Innovative Responses to Social Movements

• In Event: The Limits and Possibilities of Democratic Environmental Social Movements

Abstract

Dominant actors innovate as a response to disruptive social movements. This paper argues that their innovation constitutes a critical, undertheorized outcome of contentious politics. Theorizing such innovations as a resolution for movement-created impediments to ‘business as usual’ expands our understanding of the processes and effects of contention.

To illustrate this, I draw upon the anti-nuclear energy activism of the late 1960s in the United States to show how state and industry responses to activism reshaped the terrain upon which nuclear power politics was contested. To retain or regain the control that they held in the broader field of nuclear energy, the Atomic Energy Commission developed a new probabilistic technology to calculate the safety of reactors. Drawing upon the bureaucracy’s archive, as well as first-hand accounts, I show how this new technology of risk assessment responded to increasingly expert activism (from groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists), and how the AEC intended for it to reverse the public’s growing lack of faith in the agency’s expertise. By restoring public faith in the expertise of the Commission as the primary regulator, the AEC believed it might avert increased scrutiny and defer the increased salience of the controversy over nuclear reactor safety.

My research shows that the familiar responses of accommodation (material or symbolic), repression, and resistance are not the only tools at hand for those who face disruptive movements. Rather, forward-looking responses are also outcomes of contention; imagining that only reactive ones constitute effects of activism severely blinders scholarly inquiry. The Atomic Energy Commission’s innovation reshaped the field of nuclear power politics in ways that benefitted and challenged both the dominant actors and the activists seeking to challenge the status quo. Confounding success/failure accounts of social movement outcomes, this paper shows that we can only fully account for the effects of activism by examining the resultant array of actors and the norms that structure the contentious field.

Author

• Daniel Richards