Herbert Blumer's Outline Of The Social Movement

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According to Herbert Blumer, an American sociologist of the 20th century, who believed that humans had the capacity to create their own communal reality through exclusive and mutual actions, in his Outline of the principles of sociology, “Social movements can be viewed as collective enterprises to establish a new order of life. They have their inception in the condition of unrest, and derive their motive power on one hand from dissatisfaction with the current form of life, and on the other hand, from wishes and hopes for a new scheme or system of living”. It is an organized and continuous cooperative effort that aims at changing some aspects of life in the society. Citizens join the movement in order to promote changes in the structure of the …show more content…

Some sociologists would define them “as collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities.” (Tarrow, 1994). It is also argued by professionals of the domain of sociology that social movements are the most pertinent democratization agents in a framework of political conversion, transition and the focal path of societal democratic change. In order for social movements to work properly they need to achieve 4 characters, which are respectively: worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment (WUNC). By worthiness, what is meant here is that the social movement has to have a worthy cause, a real purpose worth fighting for, in order to achieve credibility, whether on the national scale or the international one. The movement is considered to have achieved unity when they are perfectly organized in their demonstrations and their means of claiming change (banners, motivating songs for activists etc.); and the numbers factor constantly grows with the participation of large masses of people, signatures of the petitions offered by the movement etc. and last but not least, commitment is reached when no matter