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THE SOAR AND SLUMP OF POLITE PROTEST
Author(s) -
Lofland John
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
peace and change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1468-0130
pISSN - 0149-0508
DOI - 10.1111/pech.1992.17.1.34
Subject(s) - soar , parade , politeness , wage , spiral (railway) , sociology , political science , law and economics , positive economics , political economy , economics , computer science , engineering , law , artificial intelligence , mechanical engineering
Surges of citizen activism exhibit a rapid and dramatic “soar and slump” dynamic that analysts have tended to depict, using analogies to organisms, as life‐history trajectories or stages. But, because citizen surges are collective actions rather than biological entities, a more social model, such as that of a tenuously ratcheted and enlarging or contracting interaction spiral, may be more accurate. This alternative approach is elaborated in terms of the nine major actors who are contesting in the rush of focusing and facilitative or inhibitive conditions and events, and it is applied to the initiating interaction spiral of the U.S. peace surge of the early 1980s. Drawing from those data and the social movements literature more generally, the author proposes six principles of first‐phase facilitation or “ratcheting”: supportive milieu, unengaged resources, the Darwinian parade of proposers, the striking proposer, the dramatic demonstration of feasibility, and the feasible‐timely proposal.