly on the latter case, as it is this case which presents the best demonstration of the impact of a “failed movement” that ultimately fell victim to massive state repression. Each of these cases and periods shares certain common features including rapid industrialization, rapid growth in union membership, and multiparty democratic governments.

Examining how social movements shape politics is a difficult task. Johnston and Klandermans suggest concentrating “on key junctures in movement development, key organizational situations, and points of contact with institutional and structural constraints.”⁷ Consequently, this study takes as its focus the periods surrounding the initial formation of national labor union confederations. The initial formation of national labor union confederations is important on two levels: First, it is indicative of growth and maturation of a labor movement—a symbol, that is, of organizational strength. Therefore, the establishment of national organizations suggests that labor movements, and labor unions as their principal organizational form, are emerging as important factors within state–labor and labor–capital relations in a particular state. Second, it is during this process that the long-term character of labor movements tends to be defined. In essence, the ideas, beliefs, and political aspirations adopted during these critical moments tend to have enduring consequences for the way labor unions and labor movement activists view their political role for decades to come. Consequently, these cases reflect what might be called critical junctures in the development of labor politics in these states.⁸

I argue that a movement’s impact is best explained with reference to the type of collective subjectivity that is forged during such critical junctures in movement formation. Moreover, I argue that movements that develop what I call alternative collective subjectivities are likely to have more profound impacts in shaping state–society relations than movements that do not. This is the case, I suggest, because movements that develop and sustain alternative collective subjectivities embody identifications, promote collective action, and articulate a vision for the future that is different from and fundamentally in contradiction to prevailing state views. As a result, movements that develop alternative collective subjectivities are more likely to “create patterns of organization and interaction that exert influence several years after demobilization.”⁹

The argument developed in this book is founded on an understanding that the key questions in political life—questions that get raised and debated in a multitude of contexts—involve the collective consideration of who we are, what kind of world we want to live in, and how, then, we ought to act. In short, politics is the shaping of behavior, identifications, awareness about friends and enemies, and conceptions of good and bad, just and unjust, designed to promote particular world views. The processes through which politics plays out are complex and historically diverse. At one level they include, for example, state–making and the relations of economic production, and at another level they involve the family and gender. This project seeks to improve our understanding of how social movements shape our political world. Based on an assumption, following the work of Joel Migdal, that the basic goals of any state actors are compliance, participation, and legitimation, I argue that the emergence of alternative collective subjectivities signals a low level of compliance with, participation in, and legitimation of the state’s answers to questions of who ‘we’ are, what ‘we’ want, and how ‘we’ ought to act.¹⁰ Furthermore, the sustained diffusion of alternative collective subjectivities signals the persistence of such defiance over time. Movements that forge sustained alternative collective subjectivities represent a direct threat to the basic goals of the state. Consequently, we can expect that social movements that mobilize, diffuse, and sustain alternative collective subjectivities will elicit more dramatic changes in state policy and have a more profound effect on the reshaping of political outcomes.

I begin this chapter by offering an alternative way to understand movement impacts—one that pushes empirical analysis away from models that focus on the notions of “success” and “failure” and instead highlights how movements help constitute and reshape participants’ understandings of who they are and what kind of world they want to live in. After developing this alternative way of thinking about movement impacts, I turn to an examination of the concept of “culture” in the study of contentious politics in order to examine some more satisfying ways to study how movements matter. I then introduce the concept of alternative collective subjectivity in order to link these two literatures. Finally, I set out my empirical argument that the nature of collective subjectivity is paramount for our understanding of similarities and differences in how the labor movements in the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Turkey shaped political developments in each state.

Toward a cultural analysis of movement impacts

While there is consensus in the social movement literature about the need to conduct greater analysis on social movement outcomes, there is little agreement about how this difficult task is to be carried out. This disagreement, I believe, results from the lack of consensus about how to conceptualize movement outcomes, as well as a tendency in the existing literature to conceptualize movement outcomes far too narrowly. Jennifer Earl, for example, points out that studies of social movements can focus on intramovement or extramovement outcomes.¹¹ Much of the work on social movement outcomes has implicitly addressed intramovement outcomes—focusing on such questions as how movement leaders build and sustain participation. Within the literature on extra-movement outcomes, the focus has been on quantifiable political outcomes—such as changes in public policy, and not on the cultural importance of such policy changes. The explanatory framework I propose for this study is one that offers a broader understanding of outcomes—an understanding rooted in the cultural analysis of the state–society relations in which movements take place.

I take as a starting point for this analysis the need to offer a better framework for explaining how social movements matter. This is especially true given that the tendency in social movement studies has been to give too much credence to dichotomous notions of success and failure. Indeed, although social movements rarely simply succeed or fail, much of the literature on movement outcomes takes movement success and failure as the focus of analysis.¹² There are, I suggest, four major shortcomings with this focus on movement success or failure.

First, models that focus on success and failure tend to focus too much attention on quantitative changes in public policy. In their analysis of poor peoples’ movements, Piven and Cloward, for instance, identify successful protests as those that can wrest concessions from the government.¹³ Yet, if we simply focus on such policy changes (or concessions from the government), we risk avoiding consideration of the spirit in which such concessions are granted. Focusing on policy changes, thus, does not necessarily reveal the extent to which policy concessions represent reforms within existing economic, political, and ideological systems, and when they might present more radical challenges.

Second, focusing on the dichotomous variables of success and failure has contributed to a tendency to link repression with failure. Thus, for Piven and Cloward, successful movements depend on the ability of movements to shield themselves from retribution. On the contrary, as the case of Turkey demonstrates, repression (and even repressive public policy) is more likely an indicator of a movement’s importance than its failure. Indeed, Piven and Cloward’s focus on the ability of successful movements to shield themselves from retribution cannot explain how seemingly failed movements (like the Turkish labor movement) may nonetheless be critical for (re)shaping state–society relations. As the Turkish case demonstrates, it is quite possible for movements to fail to achieve their policy goals, or to be repressed, but nevertheless to have had an impact on the shaping of political developments in a state. My contention in advocating a movement away from the language of success and failure is that sometimes focusing on failure gives us an insufficient look at why/how particular movements matter.

Third, and linked to this previous problem, models that focus on success and failure risks dismissing failed movements as inconsequential. Indeed, this is precisely what has occurred in the existing scholarship on the labor movement in Turkey, where Alpaslan Işıklı, for example, declares, “it is not possible to speak of a unionization movement with any determining influence during the principal turning points of the democratic history of Turkey.”¹⁴ Too often repression and counter mobilization are taken as indicative of a weak or inconsequential social movement, but why would the state mobilize its coercive force or opposition groups mobilize, if a social movement’s activism mattered little? In fact, even brutally repressed social movements can have profound impacts—impacts that can result in what movement participants, social scientists, and historians could perceive as positive as well as negative effects. My goal, then, is to take the impact of seemingly failed or inconsequential movements more seriously.

Finally, models that focus on movement success and failure, as Amenta and Young point out, risk missing other ways that movements matter.¹⁵ Thus, I advocate replacing the narrow focus on success and/or failure, with the broader concept of movement impacts. Broadening the focus of analysis onto a movement’s impact means not only focusing on how movements inspire policy changes and provide collective benefits, but also examining how a social movement may instigate massive state repression. More importantly, though, it means making the cultural importance of movements a central aspect of the study of how movements matter. Consequently, the framework I develop here takes seriously recent calls for “greater attention to strategic choice, cultural meanings, and emotions” in the study of social movements.¹⁶

To be sure, there has been some recent effort to incorporate more than just policy changes into the analysis of movement success and failure. Keck and Sikkink’s Activists Beyond Borders is perhaps the most notable example of recent work that seeks to broaden the criteria used for analysis of movement success/failure—in their case, the success/failure of transnational activist networks. For Keck and Sikkink, transnational activists can have a more or less successful impact in five different ways: through agenda sett...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Impact of Alternative Collective Subjectivities
• 2 Collective Subjectivity and Divergences in the Shaping of State–Labor Relations in Great Britain and the United States
• 3 Dreams of Solidarity: Populism and State–Building without Class Antagonism
• 4 Recognition and Redistribution: The Politics and Impact of Labor Insurgency in Turkey, 1960–80
• 5 Democracy and Economic Justice: Labor Activism and Contemporary Turkish Politics
• 6 Japan, Turkey, and the Comparative Analysis of Social Movement Impacts
• Bibliography
• Copyright