New Social Movement Essay

Unsurprisingly, Touraine’s, Melucci’s, and Castells’ theory of new social movements have been subject to criticism. One main criticism of this approach is on the ‘newness’ of new social movements (Martin, 2015). Many critics have argued that new social movements share some common features with old movements. For example, new social movement approach, according to Calhoun (1994: 22), is ‘historically myopic’ as it lacks recognition of how features of the new movements resemble features of movements of the past. Tucker (1991) uses the French syndicalism in the nineteenth century to demonstrate that collective identity and a sense of autonomy is nothing new. Moreover, Calhoun (1994) argue that the nineteenth century labour movements emphasised on the legitimisation and solidarity of those sharing the ‘worker’ identity. Other …show more content…
For instance, Martin (2015) points to how the disability rights movement addresses traditional concerns like material distribution and deprivation, in conjunction with newer concerns of autonomy, identity, and independent living. Thus, as critics argue, the ‘newness’ of new social movements is overstated by theorists of this approach to validate the social and cultural aspects of social movements, yet, it is important to consider how conventional political life has been an increasing influence to the new forms of cultural resistance (Martin, 2015; Tucker 1991).

In addition, this approach emphasises the ‘cultural turn’ and simultaneously, ignores political economy and focuses on technology (Martin, 2015). In the period which political overpowered the social, social theorists turned against political activism because it was viewed as problematic (Della Porta and Diani, 2006). In the shift of ‘cultural turn’, social theorists focussed on other factors