Social Movements By Devangini Mahapatra Chauhan - Book Report/Review Example

In his book, The Origins of the Civil Movement - lack Communities Organising for Change, author Aldon D Morris demonstrates the advantages of organizing one's plan of action as well as the course taken towards the achievement of goals with concerted efforts diverted towards coordinated action. When talking of the Birmingham Confrontation of 1963, Morris uses the example of the demands placed on Birmingham's white power structure by Dr. King and the SCLC, such as lunch counters in downtown department stores, fair hiring procedures in retail stores and city departments, dropping of charges against demonstrators, and finally, the reopening of parks and playgrounds apart from the appointment of a biracial commission to look into the desegregation of schools.

While this was the first step in a concerted action plan, the second step was to achieve a victory in order to bring the government to take a stand against racial discrimination besides serving as an example for black communities. (Morris DA, p. 250 - 274) This confrontation is marked by an organized integration of short term and long-range objectives. A systematically planned strategy brought it to a stage where it became a mass movement, therefore proving that organization and timely mobilization of resources helps gain and maintain momentum.

With the SCLC becoming a powerful organization, there were several meeting and strategy planning seminars held, where the internal problems were sorted out in order to reach the best strategy, therefore eradicating organizational conflict. In the pages that follow, Morris traces the movement as seen from the eyes of the masses and the economically privileged alike to find that the pressures were build up systematically by the planners of the movement and the SCLC in particular. Cultures were examined; there was segregation between the social and economic elite as well as secret meetings - they couldn't have failed.

Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, is a book that covers social movements in a more general context. Edited by Aldon D Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller, this book contains a revolutionary article by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A Cloward, titled Normalising Collective Protest. The article deals with the analyses of resource mobilisation which has paved the way for the belief that institutional continuity between conventional social life and collective protest is virtually impossible without resource mobilisation.

(Piven F P, et al. p. 301 - 325) Talking about the legitimacy of having any norms at all in the social movement, this article argues that sometimes the distinction between normative and nonnormative forms of expression in the course of such movements is stretched too far. This has been discussed in the context of "normal" assertations of collective interest. In their article, the authors have pitched resource mobilisation against social disorganisation, hierarchical bounds, and normalizing political influence, among other factors.